more on the Postmodern Paleo-Future

Digging through the comments on the original post on the Paleo-Future blog that was the origin of the MungBeing article, I found several of particular note. In the first one Jeff Patterson writes: …Futurism, like evolution, needs to be malliable and adaptable. But more importantly it needs to BE. Having some form of forward-thing running […]

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..WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FUTURE?..

And dirt. Still with the dirt, a component the futurists of the last century, from fantasists to town planners always imagined would somehow be magicked away, like the stain-resistant fabric devised by Alec Guinness’s boffin in the Ealing comedy The Man In The White Suit. They assumed that at some point a clean break would literally be made between now and Years To Come, that absolute hygiene would be a given, that the gleaming, curvaceous, chrome-plated new world would bear absolutely no traces of the old world, or of waste products. It’s a fallacy perpetuated in the flyless trousers of the Star Trek crew to the idyllic blueprints of Sixties towerblocks with their whitewashed and convenient underpasses. Neither factored piss into their equations.

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..The Postmodern Paleo-Future..

from MungBeing Magazine The Postmodern Paleo-Future by Matt Novak I started the Paleo-Future blog (“a look into the future that never was”) in January of 2007 to examine the ways that those in the past envisioned the future. I have since become well acquainted with the many promises of generations past. Clean energy, robotic servants […]

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lessons from Steampunk on Cyberpunk

Been devouring the Steampunk magazines – thanks to a heads up from BoingBoing and Warren – a xerox subsidy that saw me getting caught in pre-longweekend traffic. grr. On my first pass through I’ve skipped the plethora of fiction, preferring the articles examining just what is Steampunk. Mostly defined as a sub-genre of Cyberpunk, that […]

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..Shaping the future..

from Charlie’s Diary Shaping the future … The big surprise in the 20th century Β— remember that personal jet car? Β— was the redefinition of progress that took place some time between 1950 and 1970. Before 1800, human beings didn’t travel faster than a horse could gallop. The experience of travel was that it was […]

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SF in a science fictional world

Warren Ellis recently said is his post Flying Frogs And Crashed Rocketships

I share a conviction with Steven Shaviro, whose most recent book was CONNECTED, that we live in a science fictional world. Not the one everyone expected, of course Β— no jetpacks. But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. ItΒ’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition…

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