Customer Reviews

Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

The coming decades pose great promise and imminent peril, oracular sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling argues in this compelling critique of the state of the modern world. On the plus side, scientists someday might eliminate disease and allow people to live forever. In the debit column, people are burning so much fuel that humanity is setting itself up for extinction. Sterling combines the analytical acumen of a true visionary with the prose of a master craftsman in this fascinating work seasoned with first person anecdotes. As a futurist, Sterling is too savvy to make concrete predictions that soon might be proven wrong (though some of his U.S. political analysis is already losing topicality), so readers might find his approach a bit obtuse at times. But even Sterling's glancing blows connect. We recommend his intriguing analysis and conjectures to techies and to anyone else who seeks a literate look at what the future might hold.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first 2 or 3 chapters of this book, but soon after that it became quite clear that Mr. Sterling needs an editor, badly.

The ideas are rich, the structure intriguing, but the prose is nearly stream-of-consciousness, which makes it quite difficult to follow. Each sentence is perfectly understandable, but they do not build on each other in a meaningful or revelatory way.

Bruce Sterling writes well, and thinks well. Foremost, I recommend reading this book, if only for its explanation of How Publishing Works.

My complaints:
0.) He is overly pessimistic:
He holds that certain parts of the world will constitute what he refers to as The New World Disorder---failed states, mafiacracies, terrorist labour exchanges. In a week when Gaza is on fire, this is hard to dispute...but he offers no insight, be it ever so tentative, on how such places may transition out of that state, leaving this reader feeling like he's encountered y.a. American Calvinist separation of the unalterably Elect from the unflinchingly Preterite. Given his capacity for optimism (viz sub), this seems odd.

1.) He is overly optimistic: Especially in his consideration of biotech possibilities, his guesses are too full of bad possibilities which he dismissed on the basis of their being too unpleasant for the people involved, or less profitable than better alternatives. Once, I was arguing with a Southerner over the causes of the Late Civil Unpleasantness War Between the States of Northern Aggression; he brought out that old chestnut of slavery's being doomed because it made no economic sense, to which I retorted, "But it was so much fun, at least for the people with the money and power." He also fails to address certain possible contingencies---e.g., adult genetic reshaping's being impossible or too dangerous to be generally practicable---and the fact that in an entropic universe a biologic Gresham's Law might be in play: all it may take is one bad actor (say, someone who lets her experimental bacterial machine be _not_ barren) for everything to go very bad indeed.

2.) He is too millennial, maybe malgré lui: He seems to buy into an "end of economic history" argument, perhaps in sections written during the late 1990s and only slightly hedged thereafter. He dismisses deprecation of the high-tech boom with a simple, 'There will always be some other boom.' This is both too optimistic and too pessimistic at once, because it minimises the permanent damage done by each crash, assume that there will always be enough energy for booms which will do at least _some_ people some good, and because it implicitly contains the assumption, common both to the Marketolatrous faithful and cyberpunk noir, that governments will be completely unable to exercise enough control over their aeconomies to make a difference. This latter completely preferences one technology-of-valuation---capitalism, that is to say the the market as set up to unfairly benefit those with capital---over another: the exercise of "unfair" (to the rich) political will by masses of people who value certain things---health, security, and at least in former times, the dominance of white people---pretty much ab initio, and are willing to use at-least-mystified (but quite possibly not) power to enforce that valuation as long as they can get away with it, which can easily be one unaugmented human lifetime.

3.) He correctly suggests that those living through a Singularity might not feel it as such. This seems true, but not necessarily relevant. Interestingly enough, an observer freely-falling toward a black hole notices no event horizon---however, she _will_ encounter killing tidal forces that make the question of observation moot. Even so is it possible that social or physical or mental stressors might be present even for one going through a technological singularity, to say nothing of those who are not personally benefitting thereby; Mr Gibson's advice as to the uneven diffusion of "The Future" is here relevant: a futurist who wishes to be relevant to sectors of humanity who might not be in on the Real Big Deal when it goes down should at least attempt to guess what it will be like for them.

Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling examines the future with the focus on man and nature instead of the usual, man and numbers.
Statistics and credit ratings are good indicators of what the future will bring, but Sterling goes way beyond other futurists by bringing man as an organic creature, living in an organic world into the mix. Stuff is not as important as being attractive and having a long healthy life and because this is at the very base of most human desires, this is where Sterling predicts the future will take us. In the past we created huge machines to do the things that tiny microbes do all the time. Sterling shows us a very plausible future where the big things will be done with tiny little biologicals. He predicts DNA, bacteria and microbes will become the machines of tomorrow. Today's news featured a story of a group of scientists that had isolated a bacteria that fed on trash and excreted crude oil. Think of the immense machines, the oil tankers and political problems and the huge land fills this discovery will eventually eliminate. Sterling's future is coming at us fast, it is Tomorrow Now!