Thoughts about dreams—fictional, speculative, factual, speculative fictional.
fish dreams come at sunrise
blowing in on westerlies
they’re caught by fisher folk
with hooks on their kites
strung together and laid out
on the beaches of yesterday
to dry and harden in the sun
This discussion of infinite time and its consequences came about because a character in the story Lighter than Claire suggested (not literally) that it might be worth writing something on the topic.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the vanitas, or vanity, art style carried the religious reminder that life is temporary—mostly everyone dies. Nevertheless, concepts of living forever, life after life, and life after death have been around for a long time, in many religions as well as in fiction. While some people are quite keen on one afterlife possibility or another, others, like Richard Dawkins,¹ would prefer to simply stay dead after they die. Continue reading
As well as entertaining us (sometimes), speculative fiction asks and answers ‘what if’ questions that can open up new possibilities and fire the imagination.
In this blog I’ve written up some of the non-fiction speculations behind my stories, and I was interested to see that a new publisher, Sci Phi Journal (Science Fiction and Philosophy) makes the connection explicit by adding “Food for Thought” sections after the stories and including essays that discuss philosophical aspects of spec fic.
Time travel is a spec fic standard that has never gone away, and in the sometimes real world, a lot of questions about the nature of time—physical, philosophical and neurological—still have no clear answer. Continue reading
Beaches refers to life created by the sea, ‘aggregated by aleatoric resonance.’ Although that doesn’t exist (as far as I know) there is a little scientific speculation behind it, with the emphasis on speculation. Continue reading