Urban Honking

Earlier this year, when I went to an event to meet NASA astronaut Jim Dutton at my local science museum, I was the only person in attendance over twelve. Last night, when I went to see Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood chat on stage as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures 2010 […]

“What’s the most cyberpunk Photoshop filter?” “Oh, definitely Find Edges.” [Before I even begin, let me say this. BUY THIS BOOK BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! Honestly, if you’re not willing to drop $20 on a piece of pure, actual counterculture, get out of here. Semiotext(e) SF is an arcane book! Even in 2010, it […]

I had planned, for this review, to fall asleep reading Murray Leinster‘s 1963 novella The Greks Bring Gifts and write about my dreams immediately the next morning. As it turns out, I’ve woken up fuzzy; not only do I not remember my dreams, but I can hardly place where I was yesterday, or where I […]

Allow me to test a loose theory. Imagine a speculative fiction graph with “Distance in Time” along one axis, and “Distance in Space” along the other. Classic science fiction, indisputable science fiction, the Platonic form, if you will, of science fiction, lives on the far right corner of this graph: distant in both time and […]

This book is about alien sex. Not imperialist, colonial sex, with human male astronauts dominating winsome green-skinned babes à la Captain Kirk. Nor is it bestial. This is real mutual discovery and understanding between sentient beings. It’s not something you see much in science fiction — in Tiptree’s short stories, admittedly, and to a lesser […]

Earlier this year, I received a charming email from a pair of Helsinki-based artists and designers who work under the name of OK DO. OK DO is a socially-minded design think tank and online publication, and they wanted to know if I’d contribute to a new publication and exhibition project they were working on. The […]

One of the greatest tricks the great trickster Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. played on the world was convincing everyone he wasn’t a science fiction writer. Sure, lots of heads from our side claimed him as one of our own, but word somehow didn’t get out to the straight literary establishment. Lucky for him: it was probably […]

Introducing the One-Picture Review:

Lazarus Long — née Woodrow Wilson Smith — is a 2,000 year old man. Born in pre-WWI America, he lives to see the proliferation of space travel, the destruction of the nation-state, the colonization of the universe, and the gradual extinction of so-called “ephemerals,” or humans with regular lifespans. Though Lazarus is an exceptional long-lifer […]

An almost certainly incomplete glossary of fictional concepts in William Gibson’s Count Zero that are never explained and that you are supposed to understand by context, which is inscrutable since all these future-terms are neologisms and none could even remotely have been understandable to an audience in 1986, except to deep Gibson nerds who might […]