Author Archive

Kevin II: The ReKevining (or, The Cat Came Back).

Actually, the cat never left. It was Kevin who came back, drawn by a cat he could not live without, a cat who lived alone with him on the surface of the sun, a cat who, he sometimes insisted, was the only real being in the universe apart from himself. We know this because he […]

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The Bicentennial 21st-Century Symposium of All About Me.

  This feels a bit weird. Creepy, even.  If it makes any difference, I advised them not to go ahead with it. A couple of weeks from now— Nov 10-11— the University of Toronto will be hosting an academic symposium about me. More precisely, about my writing. You could even call it an international event. […]

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My Dinner with Ramez: or, The Identity Landscape.

A week or two ago— just before all the stuff with Kevin went down— I hung out with Ramez Naam for an evening. (If you know who I am you certainly know who he is; his Nexus trilogy burned across the charts in a way I can only dream of.) We snarfed. We drank. We […]

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We Need to Talk About Kevin.

Oh fuck, I think. I’m gonna get arrested again. There’s a growing cluster of uniforms in the ravine abutting our property: city employees, police, a couple of guys wearing insignia I don’t recognize.  Two cops poke at the tent in the ravine just across the fence from our tool shed. Their cars are pulled up […]

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Pearls Before Cows: Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049

Lers of Spoi.   You Have Been Warned.   I’ve been dreading this film ever since I heard it was in the works. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I saw Arrival. Now that I’ve seen it, well, I’m… Vaguely, I don’t know. Dissatisfied? Not that Blade Runner 2049 is a bad movie […]

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Nazis and Skin Cream

I went out drinking the other night with someone who punches Nazis. Certainly, ever since Charlottesville, there’s been no shortage of people who advocate Nazi-punching. For a while there, my Facebook feed was awash with the emissions of people jizzing all over their keyboards at the prospect of punching Nazis. People who argued— generally with […]

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Occasional demons.

It’s pretty much done. We even have a tentative publication date: June, 2018. All I need to do now is figure out how to embed a coded message into the text. In the meantime, a final fiblet. The Freeze-Frame Revolution. From Tachyon. It was the Monocerus build that broke her. The gremlin came out of […]

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The Return of the Slow-Wave Trader

Excerpts from dinnertime conversation with a retired investment banker: Angela Merkel emerges from a meeting with Donald Trump. “Yes,” she says in answer to a reporter’s question, “we had a provocative but productive discussion.” She rolls her eyes. The market soars on hearing the good news. It soars because once again, after a brief hiatus […]

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Incorruptible, Indeed.

So I wake up in a stranger’s apartment in Montreal, reset routers and flush/re-register dns caches and do all those other should-be-unnecessary things this piece-of-shit Lenovo demands I do before it spins some internal roulette wheel to decide whether or not I’ll have internet access this morning, and— What do you know. The X-Prize people […]

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A Tale of Two Cities (or, I Think I’ll Wait Another Year)

The first city is Montreal, to which I’ll be returning next week: Concordia once more, this time to deliver a lecture entitled “The Best-Case Apocalypse: Why Reality Is Worse Than Fiction.” (I was going to call it “My Dinner With Daniel”, but I figured the reference might be too obscure.) It’s part of a longer […]

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