So, this moldy jail I was in was this old dot-com McMansion, out in the Permanent Foreclosure Zone in the dead suburbs. That's where they cooped us up. This gated community was built for some vanished rich people. That was their low-intensity prison for us rehab detainees.
Shareable: The Exterminator's Want-Ad - 1 views
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This place outside was a Beltway suburb before Washington was abandoned. The big hurricane ran right over it, and crushed it down pretty good, so now it was a big green hippie jungle. Our prison McMansion had termites, roaches, mold and fleas, but once it was a nice house. This rambling wreck of a town was half storm-debris. All the lawns were replaced with wet, weedy, towering patches of bamboo, or marijuana -- or hops, or kenaf, whatever (I never could tell those farm crops apart). The same goes for the "garden roofs," which were dirt piled on top of the dirty houses. There were smelly goats running loose, chickens cackling. Salvaged umbrellas and chairs toppled in the empty streets. No traffic signs, because there were no cars.
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The rich elite just blew it totally. They dropped their globalized ball. They panicked. So they're in jail, like I was. Or they're in exile somewhere, or else they jumped out of penthouses screaming when the hyperinflation ate them alive.
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Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson | CCCB LAB - 0 views
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The idea would be that not only do you have a multigenerational project of building a new world, but obviously the human civilization occupying it would also be new. And culturally and politically, it would be an achievement that would have no reason to stick with old forms from the history of Earth. It’s a multigenerational project, somewhat like building these cathedrals in Europe where no generation expects to end the job. By the time the job is near completion, the civilization operating it will be different to the one that began the project.
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what the Mars scenario gave me – and gives all of humanity – is the idea that the physical substrate of the planet itself is also a part of the project, and it’s something that we are strong enough to influence. Not create, not completely control, not completely engineer because it’s too big and we don´t have that much ability to manipulate the large systems involved, nor the amount of power involved. But we do have enough to mess things up and we do have enough to finesse the system.This, I think, was a precursor to the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is precisely the geological moment when humanity becomes a geological force, and it’s a science-fiction exercise to say that 50 million years from now, humanity’s descendants, or some other alien civilization, will be able to look at Earth and say: “This is when humanity began to impact things as much as volcanos or earthquakes.” So it’s a sci-fi story being told in contemporary culture as one way to define what we are doing now. So, that was what my Mars project was doing, and now we are in the Anthropocene as a mental space.
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if humanity’s impact on the Earth is mostly negative in ecological terms, if you mark humanity’s impact as being so significant that we have produced a new geological age, then we have to think differently in our attitudes towards what we are doing with our biophysical substrate. And one of the things I think the Anthropocene brings up is that the Earth is our body, and we can finesse it, we can impact it, we can make ourselves sick.
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What killed Caprica? - 0 views
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Caprica may have gone too far, tried to cover too much. It broke one of the cardinal rules of mainstream science fiction, which is that if you have a strange alternate universe you'd better populate it with recognizable, ordinary characters. But I like the kind of thought-experiment audaciousness that says, Hell yes we are going to give you complicated characters who defy stereotypes, and put them in a world whose rules you'll have to think hard to understand. It's too late to bring Caprica back. But I hope that this show is the first part of a new wave of science fiction on TV. Like The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse, and Fringe, Caprica tackles singularity-level technology as a political and economic phenomenon - not as an escapist fantasy. And that's why it was a show worth watching, even when it stumbled.
Antimatter? Not such a big deal | Roz Kaveney | Comment is free | The Guardian - 0 views
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One problem with being a long-term reader of science fiction and fantasy is that you get blase about science itself because you have seen it all before. My sense of wonder was overloaded by the time I was 16; I am never going to get that rush again. Even major breakthroughs make me go 'Whatever!'.Partly that's because, despite all our advances, we still haven't got time travel, reptilian visitors from the Galactic Federation, or telepathy. Instead, we get the depressing environmental disasters that JG Ballard described, and crazed grinning fundamentalist politicians straight out of Philip K Dick. (I'm sure that if I went through all his Ace doubles from the early 1960s, I would find Sarah Palin somewhere.) We don't get the stories where someone smart gets to fix the problem with a bent paperclip; we get the grim logical stories where we are all going to die.
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One of the reasons why Dick and Ballard speak to our condition so well is that they saw the future and it was pretty rubbish.
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It is almost a cliché that most sci fi is a way of looking sideways at the time in which it was written – the reason why William Gibson's Neuromancer felt so relevant in the 1980s was simply that it was a book whose imagined technology was mostly just around the corner, and whose doomed hipster technobandits were already walking down mean streets in cities near us. It's significant that Gibson has moved to writing contemporary fiction with hardly a change of register.
The migrant caravan "invasion" and America's epistemic crisis - Vox - 0 views
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The intensity of belief on the right has begun to vary inversely with plausibility. Precisely because the “threat” posed by the caravan is facially absurd, believing in it — performing belief in it — is a powerful act of shared identity reinforcement, of tribal solidarity.
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Once that support system is in place, Trump is unbound, free to impose his fantasies on reality. He can campaign on Republicans protecting people with preexisting conditions even as the GOP sues to block such protections. He can brush off Mueller’s revelations and fire anyone who might threaten him. He can use imaginary Democratic voter fraud to cover up red-state voter suppression. He can use antifa as a pretext for deploying troops domestically.
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Trump does not view himself as president of the whole country. He views himself as president of his white nationalist party — their leader in a war on liberals. He has all the tools of a head of state with which to prosecute that war. Currently, he is restrained only by the lingering professionalism of public servants and a few thin threads of institutional inertia.
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The Imaginative Reality of Ursula K. Le Guin | VQR Online - 1 views
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The founders of this anarchist society made up a new language because they realized you couldn’t have a new society and an old language. They based the new language on the old one but changed it enormously. It’s simply an illustration of what Orwell was saying in his great essay about how writing English clearly is a political matter.
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There are advantages and disadvantages to living a very long time, as I have. One of the advantages is that you can’t help having a long view. You’ve seen it come and seen it go. Something that’s being announced as the absolute only way to write, you recognize as a fashion, a fad, trendy—the way to write right now if you want to sell right now to a right now editor. But there’s also the long run to consider. Nothing’s deader than last year’s trend.
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Obviously, the present tense has certain uses that it’s wonderfully suited for. But recently it has been adopted blindly, as the only way to tell a story—often by young writers who haven’t read very much. Well, it’s a good way to tell some stories, not a good way to tell others. It’s inherently limiting. I call it “flashlight focus.” You see a spot ahead of you and it is dark all around it. That’s great for high suspense, high drama, cut-to-the-chase writing. But if you want to tell a big, long story, like the books of Elena Ferrante, or Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy, which moves year by year from 1920 to 2020—the present tense would cripple those books. To assume that the present tense is literally “now” and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve.
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Sad by design | Eurozine - 0 views
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‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions
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If only my phone could gently weep. McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ has imploded right into the exhausted self.
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Social reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects, we too are implicit, far too deeply involved
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