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.
infrastructure
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.
week 4 / 2026: baleen and blubber
Reading round-up: seeing monsters in the (geo)political mirror; the paradoxical essence of “community”; the enantiodromia of a far-right Euro-federalism; Melville's Moby Dick considered as science fiction.
week 51 / 2025: tearing away the caul
Reading round-up: the performative shaming of “performative reading”; the post is the product; the illusion of inevitability; and maximalist manga-monster steampunk-fantasy strangeness.
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?
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.