A Blast from the Past: Cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others’ throats. Cyberspace was a […]
Author Archive
The Three-Bragger Problem
Preamble: OK, I lied. Said last time that this time was gonna be about science, and no more of this fluffy promo bullshit. And I meant well. But this time, the fluffy promo is about me. And it’s cool. And more to the point, I don’t have to spend hours doing research on things I […]
Two-Step Forwards, Ten Years Back
I know, I know. Two pimpage posts in a row. Not my usual shtick, and I assure you not any kind of new normal; the stars just aligned that way this time around. For what it’s worth, next time I expect to be talking about Darwinian evolution in digital ecosystems, complete with a tortured retcon […]
Alevtina and Tamara and Lyonka, Oh My!
(As usual, click on any of the following images to embiggen. Although I really shouldn’t have to be telling anyone that.) You might have seen a dude by the name of Dimitry SkoLzki hanging around the gallery hereabouts. He did these distinctive black-and-white sketches—they have an almost almost wood-cut vibe—inspired by characters and events in […]
Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.
—Our Father, Who Art in… But father‘s out of style, isn’t it? They call you The Admin now. The Board. Creation was a group project. I don’t know how they know that, but apparently there are a lot of you. Maybe I should call you Odin, or Thor. Or—Loki, given the way things are falling […]
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar…
Last month it was the Atlantic, where I pretended to know something about AI. This month it’s the MIT Reader, and the subject is The Imminent Collapse of Civilization. Honestly, I had no idea I was such an expert on so many things. This time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. […]
Underdog Overdrive
First, a PSA: In keeping with my apparent ongoing role as The Guy Who Keeps Getting Asked to Talk About Subjects In Which He Has No Expertise (and for those of you who didn’t see the Facebook post), The Atlantic solicited from me a piece on Conscious AI a few months back. The field is […]
Terry Gilliam’s Air Canada
Being who I am, I tend to portray my futures in the spirit of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four or Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. Sometimes, though, reality turns out more like Gilliam’s Brazil: just as grim, but hysterically so. Take my short story “Collateral”: a tale that (among other things) asks about culpability for decisions […]
You Are All Terminators. (I Am Not.)
Way back in grad school— when VHS was a thing and computer screens were all monochrome and a 20-Megabyte hard drive was the kind of thing only supervillains could afford—a bunch of us rented “The Terminator” for the weekend and watched it between bouts of AD&D. Inevitably we came upon the iconic first-person T-800 view. […]
A Glut in the Galleries.
It’s been a busy couple of years, too busy to squeeze in the usual Gallery Update back at the start of last year. But the fan art and the book covers and the bodily mutilations have continued even as my coverage of them lapsed—and by the time you look in on the backlog you’ve got […]