#scifi (15 links)
Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.
- Blood Incantation - The Stargate youtube.com
The Stargate presents the saga of a mysterious artifact and its victims in a hallucinatory synthesis of science fiction and folk horror, where mind bending imagery and unsettling atmospheres converge in a surreal tale of primeval blood magic, interdimensional travel and grotesque otherworldly technology beginning in the Dark Ages and journeying into voids of deep space.
I wouldn't have imagined that I'd spend the first month of 2025 watching 20 minute long progressive death metal videos but I have no regrets.
- Neal Stephenson's Most Stunning Prediction - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
About a year ago, I worked with a start-up that makes AI characters in video games. I found it rewarding and fascinating because of the hallucinations: I could see how new patterns emerged from the soup of inputs being fed to it. The same thing that I consider to be a feature is a bug in most applications.
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future.
- Cyberpunk came true. So what's next? noahpinion.substack.com
- My sci-fi novel recommendations - Noahpinion noahpinion.substack.com
- William Gibson - BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK blog.williamgibsonbooks.com
If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past.
- Rossignol » Thrilling Wonder Stories rossignol.cream.org