I've seen a lot of computer crazes in my day, but this one is sheer Mardi Gras. It's not proper to get stern and judgmental when the people are costumed and cavorting in the streets.

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.

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.

Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of time. Life freezes in place.

Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of time. Life freezes in place.

Bruce Sterling wasn’t originally meant to be part of the discussion. It was March 13, 2010, in Austin, Texas, and a small group of designers were on stage at the South by Southwest interactive festival, talking about an emerging discipline they called “design fiction.”

What even is theory-fiction? In short, it is the intersection of theory and fiction, and also the “dissolution of the opposition itself” (Fisher 1999, p 156).

Whenever I see an article that starts with “The Rise of. . .” I think of dough. When it’s applied to African science fiction, I picture an endlessly rising (and falling) dough that will never become bread.

A Theory-Fiction Reading List:

I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran.

Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in your mind, hanging in space. Spin it around a bit; kick the tires. Now change one thing about that world.

I am interested in 'the hole' in its conceptual, metaphorical, and literal crossovers. Who has written about holes? In the ground? In theory? In myth and fiction? I'd be super keen to read theory that cites specific holes found in myth and fiction, or people who have written about sinkholes, boreholes, etc. from geological/geographic perspective, but also, as mentioned above, the hole in a more conceptual level is super interesting.

Holes as the absence of geographic materialities, loss, gaps, and collapse of meaning. Holes as potential sites of openings, creativity, and reconstruction of new or recovered meaning.

Any ideas or leads welcome!

Looking for literary/filmic examples of singularities, infinite pits, wormholes, whirlpools, bore holes, large spacetimes in tiny crevices.

But also... Peaks too high to navigate, infinite ascents, Sisyphean feats of endurance, energy spikes set to break reality, very tall towers.

It might seem strange that a mythogeographer would be very interested in an action-horror movie from 1982, panned at the time of its release and largely ignored by audiences.

From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to infection: where strigoi, revenants, zombi, and loup-garou are generally the result of targeted curses, post-Univ

Junot Díaz interviews science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany about what it means to be an aging sex radical and why he wrote the essay “Ash Wednesday.” Junot Díaz: Chip, “Ash Wednesday” is a wonderful essay.

An interview with the artist Moreshin Allahyari about her commission for The Photographers' Gallery's Media Wall - See Who Sees the Unknown, Ya'jooj Ma'jooj. Artwork © the artist, Video © The Photographers' Gallery, 2017Cast: The Photographers' GalleryTags: Moreshin Allahyari, Ya'jooj Ma'jooj and The Photographers' Gallery

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL - THE NOISE OF BEING Daniel Rourke - The Noise of Becoming: On Monsters, Men, and Every Thing in Between 26 February 2017 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands --- In this talk Daniel Rourke refigures the sci-fi horror monster The Thing from John Carpenter's 1982 film of the same name. The Thing is a creature of endless mimetic transformations, capable of becoming the grizzly faced men who fail to defeat it. The most enduring quality of The Thing is its ability to perform self-effacement and subsequent renewal at every moment, a quality we must embrace and mimic ourselves if we are to outmanoeuvre the monsters that harangue us. Daniel Rourke is a writer and artist based in London. In his work Daniel exploits speculative and science fiction in search of a radical ‘outside’ to the human(ities), including extensive research on the intersection between digital materiality, the arts, and posthumanism. In March 2015 artist & activist Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel released The 3D Additivist Manifesto – a call to push technologies beyond their breaking point, into the realm of the provocative, and the weird. sonicacts.com/2017/artists/daniel-rourkeCast: Sonic Acts

Science fiction, cyberpunk included, has always been a bit of a boys club. Think of the names that we most readily associate with the genre. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and the list goes on. Women have been part of the cyberpunk movement since the beginning, though.