Tag: SciFi

Welcome to the Machine/ Pink Floyd (1975)

It looks like the Pink Floyd team have commissioned a new music video to an old song. I like it and think the grainy Scifi-esque landscape works really well with the dystopian nature of Welcome to the Machine.

Happy 30th Birthday ‘Anglosphere’!

So here’s something of an oddity; the Oxford English Dictionary thinks the word ‘Anglosphere’ is a mere thirty years old this month.

Usually with the. English-speaking countries considered collectively; esp. the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (and sometimes other countries), regarded as a group with a shared historical and cultural heritage. Quot. 1995 is from a science fiction novel set in a futuristic version of the world; the Anglosphere refers generally to the English-speaking parts of it. 1995 The tiny old houses and flats..had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere. N. Stephenson, Diamond Age ii. 373Citation details for N. Stephenson, Diamond Age 2004 To be part of the Anglosphere implies the sharing of fundamental customs and values at the core of English-speaking cultures. J. C. Bennett, Anglosphere Challenge ii. 79Citation details for J. C. Bennett, Anglosphere Challenge 2013 The UK lags not only behind France and Germany, but also the rest of the Anglosphere including the US and Canada, in terms of job satisfaction. London Evening Standard 10 October 61/5
Continue reading “Happy 30th Birthday ‘Anglosphere’!”

Gosh!

From October 2023’s Ansible:

40 Years Ago, a Japanese con publication printed many ‘messages of support’ from UK/US authors. J.G. Ballard rose to the occasion: ‘That great feat of arms, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, must now be repeated in the realm of the imagination — let the SF writers of Japan set out across the skies of the human psyche, each carrying a piece of that explosive future which will torpedo the battleships of complacency and inertia!’ (Ansible 35, October 1983)

Anisble, October 2023

From anyone else that would be a little on the nose, but from a man with Ballard’s history with the Japanese it’s something else entirely!