week 34 / 2025: the machine stops
When life gives you lemons, make a lemonade-flavoured parable in place of the more considered content that you'd have written if you'd not lost the time to dealing with the lemons.
Latest
week 33 / 2025: how much is too much?
Or, phrased differently: what do the IPCC's climate change scenarios have in common with the Star Wars franchise?
week 32 / 2025: conspiracy culture
There's nothing like looking at the disposable popular culture of three decades previous for reminding you that there's nothing new under the sun, and that history moves in waves rather than an arc.
week 31 / 2025: churches of futurity
What can we learn about futures from thinking about them as if they were faiths or fandoms? Quite a lot, if you ask me...
week 30 / 2025: in defence of magickal thinking
Divination and foresight are a deal less different than some practitioners in either camp would have you believe—both address questions of strategy through the sensemaking process of storytelling. Perhaps you'd like a free trial by way of demonstration? Then roll up, roll up, and step this way...
week 29 / 2025: rifts in the schismatrix
Here's another way to look at the difference between science fiction and fiction-for-futures: the former is art, the latter is artifice.
week 28 / 2025: the concretisation of metaphor
The tools of science fiction can be put to use in the storying of scenarios, but in such cases, they are means to a somewhat different end. How might we usefully describe that distinction?
News
schedule adjustment notice
Hello, worldbuilders!
Just a quick note to let you know: it occurred to me this morning that my spending a bunch of time compiling weeknotes which don't get emailed to you, only to then spend a shorter amount of time two days later writing a short note alerting
hot in the city 2nite
Hello worldbuilders! It's 28°C in Malmö this afternoon, and it's reliably been around that temperature in the afternoon for close to a week now.
I quite like hot weather, really, but a lot of other folk are less keen—and I dare say I'
call it in, take it off
Hello, worldbuilders! It's been quiet here this last week, because around this time on the Sunday previous I started thinking "hmm, I don't feel so great", and by the evening I was feeling (as we Brits say) like death warmed over.
Hell knows what
less magic, more traffic
Hello, worldbuilders! It feels a lot like the roundabout just hasn't stopped spinning over the week just gone—and next week it's The Conference, which means the metaphorical carny will be reaching out his hairy hand to give it another good shove... which means there'
pass the vol-au-vents
Hello, worldbuilders! And welcome to those of you who've signed up in the last few days. Glad you could come—take a chair, get yourself a drink. How are things?
We've got no Actual Announcement this week; I would announce again that I've giving
the circus comes to town
Hello, worldbuilders! This is your weekly newsthingy... and we're gonna start with An Actual Announcement.
Talk and workshop: The Conference, Malmö, Mon 26th August 2024
I will be giving a talk entitled Wisdom for worldbuilders: fictions, futures, fandoms on the morning of Mon 26th August.
Said talk is
null but not void
Hello, worldbuilders! What's been happening at Worldbuilding Agency this week?
No essay or interview
Um, yeah—bit of an absence at the middle of the week, wasn't there? Sorry about that.
There's an interview in the pipe, but it's awaiting approval from
Weeknotes
week 41 / 2025: stuck in the middle with you
In which I channel my inner Inigo Montoya in an attempt to explain why talking about "technology" robs us of the sense of our own agency...
week 40 / 2025: the same river twice
This week, it seems I'm flagrantly mishandling Heraclitus to make a case for horizon-scanning...
week 39 / 2025: staying with various troubles
Utopias and dystopias are equally open to interpretation, as are all narratives of futurity. That's why, for me, the name of the game is to portray the messiness of hopes and fears alongside each other...
week 38 / 2025: player of games
I’m waxing philosophical this week, as I consider the potential utility of the “dark forest” theory of the internet to foresight. So please exercise your (potentially illusory) free will and click on through to follow along...
week 37 / 2025: a room of one’s own
It’s been wall-to-wall logistics around here this week, as I’ve been moving in to a new studio/office space...
week 36 / 2025: at the intersection of three things
I've been going on about this "narrative prototyping" thing for ages now, but how does it differ from science fiction and/or design fiction? Well, since you asked...
week 35 / 2025: radio daze
Client work is keeping me busy this weekend, so perhaps you'd like to go listen to a recent podcast appearance?