"Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future"

The 1930s future: so quaint!

Somehow, imagining a brighter future seems quintessentially American. "Yesterday's Tomorrows" explains the country's obsession with futurism not in terms of technology, but as an evolution of society itself. From the preface:

To imagine that the future will resurrect cherished values of the past has no doubt been comforting to modern Americans. If only the material world changes, leaving social arrangements intact, the prospect of technological innovation becomes less intimidating. Yet this may well be in illusion. Technology has historically been a catalyst of change, not a conserver of traditions or a refuge for established ways of life and thought. The visions of the future gathered here are of little interest as prophecies. As artifacts of culture and belief, however, these past visions of the future—testaments to the pervasiveness of this illusion of technological utopianism—are guideposts to a better understanding of our own future.

Reading "Yesterday's Tomorrows" is a bit like walking through a history museum: the curator's text guides interpretation, but it's up to the visitors to make up their own minds about the past.

"The Fifth Season"

Anagram: Eons shift aft, eh?

"The Fifth Season" is another of the books I discovered¹ while reading the NYT series of mini-articles discussing prescient works of science fiction. The story is set in "The Stillness," an ironically-named world whose exceptional seismic activity regularly causes extinction-level events, known as fifth seasons: supervolcanoes, fissures across continents, sky-blotting clouds of ash, and so on. Jemisin explores the society that arose to cope with these fifth seasons and weaves the beginning of the worst fifth season yet into a very human story of striving and loss.

Minor spoilers below.

Amateur electrician (half-)hour

A few days ago, my late-night reading session was disturbed by a very large, very loud Musca domestica flitting around the ceiling fan, determined to push its face all the way through the frosted glass of my new LED bulb to feast on its tasty electronic innards.

Bzzzzzzzzzz

Determined to take matters into my own hands, I grabbed a nearby handkerchief and began flailing wildly at the intruder. A few things happened at once:

1. The fly escaped between the spinning blades of my ceiling fan (really);
2. The handkerchief wrapped itself around the weighted end of the light's pull-chain;
3. The light went out with a crack (and I put up a blackout curtain at night, so it was very dark);
4. Something whizzed by my arm and crashed into the ground.