Selected

“What Is Space Opera in the 2020s?”, Los Angeles Review of Books ¶ “Are space settlements the reward we’ll receive after managing the climate emergency? Or are they the inevitable outcome of our already-evident failure to coexist with Earth’s biosphere?”

“Ensuring Minimal Computing Serves Maximal Connection,” Digital Humanities Quarterly ¶ “What becomes of minimal computing now that we have seen the vital importance of maximal connection during the covid-19 pandemic? Do arguments for minimalism still hold in a socially-distant, unevenly-connected world?”

The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction (University of Minnesota Press), Electronic Mediations series and Manifold Edition, 384pp, 146 b&w illustrations ¶ In 1905, a young Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg founded an electrical supply shop in New York. This inventor, writer, and publisher Hugo Gernsback would later become famous for launching the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. But while science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards were named in his honor, there has been surprisingly little understanding of how the genre began among a community of tinkerers all drawn to Gernsback’s vision of comprehending the future of media through making.

Reviews:

James Gleick, New York Review of Books ¶ Lisa Yaszek, Science Fiction Studies ¶ Jan Baetens, Leonardo ¶ Gerry Canavan, American Literary History ¶ Charles De Lint, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ¶ Sherryl Vint, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory ¶ Jason W. Ellis, Extrapolation ¶ John DeNardo, Kirkus Reviews ¶ Kristen Gallerneaux, The Henry Ford Magazine ¶ Gregory Reece, PopMatters ¶ Andy Sawyer, Foundation ¶ Daniela Côrtes Maduro, Berfrois / Electronic Book Review ¶ Angelo Paura, Motherboard Italy (Vice) ¶ Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural

“Silicon Valley’s Attempts to Self-Police are Anti-Democratic. They’re Also Not New,” The Washington Post ¶ “Technocracy, Inc. promoted a philosophy that required treating the public as passive users rather than active citizens, and so far, the solutions put forward by the tech industry have taken a similar approach.”

“On Method in the Humanities,” Configurations ¶ “. . . we tend to operate from an impoverished sense of the history of the humanities, and what side of that history we are on and draw on when it comes to micro versus macro approaches, individual versus collaborative research, analog versus computationally inflected projects.”