Link tags: speculative

What would have happened if we never fixed the ozone hole?

We may not live in the best of all possible worlds, but we have dodged some bullets:

In the annals of environmental history, humanity’s response to the ozone crisis stands out as a rare success story. During the 1970s and ‘80s, evidence started to mount that certain household chemicals used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans like hairspray were eating a giant hole in Earth’s ozone layer, which prevents harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching the surface. Facing the terrifying prospect of a future without any atmospheric sunscreen at all, in the late 1980s nations came together to sign the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty to phase out so-called ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons.

But if things hadn’t turned out that way—if the scientific evidence linking man-made chemicals to ozone depletion wasn’t strong enough, or if ozone deniers (yes, there were ozone deniers) successfully stymied the Montreal Protocol—the world might look very different.

Stay Curious “Sci-Fi” with Jeremy Keith and Steph Troeth – 16 Jun 2021

I’m excited to do this event with Steph! We’ll be talking about science fiction on the evening of Wednesday, June 16th.

Tickets are from just €10 so grab yours now!

Lena @ Things Of Interest

The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.

Future Scenarios Generator - Third Wave

A slot machine for speculation. Enter a topic and get a near-future scenario on that topic generated automatically.

Daily diary for April 24, 2021 – A Whole Lotta Nothing

A blog post from the future. I’m on board with the subgenre of speculative blogging.

Exploring the Frontiers of Visual Identity… | Speculative Identities

Brand identity in sci-fi films, like Alien, Total Recall, Robocop, and Back To The Future.

This makes for a nice companion site to Sci-fi Interfaces.

The Training Commission

Coming to your inbox soon:

The Training Commission is a speculative fiction email newsletter about the compromises and consequences of using technology to reckon with collective trauma. Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.

An Interview with Nick Harkaway: Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality - Los Angeles Review of Books

Nick Harkaway on technology in fiction:

Humans without tools are not magically pure; they’re just unvaccinated, cold, and wet.

SF is how we get to know ourselves, either who we are or who we might be. In terms of what is authentically human, SF has a claim to be vastly more honest and important than a literary fiction that refuses to admit the existence of the modern and goes in search of a kind of essential humanness which exists by itself, rather than in the intersection of people, economics, culture, and science which is where we all inevitably live. It’s like saying you can only really understand a flame if you get rid of the candle. Good luck with that.

And on Borges:

He was a genius, and he left this cryptic, brilliant body of work that’s poetic, incomplete, astonishing. It’s like a tasting menu in a restaurant where they let you smell things that go to other tables and never arrive at yours.

Malicious AI Report

Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.

Women Invent the Future – doteveryone

A collection of sci-fi short stories, featuring Becky Chambers and Madeline Ashby …and it’s free!

House of Lords - AI in the UK: ready, willing and able? - Artificial Intelligence Committee

Design fiction from the UK parliament. I mean, it’s not exactly a classic of speculative fiction, but it sure beats a white paper.

Futurists & realists – The Man in Blue

Cameron contrasts Syd Mead with Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mastery of materials is a valuable thing to have. It will help you build what’s needed now and forge ahead into the near future. But vision is also valuable – it helps inspire and drive teams, and lays out a longer term future that can alter the path of humanity. What I take from the futurists and the realists is that there’s a place for every person and every process; what you need to do is find your own place, get comfortable, and own it.

Souvenirs from the futures — GlobalFuturesLab

A collection of weird and wonderful design fiction.

This collection of “Souvenirs from the Future” envisions what the future looks like through the eyes of young and talented art, design and architecture students living in different parts of the world. Some are speculations on ideal tomorrows; others are projections and critiques on the present. Some reveal beautiful aesthetics, alternatives to the high tech; others bravely question critical issues around politics, religion or tradition.

Cooking with Ursula K. Le Guin

Recipes inspired by The Left Hand Of Darkness.

I mostly stuck to Le Guin’s world-building rules for Winter, which were “no large meat-animals … and no mammalian products, milk, butter or cheese; the only high-protein, high-carbohydrate foods are the various kinds of eggs, fish, nuts and Hainish grains.” I did, however, add some hot-climate items found in Manhattan’s Chinatown for their space-age looks and good flavors (dragonfruit, pomelo, galangal, chilis, and kaffir limes).

Serve with hot beer.

TASAT – There’s a Story about That

An initiative by David Brin and the Arthur C. Clarke Center For Human Imagination at UC San Diego. You are confronted with a what-if scenario, and your task is to recall any works of speculative fiction that have covered it.

Accessing more than a hundred years of science fiction thought experiments, TASAT taps into a passionate, global community of writers, scholars, librarians, and fans. We aim to curate a reading list applicable to problems and possibilities of tomorrow.

The Future Mundane — hellofosta

As a corollary to the idea of mundane sci-fi, Nick Foster proposes some rules for realistically mundane design fiction:

1. The Future Mundane is filled with background talent.
2. The Future Mundane is an accretive space.
3. The Future Mundane is a partly broken space.

When I encounter everyday design in science fiction cinema, I get a chill of excitement. From Korben’s cigarettes in the Fifth Element, the parole officer in Elysium, and countless examples in Blade Runner, these pieces of design help us get a much better hold on our future than any holographic interface ever could. The future we design should understand this. The characters in our future will not necessarily need to save the world at every turn—most of them will simply live in it, quietly enjoying each day.

Seat 14C

Here’s a fun premise for a collection of sci-fi short stories:

Flight 008 through a temporary wrinkle in the local region of space-time. What these passengers will soon find out as they descend into SFO is that the wrinkle has transported them 20 years in the future, and the year is now 2037.

Read the stories of the passengers from Flight 008, imagined by the world’s top science fiction storytellers, as they discover a future transformed by exponential technologies.

Authors include Bruce Sterling, Madeline Ashby, Paulo Bacigalupi, and Gregory Benford.

ANALEMMA TOWER - Clouds Architecture Office

A thoroughly impractical—but fun to imagine—alternative to a space elevator:

Analemma inverts the traditional diagram of an earth-based foundation, instead depending on a space-based supporting foundation from which the tower is suspended. This system is referred to as the Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS). By placing a large asteroid into orbit over earth, a high strength cable can be lowered towards the surface of earth from which a super tall tower can be suspended. Since this new tower typology is suspended in the air, it can be constructed anywhere in the world and transported to its final location.

The construction might sound like Clarke’s The Fountains Of Paradise, but I imagine life in the tower would be more like Ballard’s High Rise.

Megatelescope releases its first image: Physics Today: Vol 69, No 12

A lovely piece of design fiction imagining a project where asteroids are shaped and polished into just the right configuration to form part of an enormous solar-system wide optical telescope.

Once they are deployed in space, a celestial spiderweb of crisscrossed laser beams can push around clouds of those microscopic optical sensors to desired locations.

Today’s restaurant reviews ( 4 Dec., 2015, at Interconnected)

A wonderful sci-fi vignette from Matt.