Haven’t done one of these for a while, but seem to have had a spate of publications since finishing my Masters, and what else is the point of a blog if not for bigging one’s good self right up, as the kids say? What, indeed. So, yeah.

That huge essay on Nordic LARP that I (somehow) wrote during the middle of my dissertation was published over the last three months of 2012, and can be found as parts one, two and three. The Verge listed part one in its “best tech writing of the week” round-up, for whatever that’s worth. People have been sending me emails regarding those three parts being reprinted as one piece in a forthcoming “best of Rhizome” anthology, which is nice. No money in it, but hey; I was paid for the original publication, Rhizome is a donation-driven organisation, and the collection will apparently be CC licensed. If it happens, that is. We’ll see, I guess.

Where does experimental theatre end, and consensual indoctrination into a covert ideology begin? Can a temporary intentional community, in and of itself, be a form of performance art? Can a performance art piece become a political movement instead of just a statement? These questions pivot on the fluid dualities of fiction and reality, of reader and subject, which can be upended with a flick of the wrist or a twist of the frame; if we assume altermodernism to have accepted and integrated (if not fully approved of) the ubiquitous ontological hollowness of the postmodern condition, then might Nordic larp be one of the first truly altermodernist forms, an experimental laboratory for the breeding of new metanarratives?

It was a lot of fun to research, quite quick to write, but took literally months to edit and reformat. But I got to accuse the Six Sigma framework of being a larp for gullible yet earnest middle management, and to talk about the free party circuit of Nineties, which is a topic that seems to be floating around at the front of my mind quite a lot, lately. I put this down entirely to the sudden revival of the German army parka as an indie-kid standard. D’you know that genuine eighties vintage German army parkas are now sufficiently rare and in demand that a factory somewhere in Eastern Europe is making clones of them, purely for the fashion market? Bill Gibson, eat yer heart out. Denim authenticity is just totes Noughties, right? Fosh.

[Update: pdf proofs of the article formatted for the anthology arrived literally during the drafting of this post. Looks like it’ll be a thing, then.]

Strange Horizons ran my nearly-nine-months-late review of Bruce Sterling’s story collection, Gothic High-Tech.

You’ll also run into trouble if you go looking to Sterling to tell you that you’re on the right side of something, or indeed anything. This deep-running moral ambiguity is what I believe made The Caryatids unpalatable for many readers: not only does it feature a cast of exaggerated types, but the extrapolated incarnations of our current ideological dichotomy—which we still label Left and Right, even though those terms are ludicrously outdated and hollow—are both revealed to be as blinkered, fractious and destined to fail as one another.

My completely gratuitous sideswipe at magic-pajama-wearing celebrity homophobe Orson Scott Card only racked up one proxy defender in the comments. They must all be busy fighting the good fight in gaymarriageguncontrolclimatechange threads.

Just after Xmas, Simon Ings realised just how easy a book reviewer I am to troll, and sent me the disingenuously misnamed Green Philosophy by tobacco-shill Tory and all-round hired-gun thinktank wankbag Roger Scruton, with results that are doubtless as predictable to read as they were cathartic to write. One can probably see a theme developing, too:

This is the mentality of those who rule the world, or who aspire to rule it: they’re so entrenched in their dogma, dialectical oppositions and centuries-old political clubs that they have forgotten how to think, let alone how to do so beyond the confines of a rapidly shrinking box. It’s like watching two teams of fat middle-aged former public schoolboys doing a tug’o’war on the village green for the rights to decide which way the stripes should go on the cricket pitch while the entire fucking village is burning down.

Mm-hmm.

What’s next? Oh, yeah, I appeared briefly in a post at Tor UK about Julian May’s Saga Of The Exiles, which is being republished this year, and which I am reviewing for SH at some point fairly soon. …Exiles, as long-term VCTB visitors may remember, was my science fiction gateway drug. It’s going to be interesting to return to it with the critical goggles on. (I’m hoping the process doesn’t spoil it for me forever, but I think that’s a risk that needs to be taken sometimes.)

Then I gone done a thing for the Locus Roundtable blog thingy, a “five golden things” list to balance out the recent spate of “best [x]” debates. So, being the sort of person you can’t reliably take anywhere nice, I steered the conversation around to drugs.

Even in the rhizomatic global cultures of Gibson’s novels, the functional addict is always already enslaved, always at the bottom of somebody else’s private pyramid of clout, an asset to be passed or traded between clients and associates as required, a human resource with a built-in and fully transferable loyalty program.

This time I managed to irk Gregory Benford, who — obtuse as his comment may have been — is surely a better class of irkee than OSC’s fanbase.

I have also found a rather super local arts rag here in Sheffield who have started taking music writing from me: here’s my ‘scenius’ editorial for the February issue’s music section (which I’m inordinately pleased with, considering how short a period I had to put it together), and my review of Swedish post-metallers Cult Of Luna, who were reet gud, as they say round here. Now Then Magazine actually comes out in print most months, too, and they make a gorgeous job of the production; a proper left-leanin’ local scene labour-of-love, which is the sort of set-up I’m always happy to do freebies for. Getting physical copies of your work in print is always a good buzz.

I think that’s pretty much everything of mine that other people have published of late, really; I’ve done a couple of long essays on science fiction and science and foresight and futures studies and all that jazz over at Futurismic, if you’re hungry for more? See me snark an energy-weapon-research/skiffy-novel Kickstarter campaign (SRSLY), or read as I roundly denounce, once and for all, the seemingly unkillable notion that science fiction can in any useful way “predict the future”!

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Stay tuned for more stuff at sporadic intervals; I keep meaning to get back into regular blogging, but everyone with a blog upon which they’ve become irregular says that, and the next few months are looking uncertain enough that I’m not making any promises to anyone, not even myself. (Unless they want to send me a cheque, or send me to an interesting and hopefully warm country where they’d like me to write a book or something.)

So, who knows? Things are happening, bad mojo keeps knocking down good people, and the times are getting weird; as such, the weird is doing its best to turn pro. Which is fun, but exhausting. Selah.