Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

  • it may be a delusion arising from some sort of psychological damage

    My most recent review filed at (but, I think, not yet published at?) the BSFA Review is of The Art of Space Travel, a collection of Nina Allan’s short fiction. It was a somewhat out-of-the-comfort-zone commission, which is exactly why I chose it; in addition to reading outside my home range, I’m also trying to…

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  • keep your shit straight

    Currently reading, and finding assorted resonances within, Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical re-translation of Beowulf. I’ve seen (admittedly few) accusations that its linguistic choices, exemplified by the use—first line, first word, and throughout the piece thereafter—of “bro” as a parsing of the tricky-to-translate “hwæt”, are somehow gimmicky. It certainly marks it at a translation of its…

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  • an epistemic heat death of universal solipsism

    Interesting (old?) idea from Venkatesh Rao: Divergentism is both an idea you can believe or disbelieve, and a basis for an ideological doctrine (hence the –ism) that you can subscribe to or reject. You could capture both aspects with this simple statement: Humans diverge at all levels of thought-space, from the sub-individual to species, and…

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  • more futures than people

    TFW a webcomic, which you’ve been reading for what is probably fifteen years or so by this point, unexpectedly recapitulates one of the major planks of your own academic theoretical framework, and does so via the staggeringly economical medium of a few panels of dinosaur clip-art: Of course, the observation that all futures—from the most…

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  • blues funeral

    Mark Lanegan’s gone. Hard pressed to pick a favourite tune, though Bubblegum is easily the album I’ve listened to most, so here’s one of the ones that’s always struck me as a masterpiece marriage of songwriting and delivery: Sad to lose another of the singers that shaped my youth, but—as I remarked to L____ when…

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Who is Paul Graham Raven?

“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.