Kalyani Tupkary

This is a world in which time is not fluid, parting to make way for events. Instead, time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past. Every action, every thought, every breath of wind, every flight of birds is completely determined, forever… In a world of fixed future, life is

The design of our calendars — the way we arrange our days, weeks, and months — is a reflection of how we aspire to live our lives

From the Near Future Laboratory, the definitive book describing in accessible and vivid detail the origins, evolution, and practice of design fiction: “ the practice of creating tangible and evocative prototypes from possible near futures, to help discover and represent the consequences of decision making.”

Like so many botanical concepts, the flower clock originated with the Swedish ur-taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in his 1751 treatise “Philosophia Botanica.” Based on field observations, he divided flowers into three categories. The meteorici open and close with the weather. The tropici follow the changing hours of daylight. And the aequinoctales,

Pemmaraju’s story urges us to consider the occasional senses of temporal dislocation that we all experience from time to time—instances of timecode drift within our consciousness, small insurgencies of slave clocks against a tyrannical master clock.