nowhere to go but further in: a hypothesis of fandom intensity
The differences in dynamic between the fandoms of primary- and secondary-world media can tell us a lot about the micropolitics of future imaginaries.
Latest
week 13 / 2025
Dusty with fragments of citation and punctuation, blinking in the sudden light—WEEKNOTES emerge briefly from the word-mines!
This week, the nose goes the grindstone, and Toffler goes to China.
week 12 / 2025
Up and down the west coast with a head full of viral fog, over the bridge and back to a melancholy melody—WEEKNOTES keeps moving, even when they don't feel like it.
This week, the fort is held, and Scandinavian history is scattershot.
the scenario doesn’t know it’s a scenario: an interview with Madeline Ashby
Few folk are better equipped to understand the art of worldbuilding from both sides of the futures/fiction border than Madeline Ashby, who has a fully justified reputation for excellence in both aspects. Find out how she does it!
week 11 / 2025
No ornate ironies and allusions this week—just a pared-down back-to-basics WEEKNOTES, because I am sick as a dog and it's all I can manage.
week 10 / 2025
There and back again, running the risk and riding the rails—WEEKNOTES takes a trip to That London.
This week, the Chronoberg Chronicle meets its moment, and Discworld trumps Middle Earth in almost every way.
of system and story: how narrative-based futuring expands the planner’s toolkit
What use is story in the context of serious, grown-up planning? It's the best way of finding out the flaws in your existing system model—let me tell you why.
Weeknotes
week 13 / 2026: markets and casinos
Reading round-up: ecomodernism chooses a weird moment to frame climate mitigation as a casino, as prediction markets expose the moral hazard of literally gambling on disaster. Plus: the accusation of technophobia reveals as much about the accuser as about the accused, if not more so.
week 12 / 2026: agents and agency
This week’s reading notes take a blog post by Matt Jones as their springboard, and as an invitation to ask the unacknowledged political-economic question lurking beneath even this fairly sane and sober look at the so-called “agentic” revolution. That question is: “do we really need or want this?”
week 11 / 2026: pipelines and pylons
Reading round-up: the unfolding geopolitical sh*tshow has many dimensions, none of them nice, but in this edition of weeknotes I’m focussing on the infrastructural and sustainability futures—the consequences and, if we look further, the opportunities—of the conflict in the Gulf.
week 10 / 2026: futures and histories
Reading round-up: defining “interiority” in fiction, and how it works; science fiction (and fantasy) as essentially historical in character; declining “declinism” in the struggle for a new media literacy. Plus a 1993 novel that feels like it was plucked from the fevered nightmares of Elon Musk.
week 9 / 2026: intentions and inversions
Reading round-up: what the Citrini scenario tells us about the tremendous power (and danger) of fictional futures; why the best novel of the Culture might actually be the most overlooked of the set.
week 8 / 2026: maps and compasses
Reading round-up: wind-powered freight (and how I think about weak signals); how audiences have come to understand the working of worlds; what science fiction has to teach strategists.
week 7 / 2026: timelines and mailbags
Reading round-up: the straightening of time by Victorian science and philosophy; the formation of the earliest international communications infrastructures; and the ironic-in-hindsight interventionism of Iain M Banks's Look to Windward.
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