Apr 29
After Philip K. Dick got his first glimpse of Bladerunner (based on his “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) he wrote this letter to the production company: October 11, 1981 Mr. Jeff Walker, The Ladd Company, 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, Calif. 91522. Dear Jeff, I happened to see the Channel 7 TV program “Hooray For …
Apr 27
I have a couple pieces of news regarding Technicolor Ultra Mall. The first is that my publisher has made the ebook version available through the Amazon Lending Library. So, if you’re an Amazon Prime Member, you can borrow it for zero dollars. If you’re old fashioned like me, it looks like the Canadian Amazon has …
Apr 27
Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships is an interesting article. If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with *each other* in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on …
Apr 23
This 1949 letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell is from Letters of Note. While these two authors shared a dystopic view, they disagreed on how it would be realized. Not to put too fine a point on it, Huxley feared the carrot while Orwell feared the stick. Wrightwood. Cal. 21 October, 1949 Dear …
Apr 21
For Earth Day, the Toronto Star asked 15 science fiction writers, including me, how we’d tackle climate change. To save some space, my answer was edited down. Here’s my full reply: The environment is something I watch on TV. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough, it’s a pristine world free of human interference. But it’s also …
Apr 09
Popular stand-up philosopher, Slavoj Žižek has an interesting little essay on Corporate Rule of Cyberspace. My favourite part: There are two tell-tale words here: abstraction and control. In order to manage a cloud, there needs to be a monitoring system which controls its functioning, a system which is by definition hidden from the end-user. The paradox is thus …
Mar 30
This is an interview that occurred in late January and will be hitting 12 television stations and 80 radio markets in about a week via TVCOGECO. It’s for Brent Holland’s Night Fright Show. Ryan Oakley – Technicolor Ultra-Mall via Skype from Toronto Canada. What if in the future Toronto had been turned into a huge indoor mall? …
Mar 10
If you’re online, you’ve probably heard about this Kony character and the campaign by Invisible Children to stop him. Their campaign is obnoxious. At best, it’s an ineffective and dangerous product of white privilege. At worst, its little more than a cynical profit grab that panders to racism. Here’s a little known fact about Africa: It doesn’t need …
Mar 02
This gun, created by Japanese researchers, is capable of stopping speech at a range of 30 metres (100ft). I’m sure we could all think of a use for it. The dystopian, silence the protesters, angle jumps right out at ya. But I would remind people that the police already have used bullets, batons, tear gas and tazers. …
Feb 28
In August, a blogger and book critic, acrackedmoon, reviewed an interview by speculative fiction writer R. Scott Bakker. She did so from a feminist angle and, from this perspective, found the fellow and his politics deficient. Six months later, the science fiction community has caught a case of the hysterics. For a chronology, I refer …
