This is Warren Ellis’ closing talk from Future Everything 2015: This part (about 14mins in, which I have transcribed for you) is a eulogy for tech conferences that generate more tech conferences presented at the closing of a conference that’s being saying the future is now for twenty years, and design fiction written within a […]
We were in Coober Pedy, I think, or definitely getting close to the edge of the Zone, one Saturday or Sunday morning… it was definitely morning… but after a week on the road, days loose their meaning. Anyway, idly flipping through whatever subset of channels was available in that particular hotel room with its geographic […]
It is, I am reliably informed, 2015 now. This year so far has been off to a slow start for me, mostly due to reasons. But there is a great weight to my plans. Moving them forwards, accelerating the mass of what-is-to-come towards escape velocity, will take some time still, but things are, be assured, […]
In his BFI Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder keynote lecture [CLICK THROUH FOR EMBEDDED VIDEO], acclaimed author William Gibson joins novelist Nick Harkaway to discuss cinematic cyberpunk and the origins of the term cyberspace. Gibson also reveals his love of District 9 (2009) and reflects upon his experience writing for The X-Files.
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Highlights:
On how he came to invent cyberspace as setting for his fiction:
“by the late 70s I had a very jaundiced view of the last little while of popular imagined futures and I wanted… it wasn’t resonant for me, if nothing else. I wanted to find something else that was more resonant, for me, of the possible.”
* the goo of District 9’s weapons as the future of interface to data via clarkean magix
Mad Max: Fury Road will show us a glimpse into the full Collapse future. (Let’s be honest, we know exactly how this movie will play out, it’s highly unlikely that it will have a twist ending with it all occurring in a VR simulator as a generation of posthumans kill time in some fan-fic recreation of the past, on their way to seeding a new galaxy.) Again.
We are a worldwide civilisation coasting with the fuel gauge nearing empty, thinking there must be another service station just over the horizon. So crank up the radio, let’s sing along to some tunes, it’ll be just fiiiiiiiine.
…
Thinking about this as “the pre Jackpot Years” helps us reframe the narrative. Something better can come out of all this. This doesn’t have to be the prelude to a future high-speed, nightmarish post-apocalypse, worse than the slow motion one we’re in now. We don’t have to wait for it to accelerate into an unavoidable crash and collapse. There is no techomagical Singularity that will save us. We must wake up behind the wheel and plot a new path on the map of the possible. Our civilisation survived the twentieth century and everyday Fear of the Bomb. We can make it through this too, and build something better. All the pieces are here already, waiting to be recombined. From advances in automated factories and 3D Printing to basic science and amazing speculations on the origins of life.
My review of The Peripheral by William Gibson is up at Daily Grail. Here’s a sample: Most notable to me, apart from the foreground of economical collapse and subsequent radical transformation, is the thread of extinction woven into the world view. One of the characters is in permanent mourning for the species being killed by […]
“Twenty First Century: for the majority of timelines, this was where a Galactic Civilisation was built from the ruins of the Twentieth Century (and the Industrial Civilisation that preceded it).”
Here in Cosmic Anthropologist HQ we spend a lot of time contemplating a more fleshed out Kardashev Scale. Something that has more dimensions than just energy usage. Cultural factors. Ethical metrics.
Here in Cosmic Anthropologist HQ we’re looking forward to being able to have a bath without using a bucket.
“The Future Composts the Past.” ~ Bruce Sterling
In most of those other timelines, Giant Mutant Rats haunt a ruined Earth.
The Truth, as ever, lies somewhere between what we think we know and what we fear and what we can’t even imagine.
It wasn’t until the fifth viewing of Cloud Atlas that I saw the Wachowskis are showing us more than the trap of eternal recurrence. They’re giving us glimpses of the path we’re on too. Neo Seoul and the drowning earth.
Cloud Atlas
And of course, a civilisation that just managed to reach the stars before the Collapse finally came. That managed to hurl bits of itself out into the void in one last push.
This is the newly set up Cosmic Anthropologist HQ. That I am currently locked out of. Because of reasons. This is the next time I move. This is just a test post. There is no stenography on this page. There is nothing hidden. There is no subspace communication being broadcast to the centre of the […]
Today’s recurring theme seems to be the Cyberpunk Future Present and the Cyberpunk Future Past. I wake up to see a tweet from Rudy Rucker talking about his first viewing of Max Headroom, over at Bruce Sterling’s house, back in ‘the day’ and then Pat Cadigan mentioning her love of Prisoners of Gravity, a Canadian […]
Between the recent minor internet war, as Joel Johnson tried to compare geeks and hipsters, and miss lizbt’s comments to me on the weekend, I’ve spent the last few days with a minor identity-crisis. Am I a geek, a hipster, something in between, or just me? And, of course (since it’s constantly on my mind, clearly), the […]
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 