I've been doing foresight work for about ten years now, as a side activity with strange hooks and connections into my science fiction writing. It was always evident to me that there was a lot more to it than the wild-eyed prophets and professional futurists like Alvin Toffler made evident; so, when an opportunity to gain a degree in it came up, I jumped at it.

--Actually, it's not that simple.  In early 2009 I was recovering from heart surgery and really, badly needed something to make me enthusiastic about getting out of bed in the morning, because just getting out of bed was really physically difficult.  Undertaking the degree gave me something to shoot for, and helped get me over the difficult convalescence period.  It was also, well, just a hell of a lot of fun.

Now I'm done, and I'm pretty bummed about it, because over the course of the programme I got to know a lot of really amazing people, some my classmates, some my instructors, and some consultants and business people who came in to mentor us. I was part of the first cohort in the foresight programme at OCAD, and we became a pretty tightly-knit group.  I'll be sad not to be seeing everybody on a weekly basis, though I hope to keep up my contacts with as many of my classmates and instructors as possible.

So, now what?  Oh, who knows!  It's not like recruiters are going from town to town snapping up recent Futurism graduates.  This was always going to be a profession where we defined our own path.  But that's half the fun of it, especially for someone like myself who's used to being adventurous in my career choices.

...All of which means, that hey, if you happen to hear about any futurist jobs opening up in your neighbourhood, well, drop me a line, eh?  I could sure use the work.

Way over at the Whatever, John has made an announcement about a really fun project he dragged me into a couple months back.  It's true:  John, and Elizabeth Bear, and Jay Lake, and Tobias Buckell and I have been working together for several months to present you with a new near-future vision, one that's decidedly urban but calls into question what a city really is... and what the boundaries of sovereignty are in a future where some of the world's cities will have greater populations than the countries they are in. 

So, if the cyberpunks were all about corporate control, sticky technologies and software, we're all about sustainable communities, parallel economies and remapping reality with your GPS and your sleeping bag. It's the city alive, the city as beast and brother and increasingly, self-aware actor in the global political arena.

Or, as Shriekback sang in their song "Hymn to Local Gods" (a reference sure to date me as one of the old guys):

The excellent French online magazine ActuSF has published an interview with me.  They wanted to know about Ventus and Permanence and some of the ideas I explored in them.  It was refreshing for me to talk about those books, because as the current Virga quartet winds to its conclusion (not that there won't be further books set there, by the way!) I find my interests and attention wandering back to the issues I explored in my first three novels.  I'm hugely interested in present developments in cognitive science, and am now thinking about how the vast array of settings and tech I developed for Ventus and Lady of Mazes might be used to support a novel about cogsci.  --Relax, I'm just daydreaming, for now.