So the last few days have been both hectic and enlightening, as well as closing a kind of thematic circle about the fuckupedness of the Human Race. It started with Friday night’s appearance of Cory Doctorow and China Miéville on the stage of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, where they were interviewed by Mark Askwith; [...]
A brief, totally context-free excerpt from “Hive Minds and Mind Hives”, the talk I’ll be presenting this Sunday at the SpecFic Colloquium. I’m told that as of several days ago only four tickets remained unsold, so anyone who hasn’t already signed up is probably SOL: Mirror neurons think outside the skull by definition. They’re a [...]
I haven’t been opinionating much these days because I’ve been opinionating too much: on the malleability of public opinion (for Nowa Fantastyka), on whether science fiction should be a happy place (for the CBC), on the use of science fiction as a Trojan horse for interdisciplinary communication between the sciences (for the University of Bergen). [...]
Turns out I have too much to do, and too many images to share; so I’m going to stretch what was originally intended to be a two-parter into a trilogy. Call it the Jackson Maneuver. There were lectures in Bergen. There was a con in Uppsala. But in between, there was a flight across the [...]
So, Phase 1 complete. The talks seemed to go over pretty well (and ten minutes afterwards, in deepest Norway, Caitlin was talking in Spanish to a Peruvian grad student about his own writing, because that is just the kind of thing the BUG does). We had beers with an author of a recent paper in [...]
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