“What do these onlookers see as they bend over my broken body? I do not know. But inside me, the sun.” ––The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, pg. 320 “In an augmented reality world, the ‘Web’ will become the space that surrounds you. Cameras embedded in the glasses will recognize the objects […]
“We mustn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where’s the joy in these […]
“Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn––and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: […]
“Apparently, now and again adults take the time to sit down and contemplate what a disaster their life is. They complain without understanding and, like flies constantly banging against the same old windowpane, they buzz around, suffer, waste away, get depressed then wonder how they got caught up in this spiral that is taking them […]
“I still haven’t found that place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.” ––We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, pg. 298 “Will machines supplant human workers or augment them? On one level, they will do both. But once again, […]
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to shake my head when asked by another scifi enthusiast if I’ve ever read Dune. To be unfamiliar with Frank Herbert’s classic is to leave a giant of the genre unexplored––to dismiss a leap forward in our thinking about technology and futurism. Now that I’ve […]
“I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile; that you don’t have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you […]
Three years ago, my father pointed me toward a frightfully thick book called Cryptonomicon that permanently rearranged my relationship with modern fiction. Since that first taste, Neal Stephenson has challenged me in every way an author can (including nearly boring me to death). Stephenson looms larger in my literary pantheon––and weighs more heavily on my […]
“‘We need brains, is the bottom line,’ Ivy said. ‘We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. […]
“The White Sky took form and fury. The cloud bloomed and evoluted like cream in coffee, spreading and paling, though from place to place one could see fresh bursts as rocks hurled out in earlier collisions found distant targets and touched off smaller chain reactions of their own. In places it took on a cellular […]