Hugh Spencer sez, "The stories they didn't want back in print are still not in print — but you can read them anyway! My tales of living software, psychological censorship, trans-human dating and childcare responsibilities are available via download in The Collected Progressive Apparatus."

Toronto's Metro Reference Library is hosting a Retro Futures exhibition until July 28, filled with exhibits from the collection of the Merril Collection (previously), the largest science fiction reference collection in any public library in the world.

Science fiction author Hugh Spencer (previously) has published an essay on how Rod Serling's activist views on human rights were embodied in The Twilight Zone, drawing on the practice of using fantastic fiction to evade social constraints, in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels (to say nothing of books like Pinocchio and Inferno).

An anonymous commenter's missive in response to yesterday's post on Hugh Spencer's Master's thesis on the Church of Scientology and science fiction is some of the dumbest disinformation I've seen yet.

The commenter (using an IP address in Melbourne, Australia) tells ridiculous, easily falsified lies — for example, claiming that the Associated Press called Spencer "the 20th century's answer to Glenn Beck," which would be a neat trick, given that Spencer's thesis was published two years before Beck's first on-air job at a small radio station in Texas. — Read the rest

Last week, I had lunch with my friend, Hugh Spencer, a writer and designer of museum and public educational exhibitions. He told me an amazing story about his son and games, and I asked him to write it up for Boing Boing:

This is a picture of my amazing youngest son Evan.

I've just uploaded a fantastic reading of my friend Hugh Spencer's short story, "Sticky Wonder Tales," which originally appeared in On Spec, the excellent Canadian science fiction magazine. Hugh's work never fails to crack me up and make me think, and this is no exception. — Read the rest