week 50 / 2025: ancient of days
Reading round-up: Auger disowns design-as-augury; a return to Turnton Docklands; a potted history of futurology; and an anarchist's analysis of utopian bureaucracy.
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week 49 / 2025: against the supposedly inevitable
Reading round-up: the end of The Line; socially constructed technological inevitability; the crusade against empathy; the Noughties as the Before Times... and the attentional friction of poetry.
week 48 / 2025: walking in the shadows
Reading round-up: dead media theory revisited; the quantified self, Victorian style; two takes on a rising China; and Aleister Crowley’s proto-pomo mental hygiene routines.
week 47 / 2025: snowblower
The end of the year is within sight, which means an early shift into reflective thinking...
week 46 / 2025: eyes on the street
So, you’re writing a short story that’s meant to explore a future. What’s the first and most crucial step in the process of getting your imagined world onto the page? It’s not what you might think...
week 45 / 2025: ten theses on “the future”
The moment to change a mental model is the moment at which it becomes an obstacle to understanding rather than a scaffold for it.
week 44 / 2025: hermit walks the dunes
I'm running a three-day course on fiction-for-futures in January! In-person, on-site, and strictly limited to no more than ten participants...
computer says yes: an interview with Georgina Voss (part 2)
The second part of an interview with artist, author and educator Georgina Voss, in which we discuss the role of humour and anger in narrating big, difficult things, and the aesthetic challenges of representing an international engineering scandal in words and images.
world-fleshing: an interview with Georgina Voss (part 1)
The first part of an interview with artist, author and educator Georgina Voss, in which worldbuilding is (sort of) distinguished from world-fleshing, and tips on artistic practice are gleaned from thought leader Hannibal Lecter.
against the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds: an interview with Karl Schroeder
An interview with author, designer and foresight practitioner Karl Schroeder, on worldbuilding (of course), narrative as an analytical tool, leaving behind the ideas of the nineteen-hundreds, and much more.