Building on two articles by Holden Karnoffsky, I argue that utopian fiction fails because it's trying to depict something impossible. Read more (5 min, 1700 words).| Everything Studies
In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Keith Brooke explores a fractured fictional future Solaris, PPB £7.99 At some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future, for the random mix of reasons that all too often drive history, Europe is fragmenting into progressively smaller national entities – or polities, as Hutchinson labels them in Europe in Autumn. Nations are breaking up into their constituent regions; these regions are splitting into cities and neighbourhoods are declaring their own sovereignty. In this future, even a ...| Arcfinity
Becky Hogge is afforded a medieval vision of the future. Jeremy Rifkin at the RSA, London, 29 April 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin is published by Palgrave MacMillan, HB £16.99 The trick to reading Jeremy Rifkin’s latest work is to treat it less like a book and more like a mystical text. That’s because Rifkin, a prolific writer and the management guru most likely to be found at an Occupy sit-in, has synthesised so many ideas within it that laboring over the contrad...| Arcfinity
It’s the end of the world as we know it - but no one. it seems, has told Al Gore. “Politics has futurism coiled within its rhetoric – the politician generally promises a better, brighter future, so long as you vote for him or her. It is rare that a politician will say, ‘Don’t bother to vote, it’s all doomed, just go home and wait for the end.’ Yet a politician can sometimes afford to be a qualified eschatologist, and such optimistic pessimism can even take them a long way – as...| Arcfinity
If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn’t that actually make life better? “The initial impetus for SO was an attempt to alleviate the unsustainable pressures exerted by an ageing population. Soon after the SO implementation, however, other major benefits emerged. By contrast, none of the potential problems predicted by critics of the scheme has materialised. There were very few cases of SO participants changing their mind. Although (or perhaps because) such cases received wide publ...| Arcfinity