week 47 / 2024

Welcome back, my friends, to WEEKNOTES at Worldbuilding Agency.

The epic renovation saga is finally approaching its denouement! As of now, all the reconstructive wall- and floor-work is done, as is the tanking; the tiles are laid and grouted; the silicone sealant has been squeezed into all the places it legally has to be squeezed into. The plumber comes on Monday and Tuesday to install the hardware, then the electrician will do their bit on Wednesday, and then I will finally have my home back to normal! (Or at least that which passes for normal.)

The intensity of the construction activities (and the fetching of tiles and porcelain and other bits and bobs) means it's been a fairly disrupted week again, but I think I've held my own under trying circumstances. Let's see...

ticked off

• Eight hours on TEMPORAL. (The irony of this being a project abut alternative approaches to time and temporality is not at all lost on me at this point.)
• Five loooong hours in an online grant assessment panel. (A pretty epic stint for a dozen-strong Zoom call, but actually not at all unpleasant, barring the physical endurance aspects; interesting proposals, interesting colleagues. Wouldn't want to do them too often, mind you.)
• Fourteen hours of admyn, including some short meetings and some accounting. (Also including the setting-up of a BlueSky node to be used for POSSE-only purposes, and automating the piping of posts from here and elsewhere to BlueSky and Mastodon and LinkedIn—an investment of a few hours which I hope will save me many hours further down the line. The accounting stuff is a huge headache, much of which difficulty comes from handling the invoicing and payments for subscriptions to This Very Website, the income from which is too low to justify paying for either automation or for someone more experienced to do it for me. I'm a words person, not a numbers person, and EU-standard double-entry bookkeeping reminds of that fact in the most uncomfortable ways.)
• A couple of hours researching and one hour discussing a prospective commission for the new year. (This could be a fun little gig, if it lands; somewhat more toward the arty end of prototyping than my usual work, but very much in a direction I'm keen to travel.)
• One hour proofing that Vector column from earlier in the year. (Nice to see this finally heading off to print.)
• Ten hours of undirected writing and reading. (Not a hugely productive ten hours this week, given all the distractions, but hey—the thing with a creative practice is that you show up every day knowing full well that sometimes you'll draw nothing but blanks and duds, but knowing also that, just by showing up, you make sure you'll catch the good stuff when it's there to be caught.)

kinmaking

Another kin-maintaining week, this one, in the form of a long overdue chat with old friend and frequent collaborator Sjef van Gaalen.

Among the topics discussed was the prospect of us going back and writing up the process of making the 2041 jubilee issue of LU Magazine that we were involved with back in 2021, most other records of which have been lost to link-rot and pandemic-era academic slippage. You can grab a PDF version from my portfolio site, and I think there's probably still a video of the launch event (complete with live-theatrical performance!) floating around in the aether somewhere... but the thing never rally got documented very thoroughly, falling as it did in a weirdly interstitial space with regard to funding and circumstances.

It was a pretty epic undertaking, to run workshops with over eighty participants on a shoestring budget during a period where gathering in person was verboten—and we owe the smooth facilitation of that process pretty much entirely to Sjef. If you need someone to design and implement creative futures workshops, online or otherwise, he should be one of the first people you ask.

reading

I thought I'd read it years ago, and it's quite likely I did, but I've been finding Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle so fresh that it feels totally new to me. One of the foundational alternate history novels (of the "Hitler won" variant), it bears up well under not only the burdens of its time of production, but also under Dick's prose chops, which were always pretty basic. But we read Dick more for the astonishing (and somewhat tragic) reach of his intensely paranoid imagination... and, increasingly, I read him as a sort of megatext that lurks within (and leaks productively out of) the greater megatext of the sf genre as a whole, while still shaping it through sheer gravitational mass.

Dick is proof that you don't need to be a high-falutin' stylist to do some supremely deft worldbuilding: the alternate history of this novel's world is never spelled out or infodumped, but you quickly get a sense of where things took a turn and how it all worked out. To include in that fictional world the existence of an alternative history novel whose own "alternate history" is basically that of our own world is the sort of mind-warping move that made Dick such an important part of science fiction's development. You can also see early mentions of the notions that would come to obsess (and, arguably, break) him: gnostic epistemologies, and the desperate search for the godhead in what Dick himself referred to as "the trash stratum" of modern culture.

(The notion of the trash stratum is an important reference and touchstone for Phil and JF of the Weird Studies podcast, which is literally the only podcast I listen to with any loyalty or regularity. I commend it to you; you could start anywhere, but the first episode on Dick and the trash stratum is this early one from 2018.)

a clipping

I've a couple of good clippings in this week's basket, but I'm gonna save a few against the possibility of fallow weeks in times to come. Given we're already talking about PKD, a deep dive on a classic sf trope seems like an apposite choice—and if you want a dive of that sort, they rarely come much deeper than the immersions of Adam Roberts.

A prolific novelist, critic and historian of the genre, as well as holder of an academic position mostly unrelated to it, Roberts has a synoptic (if not necessarily encyclopedic) perspective—which means that this exploration of the connections between the sfnal figures of the robot, the slave and the orphan will take you places you maybe didn't expect to be taken.

So many of our stories and folk-tales concern the magic orphan, the Moses or Superman or Harry Potter figure, the special child whose orphaning is only the prelude to a story of heroism, rise and greatness — that it’s easy to forget the brute fact: that the fate of children orphaned was, for thousands of years, servitude, so much so that ‘orphan’ and ‘slave’, and now ‘robot’, are all, fundamentally, versions of this same word.

Right then, that's your lot. Keep 'em peeled for a new essay in the middle of next week! In the meantime, thanks for reading.

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 47 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment. You'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content™, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources, but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

(If you are already subscribed, please send to a friend who you think might also like it!)

Have a good weekend.