Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years

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 li

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.

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 fol

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-superb

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.