Octavia Butler was an author of moving and prophetic science fiction novels. She wrote an essay in 2000 for Essence Magazine that teaches us the capacity we have to understand the future, as well as our limitations.

To my own shame, I have become a jaded reader in recent years. By this I mean that my enthusiasm and curiosity, my drive to experience new worlds, have all been damaged by a persistent disjunct between reality and the speculative fiction I most enjoy.

 THE BAD NEWS is waiting for us on the first page of the first chapter of Octavia E. Butler’s 1998 science fiction novel Parable of the Talents.

M John Harrison, 77, is the author of seven story collections and 12 novels, including Nova Swing, which won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction in 2007, and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, winner of the Goldsmiths prize in 2020.

Not only does Ullman tell us what it was like to be an engineer during the dot-com bubble, but she does it in prose that many professional writers envy.

I won’t watch House of the Dragon, despite its high ratings. The HBO show is a prequel to Game of Thrones, and that series ended so badly I don’t want anything more to do with that fictional world. But maybe A.I. could change my mind?

I won’t watch House of the Dragon, despite its high ratings. The HBO show is a prequel to Game of Thrones, and that series ended so badly I don’t want anything more to do with that fictional world. But maybe A.I. could change my mind?

Knowing that an author who wrote unsparingly about humanity’s capacity for violence and oppression dwelled amid such picturesque Pacific Northwest ordinariness is comforting. This quiet, unremarkable place would suit a diligent recluse, which Butler reportedly was. Her stories, whether set on alien planets or fictionalized Earths, rarely depicted such nurturing environments.

I first read about Lord Dunsany - I am happy to report his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - in a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction.

I first read about Lord Dunsany - I am happy to report his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - in a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction.

The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment overwhelmingly considers this prospect something that might happen in the far future, if at all.

The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment overwhelmingly considers this prospect something that might happen in the far future, if at all.

IN THE FIRST MONTHS OF QUARANTINE, my apartment became my personal ecosystem. The idiosyncrasies of daily life in isolation—the peculiar sleep hours, the midnight meals on the fire escape, the evening Scrabble ritual—felt entirely specific.

A text written for IOCOSE‘s exhibition “All of Your Base” held at Aksioma Project Space in Ljubljana, 1 December 2021–14 January 2022.

Published as a PostScriptUM PDF and print-on-demand publication.

► WHY I WANT TO FUCK ELON MUSK ► eBROCHURE (PDF)► PRINT ON DEMAND [coming soon]► LIST ON ISSUU

In their space race the gurus of the NewSpace movement are expanding an imaginary that hybridizes individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, counterculture and utopianism. “Why I Want to Fuck Elon Musk” plays with these cultural references, taking inspiration from the most emblematic statements spoken or tweeted by Elon Musk in recent years. Daniel Rourke, a London-based writer, artist and academic, has resorted to working with the OpenAI Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) language model to imagine and narrate chronicles from a near future in which blockchains have materialized and the deepfakes of Bezos and Musk have colonized Mars. The fictional universe thus created by human and non-human imagination builds a literary counterpart to IOCOSE’s latest works – the video animations Pointing at a New Planet (2020) and Free from History (2021) – presented on the occasion of the “All of Your Base” exhibition at Aksioma | Project Space in Ljubljana.

Download PDF (eBROCHURE) View on Aksioma website

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA. Known in her early years as “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet.

Octavia Estelle Butler was inspired to write science fiction after watching a schlocky B-movie, Devil Girl from Mars. She was twelve years old and thought: “Geez, I can write a better story than that.” Her mother did domestic work, an experience that would shape Butler’s writing.

Writing for academic publication is highly stylised and formalised. In this post Rob Kitchin describes how writing fiction has shaped his own academic praxis and can provide scholars with an expanded range of conceptual tools for communicating their research.

Science fiction tells us that a change in a past event, caused by the intervention of a time traveler, will open up a parallel timeline that leads to an alternate present. The example that comes to mind, for some reason, is Back to the Future, Part II.

Since his death in 2006, the work of Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem has slowly slid from view.

Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance.