Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years by Bruce Sterling (December 2002)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 2.25 Mb
Overview: Visionary author, Bruce Sterling, views the future like no other writer. In his first nonfiction book since his classic The Hacker Crackdown, Sterling describes the world our children might be living in over the next fifty years and what to expect next in culture, geopolitics, and business.
Taking a cue from one of William Shakespeare’s greatest soliloquies, Sterling devotes one chapter to each of the seven stages of humanity: birth, school, love, war, politics, business, and old age. As our children progress through Sterling’s Shakespearean life cycle, they will encounter new products; new weapons; new crimes; new moral conundrums, such as cloning and genetic alteration; and new political movements that will augur the way wars of the future will be fought.
Tomorrow Now is, as Sterling wryly describes it, "an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry, in the pulsing vein of the futurists I’ve read and admired over the years: H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alvin Toffler; Lewis Mumford, Reyner Banham, Peter Drucker, and Michael Dertouzos. This book asks the future two questions: What does it mean? and How does it feel?" Tomorrow Now will change the way you think about the future and our place in it.
Genre: Non-Fiction, General
Some of the author’s predictions:
- • Human clone babies will grow into the bitterest and surliest adolescents ever.
• Microbes will be more important than the family farm.
• Consumer items will look more and more like cuddly, squeezable pets.
• Tomorrow’s kids will learn more from randomly clicking the Internet than they ever will from their textbooks.
• Enemy governments will be nice to you and will badly want your tourist money, but global outlaws will scheme to kill you, loudly and publicly, on their Jihad TVs.
• The future of politics is blandness punctuated with insanity.
The future of activism belongs to a sophisticated, urbane global network that can make money–the Disney World version of Al Qaeda.
Reviews
"Bruce Sterling is best known for writing social satires disguised as science fiction, but over a decade ago, The Hacker Crackdown demonstrated his ability to apply his firm grasp on the cultural forces shaping today’s world to nonfiction as well. Now those analytical skills take on the future; although he can’t tell readers what will happen when, he does share good ideas about how to deal with it when it does. After a primer on the various forms of futurism, Sterling offers a seven-part consideration of the 21st century, with a conceptual structure inspired by the ‘seven ages of man’ speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Taking the infant, the student, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the pantaloon, and ‘mere oblivion’ each in turn, this sweeping vision encompasses everything from genetic engineering and ubiquitous computing to the real threats to world peace. (Sterling says we shouldn’t be as worried about ideological terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who create momentary disruptions, as about opportunistic thugs, such as Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev, who, according to Sterling, will gladly exploit chaos for profit.) There are constant reminders that progress is rarely, if ever, orderly and efficient, because ‘in the real world, technology ducks, dodges, and limps’ its way forward. But steady, reliable technocratic societies, if they approach the future with ‘flexibility and patience,’ should be able to weather even the most radical technological and cultural changes. Sterling’s breezy tone and insightful speculations reposition this cyberpunk hero as a fun hybrid of Robert Kaplan and Faith Popcorn, ready to join the punditocracy and reach out to a broader readership." ~Publishers Weekly"Nobody knows better than Bruce Sterling how thin the membrane between science fiction and real life has become, a state he correctly depicts as both thrilling and terrifying in this frisky, literate, clear-eyed sketch of the next half-century. Like all of the most interesting futurists, Sterling isn’t just talking about machines and biochemistry: what he really cares about are the interstices of technology with culture and human history." ~Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century
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