What’s the future of being human? Beats me, but here are some guesses.

A prize-nominated portrait of an android, discussed in a recent New York Times article here.

It isn’t necessarily the job of science fiction writers to predict the future, any more than it’s necessarily the job of other fiction writers to describe the present or reconstruct the past. I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell you what I’m going to wear to work tomorrow, much less tell you what anyone else will have on, and if I were a science fiction writer it’d be no different. As a second-look review of Isaac Asimov’s SF novel Foundation recently pointed out, that book premised on the possibility of predicting the future failed to anticipate changes in the social roles of women that were just around the corner. But then Asimov wasn’t trying to see the future; he was just playing the old “what if” game. That baseball-playing font of wisdom Yogi Berra hit something home when he remarked, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” What’s more, we can’t always say after the fact whether somebody got it right. Novelist William Gibson is sometimes credited with foreseeing the Internet in Neuromancer, published in 1984, but networked computers already existed when he wrote that book, and no one yet experiences the Internet as the enveloping virtual space that he termed a “consensual hallucination.” In some cases we can’t even be sure about the past; about 10 years ago, no one knew whether that line about predictions should be traced to Berra or Niels Bohr. (Maybe that’s been settled now; to adapt another supposed Berra-ism, the past ain’t what it used to be, any more than the future is.)

Still, it can be fun to try predicting the future,

Getting back to work in Houston: the drama of Harvey and the Alley Theatre

Not long after Hurricane Harvey put much of Houston underwater and practically turned it upside down, the Houston Astros played two baseball games in their hometown and reportedly sold out both. It turned out that Houstonians wanted to see the games—it was something normal amid the disorder. I imagine the team wanted it too. Baseball is their job; it’s their duty, in a way; it’s something they know how to do and do well. If they didn’t play, the storm would’ve taken away, for a while, their raison d’être. It’s a simple and fundamental feeling: when the world around us goes awry, whether it’s the illness of someone we know or a large-scale disaster, most of us want to be able to do something.

The same is true for the workers of the Alley Theatre in Houston, which is about to premiere a play by Rajiv Joseph.

Before and after Pong: a new book traces the rise of video games

In The Comic Book Story of Video Games, due out in a few weeks, the author and the artist present a history of video games that’s knowledgeable and wide-ranging but somewhat eccentric. Initially, Jonathan Hennessey focuses equally on “electronic games and electronic screen displays,” but much of the book covers the highways and byways of computer history, in which he finds that computers, which were “intended only for military, scientific, government, and industry use,” were soon used for games as well: a tennis game, a mouse-in-a-maze game, a billiards game, even a clever text-based game called Colossal Cave Adventure, which used only words on a screen. Much of this will be familiar to anyone who already knows the story of computers, but it’s presented in a rather colorful way.