The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator a...
The future arrived here a couple of weeks ago and nobody noticed. Because that’s how the future always arrives. You don’t realize it’s here until you bump into it.
She outright murdered Clough with her eyes.
Science fiction is always about the time it’s written in. 1984 was always about 1948. Science fiction is social fiction. I
Prediction is the best circus act of all. But it is just an act. It’s a carny turn. Stop doing it.
My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me. . . .Grandpa isn't coming back? No, she said. Not ever again. . . . And I remember saying, hold everything right fucking there. Y...
Mister Sun wondered if he really believed it was true that the heart is just a pump.
Look at a Segway and tell me it’s not the world’s shittiest witch’s broomstick. We only wanted jetpacks because we couldn’t make magic carpets work.
I’d love to be able to tell you a story about the future, but I’d rather tell you a story that counts. I’d rather give you a sense of where you might come from, because you need to know where you’ve b...
I know nothing about you except that I want to move through the world with you for as long as you'll let me.
I have met people who insist that humans taste like veal. And one woman from Canada who will swear up and down that people, like most other things, taste a bit like chicken. But she was crazy. And als...
How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?
He was in blue jeans and a work shirt, which is another weird quirk of Rich Old Men. Just one of the guys here. Blue jeans and a work shirt, salt of the earth, working man like yourself. Like they're...
He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of the coffee machine was slurpin...
Because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully...
Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own idea about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be Mad Scientists.
Ballardian banality comes from not getting the future that we were promised, or getting it too late to make the promised difference.
We hold up iPhones and, if we’re relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it’s a...
Tradition:' one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.
There’s a workaround for encroaching phone stupidity. The first thing I did when I got to my place in Austin – an apartment rented for three days over the internet – was connect the thing to wifi. Jus...