Average city futures

(Attention conservation notice: this is a bit of a ramble).
My local (and rather good) listings mag Venue just ran a six page feature on what the future might be like for the Bristol-Bath region. Got me thinking again about how to approach such a question. I guess I didn’t think the actual feature (not online) [...]

Near future fiction

I’ve banged on before about the supposed problem of imaging plausible (and non-horrid) futures in fiction. I had forgotten about the related debate about “mundane” SF – the ironic tag for stories about futures which only contain science which does not go beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable to imagine.
The constraints, as defined a [...]

Future shock revisited

Wanted to go to a local screening last night, but indoors with ‘flu or some viral relative – so obviously I looked for the main attraction on YouTube, and of course it is there: Future Shock (1972), in five jerky parts.
It is a pretty fair attempt to convey the themes of the book on film. [...]

Where no (transhu)man has gone before…

Writing about the singularity – the technologically transcendent kind, not the black hole kind – is OK when it is arguing about whether it will happen, and when. But science fiction writers  want to write about what happens afterwards (of course!). This is liable to make no sense – that is the whole point of [...]

information roundabout

I was dubious about Twitter (140 characters too like txt mssgng, which I can’t stand to use at all), but after 24 hrs am now convinced it’s useful…
item, some guy I’d not heard of following me (why? no matter), so check him out: oh look, he’s following Fred Spier, whose 1996 book on Big History [...]

optimism in depth

Just discovered that this enterprising chap is writing a book about the future which I’m relieved to note won’t be out until 2011…  and blogging the while.
I would just add his notes on his journeyings for research to the blogroll, but worth highlighting here too as there is lots of interesting stuff to read along [...]