In his new Slate essay, Lee Konstantinou opines that Something is Broken in Our Science Fiction. He isn’t really talking about science-fiction, so much as its subgenre of cyberpunk, which certainly still influences science-fiction subgenre naming, from steampunk to hopepunk. I’m not sure that cyberpunk …
Read MoreDestroying Budapest
My science-fiction work-in-progress is set in a single city, and I needed to see it to imagine living in it. Welcome to Pest! Only walk on gray parts…. Budapest was a proxy in the One-Day War between Greater Russia and Umoja East Africa. Buda is …
Read MoreRobots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)
Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city. From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry …
Read MoreThe pre-apocalypse
My writing group noted that my new story, though a different setting, is also a post-apolcyalypse tale, or at least post-disaster. One colleague included my novel in that theme, even though in my novel things are good, but about to get worse. It’s pre-apocalyptic, she …
Read MoreThe future of the university
My father recently put money in my son’s college fund. My son has more than a decade before he heads to college, but what a decade that might be. Already, online educational courses, from primary- and secondary-school initiatives like Khan Academy to university-level work, are …
Read MoreScience 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 …
Read MoreTinkerers and the Tea Party
Recently on Slashdot I read a thread about how 3-D printing — the technology of making an object layer by layer, as opposed to carving it out of a block of matter or forming it in a mold — is limited by the difficulty-of-use of …
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