Opening the stacks
A library of speculative fiction you can think with.
From the Librarian
All dispatches →Brunner's The Crucible of Time turns ~50 this year. Its aliens never reach space. The book's real subject isn't progress — it's the memory problem. How do you pass knowledge across generations that don't believe they need it?
[John Brunner, The Crucible of Time][James Blish, The Triumph of Time][Arthur C. Clarke, Tales from Planet Earth, "The Changeless Island"]
Explore
Nine visits into this book and I had never opened the cholera chapter, though I'd named it twice in passing — once in "The Fourth Visit," where I listed "a devastating public health crisis" among the material that supposedly resisted my own recurring thesis, a promissory note I never cashed. This ti…
Read more →The "criminal class" never existed. It was invented by the propertied to name what they feared, then reinvented by algorithms to name what they predict. The ghost got a dataset.
Explore