( This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some…
This is about the gathering crisis in the UK, not any other crisis-hit nation. Here is a compendium of the firehose of dismay that's been blasting me in the…
Global viral pandemics, insane right-wing dictator-wannabes trying to set fire to the planet, and climate change aside, I'm officially declaring 2020 to be the…
Way back in 2000, when I published my first collection of short stories, "Toast, and other rusted futures", I wrote a slightly tongue-in-cheek foreword…
( This is the text of a keynote talk I just delivered at the IT Futures conference held by the University of Edinburgh Informatics centre today. NB: Some typos…
I live in an ancient city, in a medium-old apartment--one that is rapidly approaching its bicentennial. Like any building in continuous occupation for nearly…
So it finally happened: a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona . And, of course, the car was an Uber. (Why Uber? Well, Uber is a taxi…
Being a guy who writes science fiction, people expect me to be well-informed about the current state of the field—as if I'm a book reviewer who reads everything…
This is the text of my keynote speech at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017. (You can also watch it on YouTube, but it runs to…
( Apologies for blogging so infrequently this month. I'm currently up to my elbows in The Labyrinth Index , with a tight deadline to hit if the book's going to…
( Or: when fiction comes true, part 93. ) I'm used to "Halting State" moments, when something I invented in a work of near-future SF slides disturbingly close…
Yeah, totally boring academic title, but there's a point to it. Here in this online community, we tend to err on the side of rational analysis, and I'm going to…
We are all, like it or not, consumers — short of going off to live in a hut in the wilderness, it's hard to cut yourself off completely from using services or…