Do-it-yourself soundproofing. Photo: www.g4noise.com by Simon Sellars Originally published on Sleepy Brain, 2 November 2003. It begins with a slow cycling noise, the heavy drone of massive turbines gearing up to complete some Herculean task. This sonic undertow – insistent and full of ominous bottom-end harmonics – ensures that writing my notes is a horrendous, [...]

Image by Greg Serafin. Originally published in Jargon magazine, summer 2001. Are YOU finding it difficult to leapfrog to the head of the dole queue? Sick of rubbing shoulders with billions of other citizens on Earth? Tired of breathing in disgusting pollution? Clothes shredded and skin raw from acid rain? Well, fret no more because [...]

Photograph by Daniel New (Alphonse Leonardi). I have a soft spot for this piece. With the Jargon magazine, one of the aims was to make the RMIT aerospace campus, out at Fishermens Bend in the shadow of the Westgate Bridge, interesting. So I combined my interests in Ballard and the Futurists and invented a group [...]

This represents the first academic article I had published, back when I was attempting my PhD for the first time. It was actually written in 1996 and delivered at the Speaking Science Fiction conference organised by the University of Liverpool, but remarkably the edited collection of conference papers wasn’t published until four years later. Originally [...]