Mathieu Bokestael
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mathieubokestael.bsky.social
Mathieu Bokestael
@mathieubokestael.bsky.social
350 followers 810 following 20 posts
PhD Scholar @ UCD English. Funded by Research Ireland. Community, Immunity, Care in Contemporary Scottish Writing. He/him

https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/people/residentscholars/mathieubokestael/

https://viralimaginariesnetwork.wordpress.com/
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mathieubokestael.bsky.social
@jordanscarroll.bsky.social is right, technofascists really don't know how to read sci-fi
extract from article: 'Then he brightened: “That’s about the buffer in years that I’m going to need to get to the moon.” He mentioned one more seminal book, Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi collection “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” The man in question, D. D. Harriman, longs to go to the moon, but his vision and salesmanship are so vital to the moon-colonization program that his colleagues maneuver to keep him on Earth. “Anyway,” Diamandis explained, “Harriman finally sneaks up to the moon on an illegal flight and dies there.” He laughed. “I don’t want to die on the moon, exactly. But I’d love to start a city there, a base we could mine asteroids from! The last time something like this happened is when the lungfish crawled out of the ocean onto land.” Diamandis looked off, somewhere between ahead and above. “The equation of humanity moving into the cosmos is complicated,” he admitted. He knew that it might not happen, or be optimal for all of us if it did. “But it still gives me permission to dream.'
August 21, 2025 at 10:03 AM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
Yikes, we really are fucked aren't we?
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
extract from article: Implicit in this narrative is the belief that technocrats aren’t hogging resources for vanity projects; they’re fixing the world. One XPrize Healthspan donor, Daniel Krizek, a biotech-fund manager who plans to invest a billion dollars in longevity, espouses the values of effective altruism. That principle, popular in Silicon Valley, holds that philanthropists should save the most lives they can, including the billions of future lives that might be enabled by a particular action. “You could put a trillion dollars into Africa and feed the continent forever,” Krizek told me, “but I believe it’s better to spend the trillion on going to space, because all the scientific advances that come from that will save many more lives in the future.” Bryan Johnson’s movement aligns with this belief: his ultimate goal is “species maximization—trying to get life in this part of the galaxy to flourish.”
August 21, 2025 at 9:58 AM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
SF/MedHum/Disability folks, does anyone happen to have access to Westfahl and Slusser's "No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in SF and Fantasy"?

Would love to read one of the chapters but our library doesn't have it, and ordering might take too long in these final weeks of the PhD? 🙏
screenshot of Westfahl and Slusser's book
July 21, 2025 at 2:26 PM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
Martin MacInnes on whether 'In Ascension' is a climate-change novel
April 19, 2025 at 5:58 PM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
extract from article below: 'accordingly it might be their jobs, as the highest-ranking executives of the university, to state with all needed implacability that budgets are direct expressions of an institution’s values, so that an unwillingness to meet that cost, still astonishingly fucking low, is as good as declaring that working-class kids do not rate, do not deserve an education of as high a caliber as that of their whiter and wealthier peers, and ought to get by with a replica, a cheapened facsimile.'
March 9, 2025 at 2:54 PM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
Paul Hamann-Rose on microbial imaginaries
February 18, 2025 at 4:39 PM
mathieubokestael.bsky.social
Hi Bluesky! Moved here to avoid the Musky Empire! I'm currently in the final stages of my PhD! My research asks how contemporary Scottish writing negotiates what I call the immunitary unconscious in its construction of the (individual) body and the body politic!
February 6, 2025 at 6:31 PM