Andrés Vaccari

(Publicada en el foro CTS: Revista Iberoamericana de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad, Noviembre 2011)
En un futuro no muy lejano, la especie que sucederá a homo sapiens sapiens elaborará (o quizás sus máquinas lo hagan por ellos) un mito acerca de sus orígenes. El relato comienza con la aparición de ciertos animales que se llamaban a [...]

OK, I keep insisting I have discovered a new art form, not sure if it’s a literary art form, but it certainly seems unique to the 21st century (and late late XXth). Here’s the latest offering from our annonymous, mad digital Burroughs-wannabe. Enjoy!
Chameleon would the ice
is otis day a real person
blinding yellow whatever that
smashed finger [...]

As any blogger and email user would now, there is a tremendous amount of spam out there. Apparently, 97% of the volume of all email correspondence consists of unsolicited emails. Anyway, I’ve been quite intrigued lately by a series of spam messages that have been sent both to my email account and to this site. [...]

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
By Michel Houellebecq
(The Australian December 2-3, 2006)
In this short but eventful study of H.P.Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq suggests the pioneering writer created modern horror while exhausting its possibilities. Perhaps the horror genre never lived up to its early promise because practitioners such as Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft are [...]

Is there anything NEW to say about 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I watched it again the other day for the fiftieth time. It occurred to me that we can read the film as presenting a synoptic, imagined history of technology. This imagined history perpetuates many myths about technology, as well as offering a comprehensive range [...]

Micronations
By John Ryan, Simon Sellars and George Dunford
Lonely Planet Publications, 144pp, $24.95
(The Australian September 23 2006)
THIS latest offering by Lonely Planet Books is a curious creature. Ostensibly a travel book, it turns out on closer inspection to be an exploration of the idea of nationhood. In our post-colonial, globalised times, some people see the nation [...]

Evening in the Palace of Reason
by James Gaines
(The Weekend Australian May 6-7, 2006)
History is a messy business that rarely offers neat closures or a good story. Nonetheless, the exceptions can be more wonderful than any fiction. One such case is the meeting of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederick the Great of Prussia, the subject of [...]

The World According to Y
by Rebecca Huntley (Allen & Unwin)
(Weekend Australian 18 march 2006)
While the notion of a ‘generation’ is largely a fabrication, it is useful to market researchers and sociologists as a way to study populations who lived through similar historical circumstances, and share certain attitudes and beliefs.
Just as I was beginning to figure [...]

He dreamed. Dreaming was for free and perfectly unproductive. In the dream it was the Future®. In the Future® everything looked strange to him. For a start it was all monochrome, and it took him some time to work out this was because everything—the buildings, the clothes and faces of passerbys, the roads, cars, his [...]

Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in his Times
By A. C. Grayling
(The Australian January 14-15, 2006)
Three and a half centuries after his death, René Descartes still has some surprises under his wig. Descartes was, without doubt, one of the founders of the modern world. An exceptional philosopher, scientist and mathematician, he was [...]

The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
By Ray Kurzweil
(The Australian December 17-18, 2005)
Our bodies will soon be obsolete. Genetic engineering, smart drugs and nanotechnology will reverse the ageing process and make us immortal. Machines will do all the unpleasant work for us, producing all the energy we need. We will download our minds into [...]

K. (2005)
By Roberto Calasso
Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock.
The work of Franz Kafka seems custom made for endless interpretation. Indeed, no other modern author has inspired such a feeding frenzy of critical exegesis. Kafka’s disturbing and enigmatic worlds immediately compel the reader to search for explanations and possible meanings. We are certain that something [...]

I am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated from the French by Timothy Bent.
Bloomsbury.
(The Australian, 22-23 October 2005)
Since his death in 1982, the stature and popularity of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick have been growing exponentially. Most of his books (forty-four novels [...]

MOREL’S INVENTION (1940) (”La Invención the Morel”)
By Adolfo Bioy Casares
(Sydney Morning Herald, date unknown, 2005)
This short novel is one of the great landmarks of Latin American literature, yet it remains virtually unknown in the Anglophone world. It is about time some publisher wised up and reissued it.
Written in 1940, Morel’s Invention is a prescient articulation [...]

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed [...]

SMOKY: A TALE OF EXILE AND TERROR
I´ve been awarded an Australia Council grant (New Work, Emerging Writer) to work on this from March to September, 2005.
This is a work of fiction based on my experience as a migrant from Latin America, and on my observations on the experiences of other migrants. It deals broadly with [...]

The Prestige (1995)
by Christopher Priest.
(Sydney Morning Herald, Spectrum: Best Book You’ve Never Read, November 2004)
When first published, The Prestige received unanimous critical acclaim and collected the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and a World fantasy Award. Yet this work remains a largely neglected masterpiece, and deserves an audience wider than the fantasy connoisseur.
The [...]

(This is the first chapter of a now abandoned novel, Company Man, which was intended as an extended version of “Rotting in the Office”)
People called me Matt. I had been at the Office for as long as I could remember. For all I know, I might have uttered my first words there, ventured on my [...]

Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)
By Janette Turner Hospital
When the dust from the events of 9/11 finally settles, this may be remembered as the best novel dealing with the day that set the mood for the twenty-first century.
The year is 1987. A group of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists hijack an aircraft bound for New York from [...]