I write speculative fiction, cultural criticism, humor, and journalism, with a particular interest in retrofuturism, video games, fandom, and forgotten corners of pop culture history. My work has been published by Wired, Rolling Stone, Slate, McSweeney’s, Adventitious, The Daily Tomorrow, Alta Journal, Flash Fiction Online, and Nature: Futures. I also publish the newsletter Pop Cultural Precursors.
Found: Norton Antivirus: Cyborg Edition
Found: Norton Antivirus: Cyborg EditionAn interactive bathroom mirror reports which bodily augmentations are infected One of my favorite projects when I was an editor at Wired magazine was the monthly back-page item Found: Artifacts From the Future. Each installment was a full-page image of some found object from a speculative near future. All explanation of what the object was and how it worked had to be diegetic—i.e., the page had to explain itself entirely through context and in situ text, with no annotation or caption. This was a great challenge for me as a writer/editor and for all of the designers, illustrators, and photographers I had the pleasure of working with. These pages never made much of an impact online because the fun was always in the fine print—which rarely came through at web resolution. I’m republishing them here to drill down on those cool details.
This piece ran in the June 2005 issue of Wired. I think it’s one of our most successful Found pages, and while I’m proud of the copy I wrote, what makes the page so memorable is the visuals. Kudos to the brilliant photographer Robyn Twomey, hair-and-makeup wizard Sherrie Long, and the fantastic illustrator Untied who designed the UI. (I’m afraid I can’t remember the name of my Wired colleague who agreed to be in the photo—sorry!) Full text from the product packaging below, interspersed with closeups on the UI. The page scan crops out any info on the illustrator who designed the packaging, or the photographer who took the picture.
Norton ANTIVIRUS 2022: Cyborg Edition 28 JUL 2022, 09:23 AM — Health System Diagnosis Systems affected: 1) Cochlear iPod (left ear) Probable source of infection:
Touch here for system debug Live Tech Support BASIC PACKAGE
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Genre Exercises
I write speculative fiction, cultural criticism, humor, and journalism, with a particular interest in retrofuturism, video games, fandom, and forgotten corners of pop culture history. My work has been published by Wired, Rolling Stone, Slate, McSweeney’s, Adventitious, The Daily Tomorrow, Alta Journal, Flash Fiction Online, and Nature: Futures. I also publish the newsletter Pop Cultural Precursors.
My story was serialized by The Daily Tomorrow. Their synopsis: "a deathbed codicil, a savage sport, a mechanical replacement, and further complications? Join us for a healthful outing in Chris Baker’s marvellous 'A Duty of Care.' Happy hunting!"Subscribers can read an afterword about the story's making. https://dailytomorrow.substack.com/p/a-duty-of-care-full-story
Everyone should subscribe to this excellent spec-fic quarterly edited by Scott Beggs. Very proud to have a short piece in it.
If you could rewind time and erase your mistakes, would you use that power responisbly? Or would you be undone by undos? Read my piece in Futures: Science Fiction in Nature, and subscribe for more sci-fi flash fiction.I wish more science mags still published speculative fiction. We didn't know how good we had it with Omni back in the day...