Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (Haymarket) [Paperback]

Andrew Ross (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1991 | Series: Haymarket

'The definitive study of the technoculture which increasingly dominates our lives.' Joel Kovel

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ross ( No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture ) delves into the ways in which technocratic elites (military, corporate, scientific) have set the agenda for public opinion and examines the challenges to those elites posed by popular and alternative cultures. He explores groups--such as New Agers and cyberpunk SF purveyors and fans--who have marginalized themselves by choice and by their potential resistance to a techno-fascist future. In elegant prose and carefully worked out thought, Ross shows these groups to be communities of shared interests that encourage participation by all, the mechanisms of "a more radically democratic future." He is not blind, however, to the their limitations, expressing forcefully his objections to the sour dystopias of the cyberpunks and the failure of much eco-futurology to recognize the complexity of the human presence on earth, eliding differences of race, class and gender. The book's other theme, perhaps its most important one, is that science and technology, like economics and politics, are the products of social formations.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The essays collected here continue Ross's middle-level discussion begun in his No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture ( LJ 5/15/89). In each book Ross seeks a common language between intellectual leaders and common people. An English professor and cultural critic, he discusses in case studies several scientific countercultures: the New Age, hackers, cyberpunk fiction, futurists, global warming, and weather forecasting. He urges these communities to refine their analysis of hard science and technology in order to achieve more influence on the social and environmental outcomes of future sci-tech projects. Although the book assumes wide reading in these areas, examples are selected to support the author's position but not the richness of the community. For example, science is equated with factual knowledge. The debate generated by such writers as Bruno Latour in his Science in Action (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1987) is neglected here. A conclusion, glossary, and bibliography would enhance accessibility. An optional purchase for large public and academic libraries.
- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Verso (October 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860915670
• ISBN-13: 978-0860915676
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,327,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Nonsense, May 20, 2009

By 

Sean K. Robisch "Kip Robisch" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (Haymarket) (Paperback)

What an awful book this is.

Dana Phillips offers a great critique of Strange Weather and The Chicago Gangster Etcetera in his equally poor The Truth of Ecology. His evisceration of Ross's quasi-environmental urbanist solipsism is right on (and perhaps the only defensible moment in Phillips's work, which sadly and firmly lands in Ross's camp even while pulling tent spikes from it).

How do these people gain purchase in the academy? Strange Weather is full of straw man arguments, shoddy research, spurious logic, self-absorbed think pieces, and a crusade against New Ageism masquerading as a knowledgeable examination of environmental thought.

This book is an early product of the postructuralist assault on the material world that has come to pervade humanities studies, a burning cross on the field of interdisciplinarity. It also precipitated Ross's being revealed as a charlatan by Alan Sokal, and then Ross's profiteering from his own lack as a scholar by helping to grandstand the "Science Wars."

His current work on labor stands unfortunately on the foundation of low credibility he established for himself as in ideologue in the postmodern vein, his egotistical posturing from inside the cloisters of a university, and his quest to make of the raw material of the planet a curio cabinet for his own entertainment.

I recommend using this book as an example of how not to function as a writer of cultural criticism, and as a part of the problem we face in preserving what is left of the biosphere.