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.
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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 6 / 2026: plots and characters
Reading round-up: reports of literacy’s death may well be exaggerated; plot models are patterns, not blueprints; the “tapestry” novel, and the redistribution of character agency; extreme bird-watching, and the re-humanisation of the last hipster.
week 5 / 2026: pots and kettles
Reading round-up: exploring what might happen when Medicare meets de-fi and prediction markets; why “innovation” culture would benefit from a more sincere engagement with the darker end of science fiction; and narrative techniques for simultaneous explanation and estrangement.
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 3 / 2026: pulp and pith
Reading round-up: the long game of fashion brand narratives; hints of a revivalist Romanticism; the magickal power of naming things; and the creation of history through the storying of the dead.
week 2 / 2026: ... and the circus leaves town
Reading round-up: Rodney Brooks reassesses his own AI predictions; Dan Wang holds forth on China (and everything else); Bruce Sterling reports from the depths of the multitool rabbit-hole; an anthology of stories in homage to J G Ballard.