Dateline — MidAtlantic. The BUG and I are crossing the ocean in an airbus that’s been painted a lurid mix of purple and pink— call it pinple— whose in-flight menus are refreshingly honest and whose vomit bags are volumetrically calibrated from “pan flute music” to “our competitor’s prices”. The uniforms of the flight attendants are […]
Flyswatter
Category: fibletSomething reaches down and lifts Cyclopterus like a toy in a bathtub. Inertia pushes Galik into his seat. The vessel tilts, nose down: slides fast-forward as though surfing some invisible wave. Moreno curses and grabs the stick as Cyclopterus threatens to turn, to tumble. Wipe out… In the next moment everything is calm as glass […]
Sunflowers, Hamsters, and Elderberries: Bifrost Does Watts.
Category: ink on art, interviewsIn an inexplicable yet welcome bit of ego-boo, the current issue of the French Magazine BiFrost (#93) is infested with stuff about (and in a couple of cases, by) me. “ZeroS” is in there, in French. So’s my afterword from Beyond the Rift. There’s some kind of reader’s guide to the Sunflowers Cycle, and an […]
The Weakest Link.
Category: ink on artI first wrote the following back in 2014, one of my columns for Nowa Fantastyka. Such columns— generally a longer version of them, actually, since the NF pieces are limited to 6K characters including spaces— often make it onto the ‘crawl eventually. Apparently, though, “The Weakest Link” never did these past four years. It would […]
Time Dilation in Tel Aviv.
Category: On the Road, public interfaceNone of the following events should have happened, by rights. I should never have even made it to Tel Aviv, but for some vestige of Baptist Guilt. Why, I’ve Got Friends I Haven’t Even Used Yet I currently have nearly 250 unanswered emails in my In-Box. Some are links and bulletins concerning cool bits of […]
Toronto 2033.
Category: writing newsOkay, this time let’s see if I can post a fluffy little bit of writing news without provoking a political shitstorm: That Google-related fiblet I posted a few weeks back? I can tell you where that comes from now. The critically-acclaimed urban-issues magazine Spacing is breaking with tradition and commemorating its 15th anniversary with a […]
Images, Opera, Israel.
Category: art on ink, On the RoadA bit of a break from the doom’n’gloom; instead of rubbing your noses in real-world apocalypsi, I’ll rub them in my fictional ones instead. Those at least have the advantage of cool cover art. Air Quotes in Israel First off, though, let me pull a 180 and announce something downright literally Utopian: to […]
The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC.
Category: climate, politics, rantThey showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines, the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of Human effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings, which made us feel a little better but didn’t really change anything. —”Hotshot” People have noticed. I got it in Lviv. […]
Step Function
Category: fibletA lot of disgruntlement hereabouts regarding Google’s smiley annexation of Toronto’s waterfront. A certain lack of transparency over who owns the panopticon being erected by Sidewalk Labs, who owns the data to be harvested from every footstep in the Quayside Zone. People quitting in protest; others patting us on the head, assuring us in kindly […]
A/Political (and a deferral on Doomsday)
Category: Uncategorized(I should be writing about the latest Doomsday Report from the IPCC. It’s not often that such an august scientific body concludes that massive and devastating changes to the planet constitutes our best-case scenario, that even that best-case depends on the deployment of unicorn tech that hasn’t been developed yet. But there’s a lot to […]