week 22 / 2026: fathers and sons
After the hourglass has been overturned, there is a period during which the sand must resettle itself before the flow of time can become regularised once again. We are living through just such a period.
futures
week 21 / 2026: empire and multitude
I’m pleased to announce a new publication: you can read a short story by yours truly in the just-released RISCS anthology! Meanwhile, feel free to hang around and discuss the shaky foundations of the USian technopoly, and the possible fates of the nation-state...
week 20 / 2026: regimes and revolutions
If “AI” is a revolution, as its ideologues would have us believe, then they might want to consider how unpopular revolutions tend to end. Are they sincere in their beliefs? I argue that it doesn’t really matter, but that we should nonetheless treat them as if they are.
week 19 / 2026: centres and edges
The openings of stories, and the titles we give them, have a huge effect on how they land with the audiences—but as always with stories, it’s an art rather than a science. Plus: in praise of living and working at the edges.
week 18 / 2026: truth and lore
Games and prose fiction are very different media, but worldbuilding works basically the same across both of them—which is why you can learn a lot about fiction for futures from the better sort of game dev. Plus: why does music in science fiction sound like it does?
week 17 / 2026: city and country
It’s not that there isn’t a problem with migration in Europe; it’s that the migration doing the damage is domestic rather than international. Plus: reframing the fear of death as a vital ecological dynamic, and refusing software the franchise of personhood.
week 16 / 2026: language and longing
It’s language all the way up and down, if you ask Alan Moore—which throws an interesting light on the rolling “post-literacy” debate, and on the tech elite’s increasingly open grasp for magic as something more (and less) than mere metaphor. Plus Bruce Sterling speculates on cybernetics...