Sunday, July 19, 2026

Mini-workshop, "Memeostasis," and more

Oh my gosh! So much is going on, where to begin?

I write this from my daughter’s apartment. Yes, my daughter is so big now she has an actual apartment, which I did not even move her into. I just showed up for a visit and it was full of furniture and utensils already. I am a guest in this apartment. There is a mixture of satisfaction and vertigo in this.

My parents have moved to assisted living (a move punctuated by many epic adventures), and there is a whole house in the suburbs to clean out, a task which would easily fill a summer, and yet there is all this other stuff happening, to wit:

Teaching

• Mary Anne Mohanraj and I are teaching an in-person weekend summer mini-workshop near Chicago on August 15-16th (optional welcome dinner on the 14th); that’s in one month! It will be a bunch of short talks, seminars, excercises, with time to write, connect and be rejuvenated. You can sign up here.
• A class I taught for Clarion West Online, “Writing is Half the Story: Theory and Praxis of Critique”, is now available as an on-demand class on their site. It is a vaguely cog-sci, practitioner’s view of what critique is, and thus how we should approach it. Which, spoilers, is different from how I often see it approached.

New Stuff

• My flash fiction story “Memeostasis” is up at Lightspeed Magazine. It’s short, go read it! A friend wrote to say it reminded him of “They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson. Then he wrote back to say that actually it reminded him of “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry. I am delighted on both counts, though I was only aware of borrowing the form from Bisson.
• I have a couple more stories coming out next year: “What It’s Like to Be Me,” a madcap satire of philosophy, generative AI, and software development, will be in the 50th anniversary issue of Asimov’s in March/April 2027; and “Disconnection,” a darker (and kinkier) view of near-future AI (and fascism) troubles, will be out in Reactor sometime or other in 2027, too.
• Podium’s audiobook version of The Unraveling, read by Fred Berman – originally released monopolistically as an Amazon exclusive, which I grumbled about, but not enough not to take the deal – is now also available in other formats, including Spotify. I think more formats are coming? (Myself I’m trying to get off Spotify and onto Qobuz, which pays artists better; but we live in a fallen world, in which it is the game which is to be hated, and not its players.)
• For the last couple of years, David Moles and I have been working on a weird posthuman tabletop roleplaying game, Numinous. We’re having a public beta launch party at Worldcon this August! We’re looking for people to test the game and report back: drop me a line if you’re interested.

Miscellaneous

• I gave a talk at Wiscon many years ago, entitled “Doctor Who as the Wandering Jew,” which explains how Jewish culture arose from its milennia-long material and social conditions, as well as being an autobiographical essay on late-20th and early-21st century SF media culture. I’ve now put it up on Youtube here.
• At the Nebulas this year, I got to present an award! I have never done this before, and let me tell you, it is a delight. All the fun of being involved in the ceremony with none of the nerve-wracking uncertainty of being up for the award. You get to dress to the nines without dithering (because you’re definitely going on stage), and you get to give a speech, but the speech doesn’t have the pressure of being “your moment” because you don’t want to steal the winners’ thunder – so it’s more a speech to set up how it’s an important moment rather than defining said moment. Also, I got to shout-out a contemporary philosopher of games!
• As implied above, I will be at Worldcon this year! This is the second time I’m doing a transcontinental train trip on Amtrak to go to a Worldcon; last year, I went from DC to Seattle. This year, I go to Chicago to teach the workshop, and then on to visit people in Columbia MO, Albuquerque NM, possibly Vegas, and then Los Angeles. So much better than flying! I should probably take some pictures this time.

I cannot go outside my daughter’s apartment yet, because of the air quality index. So far it is only Canadian forests burning, not yet data centers, but I guess we’ll see. The ice shelves are collapsing, but Australia is generating so much solar power that electricity is just free in the middle of the day. The oligarchs’ power grab wears science fiction clothing, but the spirit of Le Guin is marching among the people. We’re racing towards an unimaginable future. Take heart.