week 2 / 2026: ... and the circus leaves town

“You never believed in fidelity while you / walked the halls of supremacy / I once was in awe of your strength and power / would’ve followed you to the final hour / don’t you know...”

Welcome back to weeknotes at Worldbuilding Agency, where the skies are blue and the air is cold. So strap on your jetpacks and let’s get flying, wot?

• among the pixels
• between the pages
• lookback
• ticked off

among the pixels

Only three this week, because—much like Longcat—they’re all looooooooong.

I’ll start with the longest of the lot, and concede that I had to read it in sections, not least because it’s well outside my domains of expertise... but that’s exactly why I wanted to read it.

Rodney Brooks has been in the “AI” business since before I was allowed to wear long trousers to school, which means he knows whereof he speaks, and has lived through summers and winters alike. He makes predictions about “AI” and related fields (e.g. robotics, self-driving vehicles), but so does every hungry LinkedIn huckster these days; what’s unusual is that Brooks goes back, sees how close he got, and amends his thinking.

Perhaps most importantly, Brooks is actually bullish on all this stuff in the longer run, in a way that yours truly definitely is not—and that makes his near-term pessimism all the more interesting:

The summary is that my predictions held up pretty well, though overall I was a little too optimistic. That is a little ironic, as I think that many people who read my predictions back on January 1st, 2018 thought that I was very pessimistic compared to the then zeitgeist. I prefer to think of myself as being a realist.

(I also enjoy his unstated but nonetheless apparent and absolutely radioactive contempt for—as Brooks always refers to him—“the CEO of Tesla”.)

Next up, shorter than Brooks but still pretty epic, is Dan Wang’s latest annual letter.

Wang’s star is very much in the ascendant thanks to his perfectly-timed smash-hit book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. His position is a pretty good proxy for the better-informed end of North American liberal tech-optimistic policymaking—which is to say there are points where I believe him to be quite spectacularly wrong, but I recognise (as I presume he would also) that our disagreement is essentially ideological in character.

His command of the facts, inasmuch as there can be facts about a polity of the size and dynamism of China right now, are plausibly without parallel among Western commentators; his interpretations of those facts, meanwhile, are a pretty good indicator of how the Davos set is thinking about the state of the world. And so, in the spirit of “know thy opponent”:

It’s nearly as dangerous to tweet a joke about a top VC as it is to make a joke about a member of the Central Committee. People who are dead serious tend not to embody sparkling irony. Yet the Communist Party and Silicon Valley are two of the most powerful forces shaping our world today. Their initiatives increase their own centrality while weakening the agency of whole nation states. Perhaps they are successful because they are remorseless.

Last but not least is the latest in what is becoming a new year tradition: a long, winding essay from Bruce Sterling about whatever he’s been poking at for the previous twelve months.

Those who read my interviews with the Chairman a while back will not be entirely surprised to hear he’s still down the pocket-multitool rabbit-hole, though you might be surprised at just how deep: he’s been making his own prototype replicas of a sort of proto-multitool that dates back to the days of the Roman Empire. The question “why?” is not amenable to a short answer—but why worry when the long answer is so delightfully elliptical?

Multitools make field-tested sense in the deep confusions of wartime, but like a lot of other wartime things, they’re bad. You have to get fully-used to multitools to understand how authentically bad they are, how lacking in merit as tools. As functional hand-tools, multitools are wretched hacks. Supposedly, they can be a comprehensive toolbox fit for all possible challenges, but they’re all jammed into one small dysfunctional handle. The tiny tools that fold-out from those harsh design-constraints are flat, and weak, and wobbly, and frail, and hard to deploy for any length of time, with any force and precision.

To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure how all this multitool stuff is relevant to the present moment; I’m not even sure Sterling himself knows it consciously!

What I do know, however, is that he tends to become fascinated by obscure and inexplicable things about ten years before they become vital matters of everyday concern. He has the same sort of nose for novelty and change that J G Ballard once had, which makes him a useful (if gnomic) barometer of strangeness.

between the pages

Ballard is much on my mind this week, as I’ve been reading an anthology of short stories written in the shadow of the sage of Shepperton.

Like all anthologies, themed or otherwise, Reports from the Deep End is a mixed bag, with some real dogs and stinkers sat cheek by jowl with some excellent work. The worst pieces here suffer from having taken the task of paying homage too much to heart, to the extent that they either do little more than string together a bunch of fairly blunt references to Ballard’s best known tropes and stylistic tics, or pastiche a particular era of his work, or both. I’m reminded of the distinction I used to make between a covers band and a tribute act: the former chases an unachievable fidelity to the original, and in so doing ends up highlighting its own inadequacies even as it accentuates what was most generic and obvious about the source; meanwhile, the latter takes the material and somehow makes it their own, and in so doing makes the familiar strange and new all over again.

A few highlights from among the tribute acts, then: Chris Beckett actually scores pretty well on fidelity with “Art App”, but perhaps because he’s always been a fairly direct descendent of Ballard in terms of style and concerns—though somehow it’s taken his appearance in this volume to make me realise it! But while the characters, conceit and even at times the images and phrases could pass for Ballard in isolation, seen together they’re Beckett’s own thing, albeit with more than a bit of the old boy’s DNA carried over.

Nick Mamatas, meanwhile, turns in a story which, if published anywhere else, might not prompt you to think of Ballard at all—though now you know to look, you can see some dead-pan nods throughout. But “Fifty Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” possesses an affect that suggests a far more subtle appreciation of Ballard’s genius: where other writers have only scraped tropes from the surface, Mamatas has burrowed beneath the skin.

George Sandison’s “Magic Hour” likewise gets the vibe of Ballard without having to resort to pushing the same buttons in the same sequences. This tale of a wealth-management consultant called out to an on-location bender with his film-director client seeks out the Ballardian in the present, rather than the Ballard of the past; come for the surreal decadence, stay for the finely-wrought sentences, leave with the cinematic circus as the sun comes up.

I’ll give an honourable mention to Michael Moorcock, also, who it seems is still turning in better-written, stranger stories than some writers half his age. There’s enough killer in this book to counterbalance the filler; it’s no replacement for Ballard himself, of course, but it might point you at some new-to-you writers who are carrying a similar flame.

lookback

The dominant theme of this week has been the temperature. While I don’t think it’s gone much below -5 Centigrade, Malmö regularly runs “feels like” temperatures that go ten degrees lower than that, due to a combination cutting winds and moisture in the air. It snowed a bit more at the top of the week, but since then what had already fallen has just slowly compacted down to ice, making the pavements a risky proposition in some parts of town. It is not at all conducive to leaving the house, in other words—though my studio is only ten minutes away by foot, and fairly well heated, so it’s not too hard to get myself to work and back. Heading uptown for various forms of socialisation was rather more challenging, however; I cycle everywhere for most of the year, but the ice (and the bad driving) scare me, so I’ve been on buses a fair bit.

I don’t really do resolutions any more, nor detailed plans for the year ahead, but I do set myself what I think of as directions-of-travel. This year I want to be sending more writing out into the world, of all formats and styles and lengths, and to that end I’m re-establishing a blogging practice over at VCTB. This is less about producing “finished” work than it is about getting back into the habit of thinking aloud and exposing the process, though in the long run it should also be generative of ideas that can be developed at greater length; for example, in this post I struck some sparks from an essay about the famed O’Neill orbital habitat images that came out of NASA in the 1970s, which resulted in an interesting theoretical proposition with relevance for worldbuilding and speculative design.

Do feel free to follow along if you want to watch over my shoulder as I think; it won’t all be stuff like that O’Neill piece, by any means, but you’ll see flotsam and jetsam there that won’t appear here at WA.

I find that this sort of exploratory writing-as-thinking has the effect of freeing up the more intentional stuff. As the ledger below will show, I’ve put in some quality hours on the revenant PROJECT HORNIMAN, finally unlocking a blockage that’s been there for around half a year, and laid down what I’d guess is 85% of the final version of a short story for a competition whose deadline is tomorrow, all of which feels very good: the sort of productivity that’s about quality more than quantity. Of course, the paradox is that you have to produce the quantity for the quality to show up…

Anyway, the last 15% of that story isn’t gonna finish itself, so let’s get to the ledger, eh?

ticked off

• Ten hours of admyn. (Including researching and setting up a service via which you can book a call with me directly!)
• Seven hours of directed reading for research.
• Six hours of blogging. (See above; after a few weeks, it’s stopped feeling like wasted time and become generative.)
• Five hours of art practice. (Mostly experimenting with technique, here; looking for ways to combine other media with collage. Doing a lot of stuff involving repetitive and/or automatic writing with paint-pens and masking fluid.)
• Five hours of fiction writing. (Again, see above.)
• Four hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN.
• Four hours of correspondence.
• Three hours on these here weeknotes.
• Two hours of networking. (Malmö Futures Folk usually meets the first Wednesday of every month; join the LinkedIn group to stay updated.)
• And ten hours of undirected writing and reading, because that’s how we do things downtown.

Wow, busy week. Amazing how much you can get done when there’s no reason to go outside, innit? Anyway, I have a story to finish, so it’s time to sign off; I hope all is well with you, wherever you may be.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 02 of 2026. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend!