week 13 / 2025

“Saint WEEKNOTES don’tcha call me, coz I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company sto’…”

This will be a pretty brief weeknotes, for reasons soon to become apparent—though rather more positive reasons than previously.

Put simply, it’s been a seriously heavy week with regard to billable hours, and there’ll be more of them after this post goes live... because when there’s billable hours to be had, then you sit down and do the work. I’ve become pretty hardcore about protecting my weekends since leaving academia, but sometimes the time-is-money trade-off is impossible to ignore, and this is one of those times.

ticked off

• Twenty-two hours on PROJECT ADVANTAGE, including the five-hour slot scheduled for after these notes go live. (The project ends when the month ends, there’s stuff still to be done, and there’s hours outstanding on the contract—and so we work.)
• Thirteen hours on PROJECT PORTON. (Still plenty happening on this one, too; another deliverable brought in on time and to spec.)
• Six hours on PROJECT HORNIMAN. (I’m way behind where I should be on this one, really—but thankfully there’s some slack in the delivery date, and in April’s schedule. Back on this horse next week.)
• Four hours of admyn, or thereabouts.
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading, because that’s where the feedstock comes from.

kinmaking

Not much time for kinmaking this week, as is probably obvious, though I did have the chance to drop in on a little plague-themed workshop with the Jigsaw Foresight crew on Tuesday afternoon, which was both weird and surprisingly generative.

reading

Finished rereading Tom McCarthy’s C, which—to judge by the old train tickets left in it as bookmarks—I must last have read in 2013 or so, when I was just starting my PhD. It’s a curious novel, from a curious writer. McCarthy made his name in a rather unusual way, and has plotted a fairly idiosyncratic path ever since.

C in particular does a thing where it plays with science fictional tropes, but tropes of style rather than tropes of theme. So there’s no rockets and rayguns—though there is a thematic throughline of communications and cryptography and quantification, which is both reminiscent of and completely unlike the work of Neal Stephenson during his ascendant phase (before he started believing his own press). That reminiscence has a lot to do with the way McCarthy’s characters expound upon whatever it is that they’re currently fascinated by… a sort of infodumping, then, but somehow less explicatory than ecstatic?

Infodumpy sf tends to have an affect that leaves you fairly clear on what you’re supposed to have taken away from the tale, regardless of whether you actually took it away or not; there’s a schema to it, a program. By contrast, C doesn’t have that schematic feel at all—perhaps because it finishes fairly abruptly? (Or so it feels to me.) It's quite the opposite of schematic, in fact: I come away with the sense of having learned a bunch of stuff, but having acquired zero understanding of what (the author thinks) it all means in the greater scheme of things.

This may simply be a result of the sf reading protocols priming me to look for an authorial intentionality which just isn’t there in McCarthy, whose aesthetic is decidedly more postmodern-literary… but nonetheless the lack of intentionality itself feels intentional, if you see what I mean? Like a magician doing all the misdirection moves, but pointedly refusing to perform the final trick.

Strange and compelling. I loved it even more this time than the first.

a clipping

Here’s a piece at the NYRB by Howard French, a journalist specialising in Africa and China, taking a look back at Alvin Toffler’s books Future Shock and The Third Wave through the lens of their impact on the latter part of the world (where they were apparently received with even greater enthusiasm than they were in the West, despite there not being any official translations into Chinese).

It’s an interesting essay—though futures folk among the audience here will likely roll their eyes at this passage in which, after a brisk bit of genre snobbery, French makes the (forgivable) mistake of assuming all futures work is about prediction, before the (somewhat less forgivable) move of mocking Toffler for attempting to distance himself from the predictive wing of the field, and then finally making the inexplicable-in-the-context-of-the-previous-moves move of taking a lengthy look at “how well his predictions turned out!”

As a literary genre, futurism, like much of science fiction and self-help writing, has long struggled for respect. One reflection of the low esteem in which it stands is the scant serious effort invested in retrospectively holding up its predictions to scrutiny. Despite the title of Future Shock, Toffler, who was sensitive to criticism that he was an intellectual lightweight, rejected the label “futurologist.” He always insisted that he was more interested in describing the forces that drive change than in predicting the future. This makes the advent of the many sweeping changes in the international economy and in human society that he foresaw in the 1970s all the more astonishing.

(A note for journalists and others: one reason that the huckster style of futurism refuses to die is this weird combination-move of first generalising and mocking its predictive pretensions, before putting its more thoughtful practitioners on the prophetic pedestal. Please, stop it.)

Right, that’s it for this week—time to head back to the coalface.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 13 of 2025. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe. If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!