Category: essay
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Science fiction as time travel
I grew up on a solid diet of science fiction, and as a young man in the 1970s and 1980s I had a wide range of style to choose from — New Wave, Old Guard, the Cyberpunks. To read them all at once was like the old Evolution of Man posters, the history of the…
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Meandering Progress Report Sep 2013
As I wrote a novel with a corporate setting, florid language became dead weight. I needed to make a corporate motif, a slickness half jet-age half cyberpunk. It took many drafts to make that happen since it was a big story. I resolved not to write like film or for film, but to edit my…
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Better writing through selfishness
Some years ago I attended a conference at Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington DC on art and democracy. Along with the artists and patrons and at least one historian, many who came were national and local activists for marginalized communities invisible to national culture. They made impassioned pleas for the assembled artists to take the…
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Science and the Jinx
A recent issue of Science News featured marvelously detailed images of cellular division — images that recently would have been considered impossible, since cell structures are tinier and more delicate than the very light used to image them. This is a familiar story, the impossible becoming possible. At the moment, following Feynman’s lead, all myopic…