Mac Tonnies is a Kansas-based writer of post-cyberpunk science fiction (recently published by the redoubtable Rudy Rucker). He’s also the author of the book After the Martian Apocalypse, a speculative search for life on the Red Planet, as well as the originator of a “cryptoterrestrial” philosophy that ambitiously seeks to explain (with “balanced skepticism” a phenomenon UFOs that’s been around at least as long as religion. He’s also the owner/operator of Posthuman Blues, an irreverent yet entirely serious blog examining, how shall we put it weird science, imprinted with endorsements from Bruce Sterling and John Shirley.
A Ballardian philosophy ties it all together. Mac’s existential probing into the nature of the interface between man and machine, an analysis of the posthumanism which we have blundered into (the\˜blues part, it seems, derives from the fact that we’re not quite there yet), is based on respect for the work of J.G. Ballard.
It’s one of the more provocative excavations of a meme that remains largely unexplored in comparison to the more well-trodden trails in Ballard’s strange fictional jungle.
Simon Sellars