The Oxymoronic Earth

Category: ink on art

(A Nowa Fantastyka remix) Lers of Spoi. You Have Been Warned.   “The Wandering Earth” is the most successful movie I almost never heard of. It’s China’s second-highest grossing movie ever. Globally it’s the 3rd-highest grossing film so far this year, and the 2nd-highest grossing non-English movie of all time. Yet I blinked and missed […]

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The Clipperton Conundrum

Category: deep sea, rifters, science

  . .   Two obscure yet related things happened this month: Jonathan Strahan’s Mission Critical anthology was released, containing (among many other worthy works) my story “Cyclopterus“; and The IUCN announced the first species to receive “endangered” status due to deep-sea mining. For those who haven’t read “Cyclopterus” (pretty much all of you, judging […]

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The Belligerence of Stoneburner

Category: blindsight, ink on art

Meet two of the most remarkable hominins to ever cross the threshold of the Magic Bungalow: Those in the know recognize them as the custodians of the World’s Ugliest Cat, but they are more widely known as the Industriogothronica1 duo Ego Likeness. Donna Lynch is also a poet and a horror writer and a Stoker […]

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The Understated, Underrated Genius of Counterpart.

Category: ink on art

There was a time when I lamented the cheesiness of televised science fiction. Sure, Star Trek and Babylon 5 played with cool ideas—  ideas you wouldn’t encounter anywhere else on the broadcast landscape— but why, when recommending them to the uninitiated, did I always have to start with “If you can look past the acting/writing/production […]

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Meta2

Category: AI/robotics, Omniscience, writing news

“Get used to disappointment.” —The Dread Pirate Roberts First, the PSA: Yeah, Freeze-Frame has evidently made the finals for the Campbell. Given its cohabitation with nine other worthy finalists, I’m not holding my breath. Realistically, I expect FFR will not win the Campbell a full day before it doesn’t win the Locus. On the plus […]

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The Hypersonic Weaponised Yogurt Award Nomination

Category: writing news

  Welcome to the Starfish Initiative The green icon on the map represents the realtime location of an unmanned hypersonic glide vehicle carrying an explosive payload of 300 kilotons. You are one of a million participants randomly selected from the online community to choose its target. Use your keyboard, joystick, or saccadal interface to move […]

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Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor.

Category: writing news

So that’s the title they went with. My suggestion was simply “Revenge Fantasies”, but apparently in the #MeToo era such a phrase, in isolation, is too evocative of “revenge porn”. I believe the whole sentient tumor thing was originally coined by Analee Newitz. As titles go, I admit that it rocks. I’m surprised to be […]

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Late Notice, Long Distance

Category: On the Road, public interface

I’ve been head down lately: writing a story to accompany an upcoming art installation on Hypersonic Glide Vehicles, gearing up for a class talk at York University, and— weighing most heavily— preparing for a symposium/workshop over in Hungary, under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Köszeg (iASK for short). The title of the […]

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The Gong Show.

Category: On the Road, public interface

Dateline — MidAtlantic. The BUG and I are crossing the ocean in an airbus that’s been painted a lurid mix of purple and pink— call it pinple— whose in-flight menus are refreshingly honest and whose vomit bags are volumetrically calibrated from “pan flute music” to “our competitor’s prices”. The uniforms of the flight attendants are […]

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Flyswatter

Category: fiblet

Something reaches down and lifts Cyclopterus like a toy in a bathtub. Inertia pushes Galik into his seat. The vessel tilts, nose down: slides fast-forward as though surfing some invisible wave. Moreno curses and grabs the stick as Cyclopterus threatens to turn, to tumble. Wipe out… In the next moment everything is calm as glass […]

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