Monday, March 12, 2007

Osama Phone Home


I have a new story in this issue (March/April) of MIT Technology Review. It's called "Osama Phone Home," and is about the most political and contemporary piece I've ever done. It's also the first science fiction the TR has published in its century of reporting on emergent tech. Here's what editor/publisher Jason Pontin writes in the same issue:

In this, I believe, I am an entirely conventional technologist. Most of us came to technology through science fiction; our imaginations remain secretly moved by ­science-fictional ideas. Only the very exalted are honest about their debt. In his collection of lectures on the future of technology, Imagined Worlds, the great theoretical ­physicist Freeman Dyson writes, "Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams."


As to the photo at the top of this entry, I think it's a dead alien. I found it lying on the snow on the trail to my shed. It was already dead when I found it. A powerful build, hairy legs, a horse-like head. I didn't move it, and I think the foxes got it.