Customer Reviews

Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is about today, of course. As every science fiction writer knows, any futuristic venture, either in fiction or nonfiction, is an extrapolation from the present. How prescient the writer is depends partly on how well he understands and observes the present and on how lucky he is. I don't know how lucky sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling is going to be as a visionary, but he definitely has a keen insight into the present. To use his words, "the victorious futurist is not a prophet. He or she does not defeat the future but predicts the present." (p. xvii)

I have read recently, Pierre Baldi's The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001); Howard Bloom's Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000); The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (2002), a collection of essays edited by John Brockman; Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002); Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999), and others; and I can tell you this is as impressive (in its own way of course) as any of those very impressive books, and has the considerable virtue of being beautifully and compellingly written in a style that is polished, lively and sparkles with deft turns of phrase and a cornucopia of bon mots and apt neologisms. Furthermore, Sterling really is a visionary of the present in that he sees connections and developments that most of us miss. Here are some examples:

"The sense of wonder has a short shelf life." (p. xvii)

Speaking of SUVs and cross-training shoes: "Modern devices are overstuffed with functionality..." (p. 81)

"The right wing wants to leave the market alone but to regulate sex. The left...[tolerates] domestic license but wants to regulate private industry." (p. 160)

"...[F]oreign investors are entirely indifferent to...[the] phony-baloney national mythology" of any given country. "They may feel very ardent about their own country, but they won't tolerate any pretension from" someone else's country. (p. 162)

"Garage sales became Ebay." (p. 224)

Speaking of the abundance of "giant armadillos, sloths as big as hippos, three kinds of elephants," etc., and other fauna in North America before humans arrived: "A natural Texas would look like the Serengeti on steroids." (p. 270)

On what is causing the glaciers to melt: we are "digging up fossils...and setting fire to them." (p. 279)

"The actual likelihood of people...getting atomically bombed is much higher today than it was during the cold war." (p. 260)

On the human-caused "extinctions, and the sheer air-borne filth that comes from burning fossils": "It will...[transform] the whole Earth into something like a grim mining town in East Germany, only without frogs." (p. 281)

Sterling sees the first "superbaby" as a very sad creature indeed because it will be superceded almost immediately by a superior version, and then by a super-superbaby, and will be superior only to its "moronic parents." (p. 30)

"Blobjects...are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo." They "tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive..." Some examples: "the Gillette Mach 3 razor. The Oral-B toothbrush... The Handspring Visor PDA. Gelatinous wrist rests. The curvy, slithery Microsoft Explorer mouse..." (p. 75)

In addition to "blobjects" there are also "gizmos" which are "small, faddish, buzzy machine[s] with a brief life span." A computer is a gizmo. There are also "blobject gizmos." (p. 89)

And on and on. What Sterling is really writing here is social criticism. He is revealing us to ourselves by highlighting our technology, our consumerism, and the way the various economic and political players--governments, corportions, terrorists, NGOs, etc.--are all out to manipulate us to their advantage. His take on what he calls the dichotomy between the New World Order (the technological haves who are able to effectively manage information) and the New World Disorder (blighted areas of the planet taken over by terrorists, drug dealers and other high risk takers) is especially interesting. He sees the weapons of the unconventional warfare that is now, and will continue to be, the norm in a revealing way. He notes, for example, that terrorist-induced plagues, sometimes called "the poor man's bomb," will only lead to the "poor man's doom" because "Areas with organized governments and public health systems will be the last to collapse from germs and viruses, not the first." (p. 262)

Sterling's vision is of the postmodern world giving way to the posthuman. He sees the disadvantage of our becoming part machine and part biologically-enhanced beings: we will "still have some kind of everyday treadmill" to negotiate, and we may even acquire a renewed respect for death. (pp. 299-300)

In the final chapter he touches on the notion of a "Vingean Singularity" (from Vernor Vinge) which is a place in the future "impossible to describe, simply because" we as human beings "cannot comprehend" such a posthuman environment. In other words, like the event horizon of a black hole, the singularity allows no communication between us and that future world, and that it why it is called a singularity. (pp. 295-296)

Bottom line: be not dissuaded by the nay-sayers about this book, who may not like the unnecessary use of the extended metaphor from Shakespeare's As You Like It, which Sterling uses to frame the text ("All the world's a stage..."), or who are put off by Sterling's sometimes paternal and self-centered expression. This is a terrific read. I enjoyed it from first page to last and found myself nodding in agreement and surprise with much of what he writes.

The cover and slipjacket of the book smell of terabyte hard drives and organic cell phones. But that's about it. I didn't buy this book---got it from the library. Feel like I didn't waste money, but I did waste time. There are gems...the section on biotech is really provocative and well-written.

But the rest?

Filler. The ideas about the importance of networks in the future (whether cell based terrorist groups, or profiteers) are covered in more depth in both sterling's fictional DISTRACTION and Rheingold's SMART MOBS. The critique of education is pedantic, as is the discussion about the future of politics.

I get the sense that these pieces were just lying around on the hard drive, and he realized there was a book in there. He was almost right...some tight editing would've been very helpful.

I know and admire the author, whose other non-fiction book, "Hacker Crackdown" was an extraordinary contribution to social understanding, of both the abuse of uninformed government power, and the potential enlightenment that could be achieved by hackers (who are like astronauts, pushing the envelope in cyberspace).

This book is uneven. There are some truly brilliant gems, but there is also a lot of rambling, and I fear that the author's brilliance as a science fiction writer may have intimidated the publisher and editor into settling for what they got, instead of what the author is truly capable of producing when diligently managed. However, after thoroughly reviewing the book to write the review, I ended up going for 5 instead of 4 stars because this kind of writing is uncommon and provocative and my lack of patience may be the external limiting factor.

There are a number of gifted turns of phrase and ideas, and so I do recommend this book for purchase, for reading, and for recurring review. The author focuses on generic engineering, imagining an order of magnitude of achievement beyond what is now conceptualized; he properly redefines education in the future as being disconnected from the schools that today are socializing institutions, beating creativity out of children and doing nothing for adults that need to learn, unlearn, and relearn across their lifetimes; he is brilliant in conceptualizing both crime as necessary and exported instability as tacitly deliberate--Africa as the whorehouse and Skid Row of the world; he recognizes oil as the primary source of instability and inequality, sees all politicians as devoid of grand vision (and we would surmise, character as well); he is hugely successful in talking about the mythical "American people" that do not exist, about moral panics after Enron or 9-11 that achieve no true reform; and his focus on the information age basics that make it cheaper to migrate business than people, that make it essential for the Germans to see through Microsoft's insecure code and thus to opt for LINUX or open source code for their military as well as their government systems in general.

He ends brilliantly in conceptualizing a new world order within a new world disorder, in which very rich individuals combine with very poor recruits from a nationless diaspora, a new network that looks like Al Qaeda but has opposite objectives.

In the larger scheme of things, as the author concludes, Earth is debris and the humans are on their way to being the Sixth Extinction. Party while you can.

I like Bruce's work a lot, both his SF and his punditry/journalism on the Viridian list and elsewhere. So I had pretty high hopes for this, but unfortunately came away unsatisfied. Years ago, Bruce said that cyberpunk aimed for "crammed prose" - a density of ideas, impressions and telling details which his own SF novels provide brilliantly. "Tomorrow Now" is far from crammed - it's padded. While there are cool, convincing ideas (cloned babies will grow up to be the world's most angry adolescents) on past evidence I'd expect about 10x more of them per page. I haven't read a lot of futurology books, so this may compare more favorably to most of them. But for Sterling fans this is thin stuff.

Tomorrow Now is essentially a long and brilliant essay by Bruce Sterling, a noted science fiction writer and futurist covering some of his ideas of what the future may hold. Sterling very cleverly breaks the book into seven parts based upon a soliloquoy from Shakespeare covering the ages of man from birth to death, and wittily prophesies what life may shape itself into in our near future.

Two things struck me about this book. The first is that it is not nearly as focused on the next fifty years as the title purports. There is a fair deal of what the future may hold, but there is also a great deal of the present thrown in (especially in the soldier section), and some futurism that is more than 50 years out. Surprisingly this didn't bother me at all because his analysis of the present, especially an exposition on three different terrorists warlords, was fascinating, absolutely fascinating. This book ranges far and wide, and colors outside the lines of the 50 years stated, but I was glad it did as I read.

The second thing that struck me was that this is one of the most amazingly well-written books I've ever read. I am not sure I have ever read something as engaging, fascinating, informative and so easy to read at the same time. I have always enjoyed Sterling's fiction work but, frankly, the quality of this non-fiction book trumps his fictional stories. His writing style is very chatty, more or less as if you are sitting across the table from him, and at first this threw me. It's not something you expect in a science book. Yet once I adjusted I realized that this may be one of the clearest pieces of writing I have ever had the pleasure to read. When I say "pleasure to read" I actually mean it. That is a phrase far too over-used, but in choosing it I mean it literally: reading the words was a pleasure regardless of what he was talking about. His sentence construction and word choices were simply pleasurable to read in and of themself, and I have never seen adjectives used so well to create shades and nuances of meaning before.

Much of the speculation for the future involves biotechnology, changes in workplace dynamics, and what we actually produce, the change of market dynamics, consumerism to end-user, medical advances, and the rift between the New World Order (the first world) and the New World Disorder (the third world). If I had one reservation about this book it is that Sterling promised to show why the Islamic terrorism today will be irrelevant in the future. I don't think he ever really did that; he set the stage for it, and provided the backstory necessary to see the writing on the wall, but he never came out and posited why. I agree with him that the terrorism is not a long-term problem but it would have been nice to see him forcefully make that conclusion. That one quibble aside, this is a book that anyone who cares about current events, the future, or science will find compelling, interesting, and incredibly easy to understand and follow. This is a first class work and I highly recommend it.

I enjoyed Tomorrow Now tremendously; it's not as densely-packed with speculative nuggets as some of the author's work, but his approach here waxes more poetic than techno-polemical, and focuses on the human context of the changes he's projecting, and the attendant dilemnas and decisions we'll need to confront in order to navigate it all. This book is not about "nuts-and-bolts" futurism, but about the choices and conflicts surrounding social, political and technological change, and I found it extremely grounded and candid.

I enjoy all of Bruce's fiction. Every book and article has been great. But these article are boring and uninspiring.
No-one could ever finish reading this useless stuff in 50 years.
It makes you wonder how he can write such good science fiction.
Actually, I have found his no-fiction science in various magazines very good but these are not. I ordered this before it was even published , since he has never disappointed me.
This is a great disappointment since I expect much more from him.

Tomorrow Now is a bit dated already, which might be surprising considering that it claims to envision the next 50 years. He claims that Biotech will be important, but this should not surprise anyone. Roger Revelle told me the same thing in 1980.
Sterling predicts our extinction. Predicting apocalypse is not hard. People have always done so, although the means has changed. In the '60's it was air pollution that was going to kill us, and now the air in L.A. is very much improved. What is more interesting and profitable is to discuss the means of getting out of this mess.

This is an ok read, as it will make you think, but it is not as great as some of the reviewers make it sound.

This is entertaining, informative, funny, and grim at the same time. A bittersweet look at the future.

When you look at the reviews, just remember that republicans will hate this book because they have a belief system impervious to the reality happening outside of their heads. They alone have the power to be right and rightness is affirmed by belief! They read Fred Barnes and John Stossel for whats really going on because they're closed and finite. Ambiguity is kryptonite to republicans.

Read this book to find out more about the small print at the bottom of the social contract. There is no threat of a New World Order. There is a New World Disorder that is already here and devolving. Order is not on the horizon anywhere except in one's own chosen orthodoxy.

Mr. Sterling's clever analogies and examples keep the pace of this book readable and interesting. So often "futurists" deal only in numbers, quoting Census statistics that do not illustrate the wealth of technological and other advances that will shape tomorrow. The subject mater of this text is usually fodder for scientists and think tanks. The Future Is Now provides a terrific "futuristic" outlook for those in a variety of professions and industries.