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 Savvy

The title is by way of a small plug for the book of the same name by Adam Gordon, out last year but with a 2009 copyright line (future-oriented even there).
It’s a nice, user-friendly guide to forecasting, and especially to reading other people’s. The business-person-in-a-hurry style pull quotes on each page are sometimes, er, chosen [...]

Smil.. ing through?

Long time no post…   but regularity resumes, with apologies for terrible pun above. Much stimulated by Vaclav Smil’s latest work, oddly titled Global Catastrophes and Trends – The Next Fifty Years. It has been widely and well reviewed, so no need to summarise. But, even for an inveterate synthesist like Smil, it is a broad [...]

converging on what?

First of occasional notes on new books on futuristic subjects…
One of the common themes in discussions of the singularity is that trends apparently under way in different areas will interact, and reinforce each other. It is not just that computers are getting smaller and faster, cell biology is unravelling how molecules build organisms, or nanotechnologists [...]