Near the corner of Corrientes and Talcahuano Juan kept his right eye on the live feed while the movements of his left steered the ICUTS drone. But his machine could only record the clandestine churning cogs of the machines that were producing history.
If you have not yet seen the Chilean martial arts/masked super-hero film "Mirage Man," queue it now!!
This feels grounded in the idea that there ever was a stable Earth-ness, even throughout the 4+ billion years before the old English origins of "Earth" first emerged. I'd recommend repeated viewings of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
#5 resembles the shockingly included ufos in Jia Zhangke's otherwise docurealism style film, Still Life. And I hear he's around the Shang filming for a piece on this expo!
They'd best beware the Young New Mexican Puppeteer--do I hear a Tom Jones soundtrack in the works?
I was surprised Weingrad left Harold Bloom's foray into lit production (The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy) out, especially as Bloom fits Weingrad's closing description of someone on an educational par with Tolkien and Lewis.
Could you lend any insight on how to take Gibbons's perspective: "Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic that will be" (247). On the one hand, I appreciate this shift in perspective that has no odor of nostalgia. But, on the other hand, the diction of property seems perilously similar to one of the fundamental notions that facilitated the Expansion/eco-devastation in the first place. Any thoughts?
Dear Mr. Bacigalupi,
Thank you for taking questions on your sophisticated and enjoyable novel!
I have two questions for you:
1) What is your take on the apparent genre shift in sf from cyberpunk into steampunk, AND how might you reflect on your novel and short stories fitting into a trajectory or trajectories of different machine figures that seem to determine the texts in which they appear? I’m more interested in how you think about types of machines in recent developments within sf and how you fit into these rather than, say, worrying about generic labels.
2) Would you talk a bit about the inspirations for the Grahamites as ecologists and their niche teachings?
A cinematic parallel: Why do built sets, as in Troy, look so fake in the era of rising cg?
L.A.: That's why Mike Davis wrote City of Quartz not City of York
Samuel Beckett's *Waiting for Gortot*
Zora Neale Hurston's *Their Eyes were Watching the Blob*
*Do Androids Dream of the Silence of the Electric Lambs*
Fingers xd that we'll have William Gibson's Zero History to read next year!!
I lived in Shanghai from 1996 to 2002. In the 90s, the state-run Xinhua bookstores were the primary source for English books, and they carried primarily the most canonical volumes published by Bantam Classics and Penguin. Then, one day I was bicycling around the oldest parts of the city and saw a piece of cardboard in the window of a tiny storefront on Shengze Road: on the sign was one word, books. Musty, funky, claustrophobia-inducing. Much of their stock came from American church donations. Somehow they siphoned off the most recent issues of Time and The Economist and sold them for a fraction of the luxury hotel shops. Over the years I found some real treasures there: Richard Brautigan novels, an early mass market of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and once a complete Standard Edition of Freud that was sadly so disfigured from water-rot it was worthless. That store—I don’t know if it actually had a name—was an impossible oasis for a bibliophile urban bicyclist looking for edgier fare to match the edgier world of Shanghai back when Pudong had a handful of towers unlike today with its Bladerunneresque "mediatronic," to quote Stephenson, monoliths. A friend still in the city told me 2 years ago the place is gone—not necessarily closed; perhaps relocated and awaiting another serendipitous cycling about town.
Hoping for The Matrix retold from the point of view and interests of Agent Smith or the Matrix. #books
@GreyHammer: Doctor? I don't recall Victor completing his degree program... #angelvsfrankenstein
Zizek refers to the MacGuffin--paraphrasing here: a pure nothing which is nonetheless efficient--the void which functions as the object-cause of desire
I once had a fascinating chat with a History professor in Shanghai on his theory that there are only ghosts in the countryside--a phenomenon he linked to the Cultural Revolution...
I feel happy when Amazon.com gets me but so let down when Netflix doesn't. I guess we're not yet to the level of cinema AIs that always get us.
The MDW in WG:
She put the helmut on, turned it on, and looked up, to where Alberto's giant cartoon rendition of the Mongolian Death Worm, its tail wound through the various windows of Bigend's pyramidal aerie like an eel through the skull of a cow, waved imperially, tall and scarlet, in the night.
You had me at green tea!! But I am still waiting for an sf novel with a commitment to being tea-infused narrative. A novel of tea-masters and science fiction--Cadigan's didn't quite get there...
