Roundup from e-flux Notes
Notes will be back with a new essay on September 4! Until then, enjoy this roundup from our archives on articles about the future, from transgender robots and paracosmic visions to the end of writing and Dickian sci-fi worlds.
Transgender Robotics: On Love by Isadora Neves Marques
Bubs is a robot that wants to be a woman. Not a human. A woman. She makes a living sweeping space debris from earth’s orbit, and, along with three other misfits—Captain Jang, Tae-ho, and Tiger Park—is envied by other space sweepers for her ruthlessness. Among the member of her gang, she is the stingiest and the one with the most money in savings. Bubs has a goal: she aims to transition.
Future Paracosms and Their Infrastructures by Agnieszka Polska
When I was a child, my mother told me to “think of something pleasant, think of a forest” while trying to fall asleep. So I did, and over the years the forest I imagined expanded into an intricate ecosystem, complete with human protagonists, fantastic species bonded by symbiotic relations, futuristic technologies, and the epic story of one character, a reflection of myself. Instead of being simply “pleasant,” from the beginning the fantasy was also dark, sometimes dystopian and eventually sexual. Later I learned that such delirious projections are called “paracosms” and are not uncommon.
From Writing to Prompting: AI as Zeitgeist-Machine by Boris Groys
The process of writing is unpleasant and tiresome. Personally, I hate it. The usual position of the body of a writer in front of the computer is unhealthy. It leads to scoliosis and is damaging to the eyes. Writing is a purely manual activity—pressing the letters on the keyboard one after another. One feels oneself in the position of an industrial worker in the nineteenth century. But why are writers still writing?
Facing the Future by Ted Chiang
In 1955, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the family of his friend, Michele Besso, who had recently died. Einstein had known Besso since they were both in college, and Besso was the only person Einstein thanked by name in his 1905 paper on special relativity. In his condolence letter, Einstein wrote, “Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically; he was referring to a discovery he had made when developing his theory of special relativity.
On Delirium in Philip K. Dick by David Lapoujade
SF thinks with worlds. Creating new worlds with different physical laws, different conditions for life, different life-forms, and different political organizations; creating parallel worlds and inventing passages between them; multiplying worlds—such is the essential occupation of SF. The war of the worlds, the best or worst of all worlds, and the ways the world comes to an end are its recurring themes.