Oh, America, what have you done? How has this happened?

Watched the Channel 4 documentary about Hope Not Hate’s undercover investigation: Undercover: Exposing the Far Right. Very good, compelling viewing, and important.

Just booked to see Fucked Up on Saturday. I saw them back in 2011. I haven’t paid that much attention since. But since they’re playing at Oslo, Hackney, just down the road, it would be rude not to go.

The local parakeets basically live in our garden now.

📚 Books 2024, 20: Julia by Sandra Newman

As I said about Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, a bigger post is coming.

📚 Books 2024, 19: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

I’m going to write a bigger post about all the Nineteen Eighty-Four -related things I’ve read, listened to, or attended recently, and I’ll link to it here when I do.

And here it is.

I love that today’s Xkcd (probably strictly yesterday’s) celebrates the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired powerstation in such a British way: do all the sums in metric, then convert at the last to inches.

Let my phone update to iOS 18 overnight, and this morning… it’s hard to see the difference.

There wasn’t even a message saying, ‘Your phone was updated…’

Currently reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚

So many editions, and none of them with quite the cover I have: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.

It must be 40, 45 years since I last read this and there are currently a lot of sequels and connected works I want to read, so I thought I’d go back to the source.

📚 Books 2024, 18: Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson

If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).

Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.

And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.

I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.

Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.