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It's another installment of Entropist, a sci-fi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. The British branch of Penguin Books recently premiered a new website called - a bit lamely - We Tell Stories. The basic idea is that six authors will tell six stories over a period of six weeks. More interesting, however, is the fact that story #1, "The 21 Steps" by Charles Cumming, was told using Google Maps. So combine this same strategy with today's urban sci-fi, add a few more cities - and you've got a way to map science fiction across the planet. Could there someday be a Google Maps of Sci-Fi? More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. The message today seems to be: Become a celebrity, make millions of dollars - and use your fortune to buy alcohol. Get addicted to diet pills. Get your teeth capped. When was the last time the rich got addicted to something interesting? Something that actually made heads turn, made people think what the f-? Why not sink millions of dollars - your entire net worth! - into something truly grandiose? Why not blow your whole bank account building a series of new, artificial show caves beneath the surface of the earth? Why not get addicted to excavation? When it was reported last summer that London's ultra-rich had begun building downward, into the earth's surface, we witnessed what was perhaps the beginning of the world's most interesting subterranean property boom. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. In his 1936 short story "The Shadow Out of Time," classic weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft describes a man who takes "long visits to remote and desolate places." These places include the "vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia - black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered," and the "unknown deserts of Arabia," wherever those may be. But he visits them looking for evidence of a long-lost religious cult - a cult which, like "the horror" it once worshiped, had something to do with grotesque gods from "out of time," ancient germ lines that preceded the origins of human biology, astrophysical space, and the subterranean Earth. And, should all of that raise your eyebrows, let me add that it's actually a good story. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. If we can hack Wiis and iPods and old Segas, make garage door openers into mobile phones and cause elevators to run backwards — or turn upside-down, or do whatever it is that elevator hacks are supposed to do — then could we also hack the surface of the earth? Could we hack geology? Could we use plate tectonics to re-direct whole island chains, color rocks, print cities out of magma, and build mountains where mountains have no right to be? Here are the Entropist's top five ways to change the surface of the earth. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. You stumble on a cave in the mountains of Slovenia. Rumor has it this place inspired Dante's descriptions of Hell in his Divine Comedy. Called the Postojna Jama, it's a real cave. Let's say, then, that you join a group of people milling about at the cave's entrance before you all descend into the deep. At a point that clearly isn't the bottom, you're told to turn around. But why stop? you think, looking ahead into the darkness. Is there something down here we shouldn't see? In an utterly cheesy, but nonetheless enjoyable - even impossible to stop reading - novel called The Descent, author Jeff Long presents us with a very similar premise. It involves nuns and the U.S. military and Himalayan mountaineers and a weird parallel branch of the human species, some rogue sub-race that went literally underground so many tens of thousands of years ago - and is only now coming back into the light. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. What would it be like to make horror films for the Red States? Maybe we've seen too many mutants warped by environmental damage and dioxin exposure, enough of government conspiracy flicks featuring Dick Cheney stand-ins and bad plots. Maybe it's time to make a horror film even the Red States can appreciate. Maybe it's time to unleash a Gigantic Hillary Clinton upon the streets of Kansas City. Fear so easily becomes politicized. Nightmares are the realm of unexamined scapegoats. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, editor of BLDG BLOG. Tucked away in a museum at the University of Toronto is a collection of small devices known as the Museum of Psychological Instruments. These contraptions were assembled and put to use during "an extraordinary period in the history of philosophy and psychology, when scientists started measuring, describing and investigating the contents of our sensations and thoughts." The mechanisms also look like alien probes. More »
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In Patrick Süskind's 1985 novel Perfume, a psychotic perfumer goes to murderous lengths to create the ultimate scent. He kills a young woman to incorporate her natural smell into his latest cologne - and he is himself later ripped apart by people driven into a state of bloodlust by the power of his creations. But the outer limits of personal beauty may no longer require us to kill. Indeed, it's now possible to grow human flesh specifically for the cosmetics industry - bypassing murder with a trip to the specialty science lab. More »
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While all the attention given to human cloning has focused almost solely on questions of morality and bioethics - or on religion and the nature of government power - little energy has gone into questioning the literary impact a human clone might someday have. More »
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