Promethean

The Promethean Series

promethean
/prəˈmiː.θi.ən/ adjective
daring and original in the manner of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, handed it to a species made of mud, and paid for it with his liver, every day, for the rest of time.
N° 01 published · October 2026
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Premise

Prometheus carried fire down from Olympus hidden in a fennel stalk, and Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus for it. The Greeks told the story as a warning. The species has been ignoring it with admirable consistency for about two and a half thousand years.

Before Jenner vaccinated anyone against smallpox, he wrote a short book arguing that cowpox could do it. Before anyone built a machine that could hold a conversation, Turing wrote a paper asking whether machines could think. Most of what we now take for granted started as a text that someone had to read carefully before they believed it. The Promethean Series publishes those texts in full, typeset for long reading.

Some of these works celebrate the fire. Some keep a careful inventory of the burns. Both are written in honour of the same animal, the one that keeps stealing it.

01
The World as Phantom and as Matrix Günther Anders on radio and television, written in 1956 about a world delivered to your living room as a picture of itself. Read now, it describes the feed in uncomfortable detail.
Günther Anders · 1956 5 chapters · ~3 h Read ↗
02
In the forge
Forthcoming