Hughtopias

February 13, 2022  To: CBC Radio - On The Coast  Happy Valentines Day to everyone at On The Coast.  There is one gift that expresses how sincerely you love someone, that you want to be with them when you are both collecting pension cheques and entertaining grandchildren.  That gift is the bicycle helmet. It kills the mood for Valentine's Day, so wait a little before you offer to help your loved one pick out headgear that fits their personal style.  I watched a cyclist go over his handlebars on the Adanac Bikeway just this Saturday evening. I thought he would be a head injury victim for sure. But his bike helmet took the hit so he is bruised and scraped but doing fine.  The single folks in your audience will be relieved to hear that there is a slim athletic young man with handsome mixed Asian features still available in East Van. He's polite, employed, not in a committed relationship, and has just lost the habit of using his phone while he rides his bike. He...

 Fiction Addiction:  "Dune" and the Narrative of Exceptionalism January 2022 I heard a radio host the other day say that he had not seen the movie "Dune". At the time, I felt like telling him, "Do watch it so you can discuss it, but don't pay for what will be inevitably dreadful." Quoting myself from September 2020:  " Frank Herbert was one of the most inventive and original writers of speculative fiction and Dune is a classic masterpiece that can still hold a reader's interest. I have never been without a copy on my bookshelf. But it is important to keep the work in perspective: it is largely a fantasy that sets aside what we know of space, time, consciousness, the human brain, biology, and the fundamentals of information processing. It does this to present a time-proven bankable romantic fiction of social privilege, adventure, and warfare.  Nowhere does the book touch on how a future society would achieve the slightest measure of democractic...

Buddha’s Wife -   2020-2021 - ver09e - short fiction by Hugh Tayler I closed the dishwasher on the breakfast dishes and called up the stairs to my wife in her studio, "I'm going to check the Free Table, see what's out there this morning." It was a nice day, considering that there was a pandemic. People were de-cluttering that summer as they spent more time at home. Lots of that clutter ended up on the Free Table, out on the boulevard in front of our townhouse. One of the principles of running a Free Table or a Free Store or a Free Space in an apartment recycling area is that someone has to fill in the gaps left by volunteer anarchy. I put on my baseball cap, checked my t-shirt and sweatpants for dishwater, put on my mask and gloves, and went out to the sidewalk. Some jerks had left two paper coffee cups on the Free Table next to a big pile of free kids' clothes. Better coffee cups than another bag of dog poop. I edged away from the table because there was a woman ...

 Why the plural name? I wrote a set of notes years ago where I used "Hughtopia" to describe a world where more people thought logically, the way I would like to think myself. But there are a lot of better futures that are possible, better than a Hughtopia where people are literal and logical to a fault. So: Hughtopias. Plural. Besides, the singular form was already taken. ***