Why I Want To Read The Weight of Numbers
Aside from this glowing review (key references, Ballard, Stephenson, DeLillo; key phrase, "reinvention of the past as though it were science fiction"; review titled 'Pattern Recognition'), on Simon Ings' website we find this disclosure:And finally. Weight's mysterious, slightly farcical philosophical society exists: it’s called the Science Fiction Foundation, and it was founded by George Hay, a friend of Arthur Clarke, Fred Hoyle and Solly Zuckerman. I don’t think it’s too much to say that Hay - long dead, alas - was the last of a grand line of Fabian eccentrics, the greatest of whom, I suppose, was Zuckerman’s wartime collaborator J D Bernal (the model for Weight's J D Arven). Hay wanted to create an organisation along the lines of Isaac Asimov’s fictional ‘Foundation’ - a shadowy elite with a hotline to government, providing it with the sort of thought experiments and long-term technical and sociological perspectives that the best science fiction could provide. To this end, he allotted me - his last and least protege (Mike Moorcock and Christopher Priest had preceded me), a number of more or less absurd tasks. I set up a dial-a-poem service. I typed up a previously unpublished soft-porn novel by a renowned science fiction author who really should have known better.
Funnily enough, a couple of years ago the Whitehall Foresight team invited a bunch of science fiction writers and myself to a hotel in St Pancras to perform for them (I seem to remember their theme was ‘The Future of Crime’ - their ideas were much better than ours were) - so obviously either Hay has had his influence, or - incredibly - he knew what he was talking about.
Today, Foundation survives only as a library at the University of Liverpool, picked over by a handful of dubious PhDs. A pity.
In other news, somewhere in this flat is my mobile phone. It's just that I can't find it and it's switched off. Nobody expect a quick response to any text messages today.
Funnily enough, a couple of years ago the Whitehall Foresight team invited a bunch of science fiction writers and myself to a hotel in St Pancras to perform for them (I seem to remember their theme was ‘The Future of Crime’ - their ideas were much better than ours were) - so obviously either Hay has had his influence, or - incredibly - he knew what he was talking about.
Today, Foundation survives only as a library at the University of Liverpool, picked over by a handful of dubious PhDs. A pity.
In other news, somewhere in this flat is my mobile phone. It's just that I can't find it and it's switched off. Nobody expect a quick response to any text messages today.