Category: speculative fiction
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Kim Stanley Robinson on how we live in a science fiction novel that we’re writing together
From The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations: These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that…
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The promises and perils of geoengineering
I went on the Technotopia podcast to talk to John Biggs about geoengineering, the future of climate change, and the inspirations behind my forthcoming novel, Veil. Complement with my conversation with Andrew Liptak about Veil, how it feels to write fiction, and this podcast interview about how technology shapes society. This blog exists thanks to…
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Announcing Veil
I have a new novel coming out May 20th, 2020. Veil is a character-driven speculative thriller about a near-future shaped by geoengineering: When her mother dies in a heat wave that kills twenty million, Zia León abandons a promising diplomatic career to lead humanitarian aid missions to regions ravaged by drought, wildfires, and sea level…
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How CEOs are using sci-fi to imagine the future
Susan Lahey wrote up a wonderful feature for Zendesk Relate on a SXSW panel I participated in last year alongside Malka Older, Kevin Bankston, and Tim Fernholz: In the 2002 movie Minority Report, the main character walks through a store where artificial intelligence customer service devices greet him by name, ask how he liked recent…
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William Gibson on tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient
I interviewed William Gibson about tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient, how to avoid terminal shortsightedness, and the creative process behind his new novel, Agency: I think I’ve learned that we need, individually, to find those areas in our lives where we do possess agency, and attempt to use it appropriately. And it seems to me that’s…
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My interview with Nick Harkaway was longlisted for the BSFA Award
My interview with Nick Harkaway about writing Gnomon was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award. It came as a complete surprise but probably shouldn’t have because Nick is a brilliant writer and you should all read Gnomon. If you already have, the BSFA longlist is full of mind-bending science fiction, as are my reading recommendations.…
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What sci-fi can tell us about the future
Tom Standage wrote a thought-provoking article about the feedback loop between science fiction and real world tech for The Economist. He happened to quote from an essay I wrote a few years back: “Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2017, Eliot Peper, a novelist, argued that science fiction is valuable ‘because it reframes our perspective…
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In Praise of Sci-Fi Determinism
Maize Magazine interviewed me for a feature on futurism and science fiction: Now that technology is changing our world at an unprecedented pace, science fiction is building a mythology of the 21st century—a mythology shaped by technology and climate change. Complement with imagining new institutions for the internet age, using science fiction to understand the…
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Why we suspend disbelief
Last night I binged Russian Doll. The recursive structure, nested plots, and multifaceted characters make it a philosophical thriller as much as a psychological one. As each thirty-minute episode slalomed across the finish line, I fumbled for the remote to inform Netflix that “YES! I’m still watching! More! Now!” I woke up this morning thinking…
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Government is a technology, so fix it like one
The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy, and the United States of America are human inventions as surely as airplanes, computers, and contraception are. Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action. Just like any other technology,…