A flight of satirised fancy inspired by a prompt from an AE Micro contest, this piece really came alive after I expanded it into a triptych full of hyperlinks in the side panels. Sometimes, indeed, a piece needs to ripen, like wine, whisky or (fill in your vice of choice).
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Blurb for "Gaudí, Cons & Spires".
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Weather is capricious, sometimes to the extreme. As a group of tadpoles gets wept away by torrential rains in Purnululu, they learn the hard way that the draught afterwards makes 'survival of the fittest' seem tame by comparison. . .
(WARNING: full of metaphors, subsurface layers and misguided attempts at literature...;-)
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Some things, like moving faster than the speed of light, creating energy out of nothing and—indeed—time travel should be impossible. Unless the cosmos conspires crazily and we just happen to be in that unimaginably impossible corner of the multiverse where one-in-a-kazillion chances are the order of the day. Add Agents Watt & Krikksen and even the sacred laws of physics creak under the pressure...
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If things turn out for the worst in a sixties America where McCarthy is president, then maybe the brain behind Ubik should become ubiquitous? Watt & Krikksen—psychedelic time agents sans pareil—are on the case...
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All these stories about people being absolutely flabbergasted when they meet aliens for the very first time are obsolete. The modern astronaut has the guide, and knows what to do. Guidelines for First Contact in Simplified Technical English: never leave home without them!
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In order to maintain an unbiased view, Alex shifts through the sexes like a neutrino oscillates from electron to tau to muon. She/he will need all his/her wits, imagination and perceptiveness as a visitor arrives with a message: cognition, time and reality itself may be nothing more than elaborate illusions. . .
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Underway towards 61 Cygni, astronaut Kobayashi encounters an anomalous object. Before he knows it, an alien craft abducts him and he's staying in a space station with a 'Hotel California' attitude: he can check out, but never leave. Through an unwavering attitude, lateral thinking and an immense reservoir of patience, Kobayashi tries to figure out what the hell is happening. . .
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Suppose Ray Kurzweil is right and—at some undefined point in the future—the technological singularity arrives. What will happen if, not only it arrives, but works as planned, and takes over the complete solar system?
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As Janet tries to make ends meet in in a warming world, her son Jason takes it a step further and develops a new bike whose solar sail will find unexpected applications. His uncle Yiska runs—among other things—a program that re-introduces extinct species. In their near future, things are slowly changing for the better, helped by an invisible hand that’s definitely not from the market.
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Some people prognosticate, some people satirise their prognostications with a reductio ad absurdum. So what if the nine principles in Joi Ito’s and Jeff Howe’s Whiplash are applicable on all levels and push civilisation to the next level? Would it look like the Über-Shanzhai in “Life in the Superfast Lane?”
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As surveillance becomes near-ubiquitous in the UK (and beyond) are there still ways to 'fashion a book of rectitude in an empire of lies'? As Philip K. Dick had it, 'will there be new responses by the spirit that we can't anticipate'?
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What can happen in rural Zambia when a volunteer doctor for Médecins Sans Frontières takes his red-haired girlfriend with him, complete with her physics PhD and some decidedly advanced knowledge from a bleeding edge research lab? Especially as she volunteers to become a teacher, and shows the local kids how to make a biological quantum computer? Mayhem, destruction, doomsday or . . . something wonderful?
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In what may be one of the most clichéd openings ever, Sean Collins awakes to find himself in a place that's halfway between Heaven and Earth. And indeed, a kind of Purgatory it is. In a world that’s going through irreversible changes—the inevitable paradigm shift—Sean (or what’s transferred from him) has to make the second choice: return to his earthly existence, or crash through a conceptual breakthrough into truly uncharted territories. A Leap of Faith, indeed...
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