You searched for book_author:"Lauren Beukes"
Lauren Beukes writes haunting pieces of speculative fiction, and The Shining Girls is no exception. If you like serial killers, time travel, or investigative journalism, then this book is for you. I don’t normally read thrillers, serial killer stories, etc. That just isn’t my cup of tea. But I like Beukes; Broken Monsters is a fantastic work, and I was hoping for more of the same here. By and large I was satisfied, although certain…
So there’s this new show on TV called CSI: Cyber. It’s a spin-off of a little-known TV series you probably haven’t heard of—CSI or something like that—about people investigating cybercrime. Every episode involves bad guys trying to do bad things with computers (sometimes their computer, sometimes your computer!), and the good guys have to race against the clock to stop the bad things by doing things that are like the bad things but…
Corporations are legally people—how long before they become nation-states? Some of them own islands, or indeed, virtually entire countries. I’m not as pessimistic as some about our short-term survival odds in the coming century. Sure, we have problems, but we’ll muddle through—somehow. Yet if I had to pick which chilling dystopian vision of the future I feel is most likely, the corporations-own-us-all future is the one I’d choose. It’s feudalism all over again, baby—party like…
Identity is a very fragile and ephemeral concept, and the philosophy surrounding identity fascinates me. If, in the immortal words of Ke$ha, “we R who we R”, then who we are differs depending upon whether we are alone or with people, with friends or with enemies (or, if you are Ke$ha, with frenemies). We perform identity, wearing it like a costume. But it’s not something we entirely control. Identity is not so much a costume…