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Title: Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0-679-46322-4 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 17 December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.07 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Sterling delivers
Comment: Sterling's science fiction is characterized by a keen appreciation for social forces and the increasingly intimate realtionship between things seen and unseen (the latter being anything from genetically tailored microbes to omnipresent cultural agendas). In "Tomorrow Now," his first book-length nonfiction work since the dated but fascinating "The Hacker Crackdown" (a tome on computer crime and digital culture written in the Internet's infancy), Sterling envisions the trends, technologies, and mutant ideologies that will define the first half of the 21st century.
"Tomorrow Now" is Sterling at his chatty, global-headed best. He writes about the future with skill and heartfelt exuberance, avoiding the perils of dystopian science fiction. Readers expecting biotech holocaust or maurauding robots will probably be disappointed in Sterling's close-to-home approach. But for readers into the political ramifications of computer networks, "ubicomp," and postindustrial design philosophy, "Tomorrow Now" delivers in spades.
The future, in Sterling's eyes, is merely an alternate way of looking at history. As such, it's an artifact of our own desires and creative stamina: a perplexing realm where "dystopia" and "utopia" blend and ignite with incandescent results. True to his science-fictional visions, "Tomorrow Now" is both laugh-out-loud funny--read his commentary on the pervasive techno-ecology of pseudo-organic "blobjects"--and grimly cautionary. "Tomorrow Now" unveils a world that thrives off future-shock, held together by neobiological systems and threatened by greenhouse catastrophe. Along the way, we meet angst-ridden clones, digitally savvy terrorists, and our own posthuman descendants.
"Tomorrow Now" is imminently readable, thoughtful, and soundly structured. Required reading for postcyberpunks and curious bystanders alike.
Rating: 4
Summary: Brilliant Futurist Architecture Built on Weak Foundations
Comment: Bruce Sterling is, without doubt, a brilliant futurist. In "Tomorrow Now", he serves up a feast of clever and entertaining prognostications about humanity's near future. But reader beware! The book is like a gleaming, new building whose stunning design, lavish decoration and gleaming contours can blind observers to many small architectural flaws and the crucial fact that it's built on shaky foundations.
To take one example, Sterling tells us in one paragraph that a "cruise missile ... is just a rich guy's truck bomb". But in the very next paragraph he emphasizes that there are in fact huge differences between cruise missiles and truck bombs that go far beyond the class background of their users. Cruise missiles are produced and deployed by complex, industrially advanced societies, while truck bombs are used by terrorists who operate beyond the ken of settled governments and civilized society.
Another, more serious example of some of the less-than-deep thinking that went into this book is its overall organizational gimmick, which is based on the "Seven Ages of Man" so poetically described by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Sterling emhasizes the chronological aspect of these "Ages" by labelling his chapters as stages. Stage 1 is the Infant, Stage 2 is the Student, and so on. He uses these stages as conceptual launching pads for fascinating riffs on a variety of subjects related to 21st century technology, culture and politics. In the chapter on the Infant, for instance, he writes at length about future bioengineering not just for babies but also adults and what this will mean for huminaty as a whole. In "Stage 4: The Soldier" he speculates on the nature of future warfare. Thus, Sterling is really often talking about cross-cutting themes rather that chronological ages, which is more than a little confusing. Why he did this, except that it is so cool to quote from Shakespeare, escapes me.
A final example of Sterling's inconsistency is the subtitle of the book itself: "Envisioning the Next 50 Years". In fact, he often describes trends from the late 21st century, which puts us more than 50 years ahead. So why didn't he just call the book "Envisioning the 21st Century"? Search me.
This is a great book, but Sterling's slickness can't completely compensate for these weaknesses. Cool soundbytes, technological virtuosity, cute wordplay and even large dollops of honest-to-God weighty insight are not enough to make up for some rather shoddy underlying illogic and conceptual weaknesses.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not very good...
Comment: Not very good... tries to examine the social and institutional trends, but goes into much self-serving prose.
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Title: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson ISBN: 0399149864 Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons Pub. Date: 03 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century by John Brockman ISBN: 0375713425 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 14 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Quicksilver : Volume One of The Baroque Cycle (Stephenson, Neal. Baroque Cycle, V. 1.) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0380977427 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling ISBN: 0345460618 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan ISBN: 0345457684 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 04 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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