If science fiction’s not dead, it’s not quite the same now we’ve bombed the moon. After all, we’ve done space travel and beaten communism. We got to the stars, and went past plopping pulp heroes on Mars when we crashed robots into it. We worried about plugging ourselves into each other before the internet; feared fluid identities before AOL chat rooms, and we’re not worried about black holes now we’ve made a big machine to create little ones. Possibly we got bored of science fiction when reality caught up – and now, given to romance and nostalgia, we’ve got steampunk and a million remakes.
But for all the debate about what SF is and isn’t, the best stuff is still based around big ideas. A big idea; a mirror to our present fears, advances, social structures, institutions and other big words.
With Twitter, and all the web stuff that’s growing with and around it, I reckon there’s a lot for new genre fiction writers looking for new, big, original ideas in science fiction. And that’s because I think Twitter is an excellent parallel for fictional technology – the fictional technology around which the very best SF writers build their worlds.
A thousand tech journalists have already put this decade in a time-capsule and marked it mobile. Everything’s moved to a screen, gone flatter, gone smaller. Your phone’s a laptop, your laptop’s a telly, your telly’s a cinema. Your local cinema is closed.
Suit fitting
Look, me and suits go like penis and blenders. It seems foolish and feels worse.
Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.
Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know they’re in the club. They’re the bonus you wear – a massive cotton-rich condom, designed to sheath six feet of dick. And like the rank banana jonnies you bought that time, lobbing sweaty quids in the machine and praying nobody came in the bogs behind you, they never fit right.
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