Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Matt Ruff's "Destroyer of Worlds" (21 Feb 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Deena Mohamed's 'Shubiek Lubiek' (11 Jan 2023)"
Three of my short stories that got it right…kinda.
I am on record on the subject of science fiction writers predicting the future: we do not. Thank goodness we don’t predict the future! If the future were predictable, then nothing any of us did would matter, because the same future would arrive, just the same. The unpredictability of the future is due to human agency, something the best science fiction writers understand to their bones. Fatalism is for corpses.
Continue reading "Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2022 (01 Dec 2022)"
Author’s Note: This short story was originally commissioned by Deakin College as part of an AI ethics course; they have since take it down. This is its new home. For a nonfiction analysis of the problems set forth herein, see my Guardian column on the subject. Here’s an audio edition.
James Kennedy’s debut novel Order of the Odd-Fish ran like a very successful of dares between the author and himself — Kennedy just kept ratcheting up the weirdness in the book, piling up the comic and surreal, to the point where the book should, by all rights, have collapsed beneath its own silliness. But it didn’t!
Instead, Kennedy produced a tale of magic. As I wrote in my review, “This is what Harry Potter would be if its magic world was truly wondrous and magnificent, as opposed to plain reality with broomsticks and funny robes.”
Here’s how I ended that review: “An epic novel of exotic pie, Götterdämmerung, mutants, evil, crime, and musical theater, Odd-Fish is a truly odd fish, as mannered and crazy as an eel in a tuxedo dropped down your trousers during a performance of The Ring Cycle.”
