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The proof is in the pudding. |
It seems to be the received wisdom that books angled at the younger set are simply not quite the same thing as books aimed at adults: not quite as challenging to write, not quite as challenging to read. And it is my boring yet constant duty to explain that books for younger readers are some of the most challenging and well-written material out there.
-Maureen Johnson, The Guardian, February 27, 2012 Read more
In my hard-hitting expose of simulated humans passing themselves off as real (“Russell Brand Does Not Exist,” February 24, 2011, http://weird-proof.org/2011/02/24/russell-brand-does-not-exist/) I named Katy Perry as one of the most prominent of possible simulacra. Now some additional evidence has emerged that she is indeed not a person of flesh and blood, born in the natural way, but an eerie eidolon created of bytes and algorithms: Read more
On the roof of a skyscraper that floated like an island among the dazzling multihued lights of Manhattan, the superhero known as the Barber patiently explained yet again why he wasn’t just a regular barber. “I’m a superhero, not just a barber. They call me the Barber because I can do everything a barber can,” he said. “I can cut and style hair, shave faces, I wear a white lab coat and keep my combs in a tall glass jar filled with faintly blue liquid.” Read more
The coffee-house looks like a photograph,
Pre-digital, a faded more-than-real.
Espresso and two cigarettes: a meal.*
Reflected in the window, I’m a half-
Step out of synch with moving in the flesh.
Barista croaks “two lattes”, bobs his head,
His long beak hazed with steam, his eyes dark red.
The tip jar fills with cogs as well as cash.
She always comes at seven, orders chai,
And chats with him in hisses and in clicks,
A ratchet laugh and engine-cooling ticks.
The regulars all smile when she comes by,
Her skin dark bronze, her pockets full of tools.
He pours a steaming cup of tiny jewels.
* A joke about the long-vanished San Diego coffeehouse Java, whose menu offered a “Bohemian Breakfast” of black coffee and two unfiltered cigarettes.
(Writing exercise January 24, 2012: something with a mechanical bird in it, in honor of Shweta Narayan.)
The leaves of the tree wouldn’t have moved if they hadn’t been programmed to, but the light breeze caught them, enameled brass so thin they barely weighed more than a real leaf, and they rustled, glass-like against each other. Nearby the river rushed in whispering, rasping gouts, tiny quartz beads thrust into cataracts by jeweled impellers in the perfectly crafted riverbed. The rich azure sky above was painted, the twigs on the ground, pounded into shape by minute hammers. Each blade of dyed vellum grass held a different small poem, the script like nibbles from indifferent locusts. Is not knowledge a subtraction, a bite, a lacuna in the great blankness of possibility? Read more
Jorge sat down at the breakfast table. He was feeling good; he had slept through the whole night, and woken to gentle rays of morning sun curling their fingers around the window curtains. A bird sang in the distance, and even though it had been programmed to sing this song, he found the rising ditty cheery.
Lara was already up. Normally Jorge was up first, in the dank hour before dawn, to make coffee. But Lara set a large mug in front of him, brimming with deep brown liquid, and he closed his eyes and breathed in the burnt caramel aroma.
He felt her hand on his, and opened his eyes to see her, sitting next to him. He reached up and brushed a lock of black hair from out of her eyes, and she smiled. For a moment they just sat there, and he knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking: maybe we could spend the whole day not talking. Just be together.
But then, inevitably, the Watch on his wrist buzzed, like a pompous, angry beetle. Read more
The 1977 film Capricorn One posits a flight to Mars being faked on a film set. What Dr. Robert Pritchard’s book presupposes is, what if it were a hoax? What if this movie was, in fact, never filmed, and the true hoax was not the flight to Mars but that someone hoaxed a movie about a fake flight to Mars? And then, later, it came out that it had only been a hoax that someone had hoaxed the Mars flight hoax, and in fact the movie about the hoaxed Mars flight really was made, except that it was called something else—Damnation Alley perhaps?
The Scene: An isolated manor house on the windswept Yorkshire moors, 1920’s.
A: Don’t you realize, Margo, that this sarcophagus is the very one stolen
from the British Museum on the same night that the dastardly master
criminal Rene Dastard escaped from Reading Gaol?
B: But Lamont, surely you don’t suspect…
A: But I do, Margo. If the riddle of the Brass Head has led us here,
that means… Read more
This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true.
This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases . . . is an old-fashioned idea.
Garbed in a white polar bear fur parka, with his trusty harpoon Innuvalieut in his hand, the Icicle gazed across the vertiginous topography of Manhattan with an icy gaze from the igloo on the roof of the Hudson’s Bay Company Building. Somewhere in that city the evil mastermind known only as The Viking was preparing to melt all the polar ice caps via a fiendish plan involving burning hydrocarbons for several centuries, gradually increasing the earth’s temperature. Read more