Urban Honking

I’m very excited to announce the latest fruit of my ongoing collaboration with SEED Magazine — a web-only article justifying the cultural and scientific import of science fiction. Being written for a primarily scientific audience, there are large sections of the Venn diagram that will already have been filled in; yes, I’m preaching to the […]

In my opinion, the 1960s were the best time to be a sci-fi buff. Everything was new: the unfolding space race was not only beginning to justify decades of literary speculation about space travel, but it was also ratcheting astronauts and engineers up to rock-star status, making science cool for (maybe) the first time. Meanwhile, […]

Dying Inside is one of science fiction’s great genre classics, although hopefully the edition currently in handsome reprinting will hip the mainstream to the fact that it’s also a great American novel. The story of an aging telepath gradually losing his power, it was written by Robert Silverberg during his creative peak in the early […]

Actual Reading Notes: Whoa, this book is deceptively complex: a wildly convoluted and impossible story told very plainly, with an almost maddening lack of detail — lacking the atmospheric fuzz and hypertext of more contemporary sci-fi — we’re told very little of how the “World” Null-A looks, feels, and functions, only of the drama that […]

I first met Mark von Schlegell in 2004, an eternity ago, on a blurry, neon-tonic night in Los Angeles, probably one of the banner nights for my endless (and this, I admit, is personal) migratory-birdlike longing for a return to California. It was a deeply improbable place and time: a wild, feathered, cavernous warehouse art […]

As I tried to switch to a biphasic sleeping system it was too easy to skip the afternoon nap. That caught up up with me last night when I slept from about 11pm to 7am, waking up disoriented in the living room with all the lights on, hearing the buzz of Willow’s electric toothbrush. After […]

The last three days I moved back to monophasic sleep to test if napping beat a longer sleep period. Instead of only sleeping three and a half hours at night, I slept all five of my hours during the night. Sleeping from 2am to 7am means I get VERY tired about 2pm, especially if I […]

Is The Handmaid’s Tale sci-fi? It’s not marketed as such, nor does the book cover pronounce it to be so, but that’s how it was sold to me. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel like the question might be irrelevant. If The Handmaid’s Tale wanted to be science fiction, no one could contest it: […]

Two weeks of attempting to sleep five hours a day, with the knowledge that it is not actually possibly, has been surprisingly effective. According to the initial plan I should have slept only 65 hours, as opposed to my usual 117 at this point. With the slight slips in the schedule I’d guess I’m at […]

Is it still polyphasic sleep if I take occasional breaks? Well, yes. Polyphasic sleep is defined as “a variant of a sleep pattern that is set in opposition to monophasic sleep.” (via supermemo) I am starting to feel a bit of a sore throat coming on (this could be unrelated to the lack of sleep, […]