I haven’t been posting “South Tech Today” and “News from the Future” for a while because that’s now called “the front page of the newspaper.” However, this article in the Washington Post is (a) too absurd for even me to think of it while writing South, and (b) too perfect…
Hairy Raising: Cleverman
Another entanglement with the Criminal Element led me to discover Cleverman, a limited-run series on the Sundance Channel: We Homo sapiens have gotten pretty used to being the only humanoid species on Earth. So, what would happen if we somehow ran across a cousin species—perhaps a somewhat better design? What…
The Upside to South’s World
If you’ve followed my series of posts about the dystopian version of 2032 America in my work-in-progress South, you may be wondering if anything good has come of the state of things. Someone in my critique group asked what the South equivalent would be to Italian trains (supposedly) running on…
Getting Around in 2032
Flying cars? Teleportation? Bullet trains? Not even. In the version of 2032 envisioned by South, governments don’t have money to spend on real police or schools, far less this kind of stuff. The transportation picture then looks much as it does now, with certain big absences. Trains Amtrak, long…
Doctor’s Appointment, 2032 (Part 2)
In Part 1, I went over the current state-of-play in American healthcare finance and reviewed the Republican proposals for changing the system. Assuming this agenda takes hold (the basis for the future I planned for South), we end up with a picture that unfortunately is a more extreme version of…
Doctor’s Appointment, 2032 (Part 1)
[10/7/13 update: not unexpectedly, the Mitt Romney for President website has been taken down, so you won’t be able to follow the links to that site provided below. There are plenty of other links that still work, though.] No matter what happens in the future, one thing will remain constant:…
Welcome Back to Manzanar
In South’s version of 2032, our hero Luis helps American Muslims go south across the border into the relative safety of civil war-wracked Mexico to escape from the detention camps that have swallowed 430,000 of their co-religionists. How did this happen? How could it happen? It has before. Unless you’ve…
2032 Spring Fashion Preview (Part 2)
In the last installment, I talked about some of the influences on fashion design in South’s version of 2032. Now I’ll look at the clothes themselves. In general, I intend to avoid the usual future-styles tropes: jumpsuits (hot and impractical for everyday wear), metallic fabrics, unisex smocks, government-issued uniforms, and…
2032 Spring Fashion Preview (Part 1)
Enough with the heavy stuff about surveillance and putting the Fourth Amendment through the shredder. Now I’m going to try something truly foolish: figure out what people will be wearing in May 2032 in the Southern California of South. This is foolish because it’s hard enough to predict what will…
Hacking Your Brain
Apropos of my four-part series on surveillance in 2032 America comes this, from Gizmag.com: Using an off-the-shelf Emotiv BCI costing only a few hundred dollars, the team has shown that it’s possible to “hack” a human brain and pull things like bank details straight out of your skull. For more…