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Wednesday, March 28, 2007
MY NOVEL'S SET IN FEBRUARY 2006...
posted 9:22 PM
NSA domestic wiretapping is still a secret, more or less. But I wish I'd thought of this.

That's the trouble with speculative presentism, with trying to extrapolate the surreal implications of the recent past...

Monday, March 26, 2007
101: SPECULATIVE FICTION AND TOTALITARIAN COSPLAY
posted 9:52 PM
"I’d long been fascinated by George Orwell’s work, but I resisted reading 1984 until I finished the manuscript for Stasiland. After that, I devoured it, and I couldn’t believe Orwell’s prescience. When I went into Mielke’s office, I saw it had the number 101, which in 1984 is the number of the torture chamber. 1984 was banned in the G.D.R. but of course, Mielke and Honecker had access to banned material. The guide told me that Mielke wanted this number so much that even though his office was on the 2nd floor, he had the entire first floor renamed the Mezzanine so that he could call his room 101."

--Anna Funder, author of Stasiland


Thursday, March 22, 2007
AN ODD DAY AT THE POOR MAN INSTITUTE
posted 8:48 PM
Has been for me, anyway. The Poor Man Institute has been a daily stop of mine for a couple of years now. I have never been certain whether Sifu Tweety and The Editors are two different people, or whether Sifu Tweety is a solo entity, while Sifu Tweety and someone else comprise The Editors, or... Anyway. Easily one of my personal top five sites, and when it's fully on, quite brilliantly funny.

This afternoon, checking in in hope of a fresh post, I discovered Sifu Tweety employing a line of mine to make fun of Jonah Goldberg. Dang, I thought, delighted, look at that.

Soon, however, Mr. Tweety added this confusing pendant .

Mr. Tweety, sir, please rest assured that I regard you and your friend(s) The Editors as quite utterly and breathtakingly *of the moment*.

In a day in which being a futurist can seem the most hopeless of undertakings, you two (or more) are *presentists* of the first water. With the exception of the rants about abandoning New Orleans to the cold equations, but those had, thankfully, faded. The funny parts, though, favor us with lucid glimpses of our unthinkable present. And for that, I salute however many of you there may be, and thank you for much heartening pleasure in very dark times.

Friday, March 09, 2007
VISION THING
posted 9:12 PM
But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse's Mouth, "It wasn't the vision I had."

Neither is Second Life.

Chia and her buds build their treehouses in corporate ghost sites. That's the difference. Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.

Call me when you get it worked out. I'll be on eBay.

William Gibson's Vision Realized

Sunday, March 04, 2007
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN...
posted 9:50 PM
Mr. Bruce Sterling!