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: RonCo Meat-O-Matic
Found: RonCo Meat-O-MaticThis QVC gizmo lets you culture your own vat-grown meat in the comfort of your home 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 March 2008 issue of Wired. I remember that everyone loved the QVC-home shopping-RonCo angle on future tech. We initially explored laser knives, but we ended up going with cultured meat. The onscreen artwork of the home vat-grown meat-growing appliance is by John MacNeil, and the surrounding context is a Corbis stock image. Detailed images and full text below.
Offer Expires 2/29/2016 RonCo™ Meat-O-Matic Vat-grown Kobe beef in the comfort of your home! RETAIL VALUE: FREE S&H Stare here for 10 seconds to initiate RetinaScan Purchasing® or Buy at QVC.com No Bones! Kosher! Halal! Plus, if you act now ... ITEM KL-805262.1-V17001 QVC Kitchen Ideas |
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...