This one has threatened to break out for a while now so if you are not interested in SF or SF Movies then it’s not for you.
You know me, if you are still here after all this time; I never view the world through the prescription optics. My lenses sometimes hang upside down, my optics are decidedly non-linear.
I always wonder.
So we have to go back a quarter of a century to the mid 80s when I started to wait and wait and wait for something truly marvellous to continue and give birth to a new “something”.
What that something might be depended on one person, William Gibson.
His first four books, shades of which can be seen in Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix; all that Count Zero stuff, left me on tenterhooks. After Wintermute, the telephone banks, the artificial sun on the space station, the beach, the robo dogs, Hideo, the babe with glasses and the nails, black ice and the net, after all that stuff where did he leave it all?
The intelligence in the net has reached instantaneous communication with Alpha Centauri, I think.
Then WG sods off and joins futurology engagements in the US Dept of Defence. Immediately after he says that life is too complicated and makes his fiction irrelevant.
Well the stuff I’ve read from him since certainly makes me wonder if the same guy is doing the writing.
Only other author that even got close was Patricia Anthony.
What’s the difference?
The difference can be seen in the Movies, they look in, down, and the human experience is inward, concentrated and limited. Bounded and trapped.
Those first four books left us looking out, unbounded and free. With limitless possibilities for human experience. Even though the world portrayed therein was a dystopian shit heap.
WG was persuaded to STOP I reckon.
Perhaps he finally realised he was already living in that dystopian shitheap, INCOMING!!!!!!!, and that it was only going to get worse, coupled, of course, with the aforementioned "persuasion".
ReplyDeleteSpidey, glad you've broken out.
ReplyDeleteCould be, but the timing of his being invited into the US DoD/Think Tanks as a "futurologist?!!" and his stories going flat, just like the films, leaves me scratching my noddle.
It is a sort of negative Arthur C. Clarke effect.
BTW did you catch the MSM and BIG PUSH in AFPAK? Lots of speechifying, it looks bad for our lads.
Yes I did, mate - it doesn't look good at all - and, as expected, the Taliban did a runner before our boys ever got there. They were told both where and when the attack was coming for days/weeks before the event - WTF???!!!!
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine if Churchill had fought WW2 like that? Christ on a bike!
Spidey, the thing that really bugs me is the sniper fire. That is highly skilled and there is more and more of it in this campaign. Our muppets really said clear the area of your close in fighters and leave an open filed of fire for long range loners. How a UAV is going to deal with that is beyond me. It also means we will never really know who the snipers are.
ReplyDeleteIt's absolutely impossible for a UAV to deal with that at the moment, mate.
ReplyDeleteSpidey this is the season for staying indoors really, wait 'til the weather improves and the mercs and advisors start coming in from out of theatre then our lads will be in real trouble. McChrystal is a psycho, he's determined to get a massive body count. He's got to be into some sort of Military Skull & Bones type shit.
ReplyDelete