Keep seeing this on BoingBoing, and while I realise it’s supposed to be kind of hyperbolic, it always strikes me as hysterical.

I worry and get angry as much as anyone about the UK government’s rampant attack on civil liberties, but have you all READ 1984? We ain’t there yet.

When Jack Straw has my head in a cage, and is threatening to release face-eating rats unless I repent, THEN I’ll concede that the UK has become “1984″.

I know this is a tangent, but the mid-90s font and the conventional-dystopia-on-oil-derricks rendering make it feel extremely dated to me.

If the Apocalypse came tomorrow, the stock market would adjust and share prices would rise for refrigerant and blister cream manufacturers. A lot of people would make a fortune.

It’s the anthropocentric bias of the human race. As soon as we realize that at least some of us will survive, cars and burblaves intactus, a huge sigh of relief will resound and then the future envisioned by Sterling will come. With a lot of dead people, certainly, but no one really cares about them anyway. They won’t be on the news.

But the polar bears and grizzlies and dolphins and trees and amphibians will be mostly gone; shorelines will change, weather will warp into extremes, and all the nightmares that perceptive people like Wiley and Kornbluth wrote about will come to pass. But we will all be Mitchell Courtenays, get-along guys who visit the dogs in zoos and get a big kick about their mastery of the world. Well, not me, but I’ll probably be dead and no one much will remember the grizzlies and dolphins and amphibians and all the rest.

This is why monkeys are not allowed the keys to the banana plantation.

Amazon, here I come!

(Of course, most important events that lie in our future will have already been predicted by some SF writer at sometime or another, making the whole bunch of ‘em seem prescient.)

Yeah, a hundred million is pretty catastrophic. I saw Europe after WWII and it was almost indescribable. I guess Wells came closer than anybody with the future-gazing, huh?

Without sliding into total misanthropy, however tempting, IMO those who call US the Great Catastrophe are probably right.

I think it’s anthropocentric folly to think we control technology and not the other way around. “Things are in the saddle and riding mankind.”

The sky is darkening like a stain
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won’t be flowers

I doubt that Bruce Sterling’s new one will fare better than the rest in this respect, even though apparently it offers “hope” after setting up its probably exaggerated vision of ecodoom. (I say “probably exaggerated” because a) that’s how fiction usually handles this kind of theme and b) it is in Bruce’s nature, and indeed is part of his charm, to use hyperbole.)

“all the nightmares that perceptive people like Wiley and Kornbluth wrote about will come to pass.” I don’t know about Wiley but Kornbluth wrote no novels, novellas, or stories about eco-catastrophe that I am aware of, and his dystopian view of corporations exploiting people, people exploiting people, and the human race being not-quite-as-smart as he would have liked, were drawn from observations of his own time.

Way to ad hominem and marginalize.

I consider Charles Platt’s contrarian arguments thoughtful enough to be worth engaging.

I asked my earlier question without snark or ulterior motive.

Of all the thousands of dystopian or doomsaying science-fiction novels that have been published, can anyone name a single one that has been really successfully predictive?

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner?

I’m no “artist” but shouldn’t works like these be viewed more as commentary on the human condition rather than a prediction of scientific eventuality?

“I do become skeptical when people start taking the entertainment seriously,”

I’m skeptical of those who address artistic endeavors pejoritively as “entertainment” when convenient.

“or fiction writers take themselves seriously as futurists.”

I can’t comment on the author’s intent but you seem to be just as guilty of focusing on the mechanism of the story (as opposed to the human truths elicited by the mechanism) as those readers who look to it as being predictive of our future. Whether you agree or disagree with the mechanism of the story you’re still seeing the mechanism as the kernel of the book’s message and you’re still wielding it as a political weapon.

Maybe there is something to be learned about people in this book rather than it just reinforcing what you, and those that disagree with you, already believe.

It is with disappointed sadness, then, that I must complain that the only ebook editions I can find of _The Caryatids_ are sporting ridiculous DRM. I just flat-out will not buy media this way.

I wish our brightest minds (I’m also thinking here of Charles Stross, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson) could ply their craft without the restrictive packaging.