Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

“That’s all right for you literary types,” he says to Emily. “Most writing has been done in a lockdown environment since time immemorial, but aren’t we supposed to follow the science, according to the great Dr. Fauci? What about lab time, for God’s sake? Bio labs? Chemistry and physics labs? What about them? Labs are science!”

“And bonus! Trump’s gone.”
Leaving behind a country at war with itself, Holly thinks. And who’s to say he won’t reappear in 2024? She thinks of Arnie’s promise from The Terminator: “I’ll be back.”

Lots of professors are loco, he’s been in enough schools on the writer-in-residence circuit to know that— but the Harrises take it to a whole other level.

Still, the idea of a thousands-year journey that depends on scores of generations of uninterrupted human procreation inside a ship transiting the vastness of space might not be the most reliable way to settle distant star systems.

“I think Abrahamson originally thought that he’d use me as an executive assistant. It’s basically a bureaucratic job that I was terrible at.” For instance, “I was sitting in a chair right behind him, and he had some people in the room. He then turned to me and asked, ‘What’s the colonel’s first name?’ And I said, ‘Colonel.’”

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said during a 2010 Discovery documentary. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.”

...in the context of growing efforts to forge a kind of “digital twin of the world,” or a virtual representation used to simulate a barrage of scenarios to assess real-world situations and their prospective outcomes. Everything from global trade and climatic patterns to holiday shopping habits and enemy troop positions was on offer.

The personal computing age had begun, with the Kenbak-1 (a machine equipped with 256 bytes of memory and a single circuit board) hitting the market just three years later in 1971. Three years after that, it was the Altair 8800, which lacked a keyboard but nonetheless graced the cover of a 1975 edition of Popular Electronics...

Advanced data processing that served as cognitive support, while bridging gaps like language and cultural barriers, might then be just the beginning.
It could even help with dating, Song explained with a chuckle.
“A lot of engineers don’t know how to talk with other people,” he said, “especially cute girls.”

Over the years, Wuhan had emerged as both a major industrial center and a space research hub. It was an identity that somehow persisted even after the city gained global attention as the epicenter of the first known cases of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

The Artemis Accords had, in effect, been inspired by Star Trek’s Khitomer Accords, a reconciliation between the federation and Klingons.

Go to the wild places.
Travel to where only pinpricks of starlight interrupt the blackness of night, where nature’s raw struggle is more evident. Then look up, as our ancestors did, and tell stories.

Could it be that Mary wrote Frankenstein as a way of facing her pain and fears? That she produced something so great and beyond herself from the grief she suffered? If this is true, then not only did Mary Shelley have her own “clay lady” (Frankenstein’s monster), but an entire genre of literature (science fiction) was launched by the Breaking.

Where Frida wants me to see her suffering and anguish, I also see a woman who has become more because of that suffering and anguish. I don’t see a stone column for a spine; I see a column of steel. The cracks in it make her more flexible. I don’t see nails; I see sensors that detect the world around her, bringing her more information than any purely organic human being. I see a cyborg.

I felt like a rusted robot. A machine with no waterproofing caught out in the rain, with no shelter nearby. No options. Vulnerable. I was now malfunctioning. I needed a hard reset.

We ran down the suburban Chicago sidewalks of 1982, like those relatives before us who happily ran down the dirt roads of Isiekenesi and Arondizuogu in Nigeria on their way to the market or school or wherever they were rushing to, like those of my stolen relatives who ran for their lives through the forests and swamps of the United States, and so the cycle continues.

What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become strengths greater than what we had when we were “normal” or unbroken. In much of science fiction, when something breaks, something greater often emerges from the cracks.

When you wrote and edited and polished something so many times, it became branded into your brain. It took only a few words to bring it all back, despite the fact that she hadn’t reread the novel in years, since it was published. Yet she still could not summon book two.

“Meet Mohammed,” her auntie said. “Our family driver. He’s read your book many times.”
“After the Koran, it is my favorite,” he said.

“Afrrreeeeekaaaaaaaaaaah!” Zelu said, imitating her bad accent. “Deh mothahland, where eet all began!”

...talking about Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They were making fun of the sex, the twining of flowers in Lady Chatterley’s pubic hair and so on, and Pat said, louder than he meant to, For sure, that was scarier than anything in Weird Tales!

H. P. Lovecraft was a homosexual. There were no female characters in his stories—or almost none! His creatures had long, slimy tentacles! Also, Lovecraft frequently used the words nameless and unspeakable: What was that, if not a sly reference to the love that dared not speak its name?

When Lovecraft moved to the city, he and Long became inseparable; they ate together, argued politics, shopped for books, took long walks at night—and all the while, the Erotonomicon revealed, Lovecraft longed for Long.

But this isn’t the story of our marriage. It’s not the story of how quickly Charlie moved in with me and stood Han Solo and Darth Vader on my bookshelf, in front of D. W. Winnicott and George Eliot.

...she also didn’t want to educate people about her exos, or debate whether she was an American, a “diasporic,” an Africanfuturist, or an African writer.

There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations, it is neocapitalism by nature. It invents its eastern face and western face, and reshapes them both — all for the worst.

'Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them?'

Huh? What about palimpsests as residual tracings, a shadow rhizome network. 2D to 3D, all stacked in the pluriverse.

My skin is stronger than titanium. Smooth, contained, no pores. I have no mouth, ears, nostrils, vagina, urethra, anus. My eyes are African lights. My face is a screen made of thick glass. My display is Ankara themed. I have all I need within my body. I replace whatever I want to replace. It’s all still me. I don’t breathe, because I’m a robot. I fly into outer space. Out here it is quiet. I’m still. I’m calm.

Got to love a heavy theory book where Deleuze muses on “conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.”

Then Zelu came through the yard and she wasn’t in her chair, she was walking. Not on regular legs. On robot legs. She was a robot herself. A tall humanoid thing with a face full of light.