Friday, 5 March 2021

The BSFA, PKD, and the columba livia domestica

Could I take a moment to point you in the direction of 'Through the Decades: Sixty Years of the BSFA', published by the eminently and affordably joinable British Science Fiction Association.

It does pretty much what it says on the tin, collecting excerpts from the Association's often amateurish and irregular (at least, in the early years) output.  A fascinating wade through the history of the future; I certainly enjoyed it all until the somewhat dry quasi-academic articles towards the back.

A personal highlight was a now 50-year-old ramble by Philip K Dick arguing that our dystopian future is all about governments learning everything about us and turning it back on ourselves.  Well, that future has been with us for some time now, and the truth is so much worse, that we’ve done it to ourselves, collecting, collating and sharing every detail of our lives on social media.

Hilariously, he makes a passing reference to pigeons being trained and used as quality control inspectors.  I assumed this was some fucked-up acid flashback but it really happened.  Honestly, you couldn't make it up.  Even if that's what I try to do on a daily basis:

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.


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