I could just as easily have titled this one “Looking forward to 2006”.
Right now Bruce Sterling is having an online interactive discussion/seminar on the view for the year ahead over on The Well’s Inkwell.vue
There are more than one places in the discussion already where Sterling is saying smart things, and the thread is still growing.
Here’s an example:
The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it’s the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn’t have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.
The thing is, though: when a culture is “gone with the wind,” it’s never utterly and entirely gone. You can’t make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It’s just… up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can’t throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no “away.” Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.
There’s lots more rich stuff there, and you can join the conversation whether you’re a Well member or not.
(As an aside, I just got around to finally reading Zeitgeist last month, and as is usually the case with Sterling’s novels, it was excellent AND much better than I expected it to be from the flap text–Sterling always does more with the premise than I expect, even when I factor in that truth. In this case, in the guise of subjecting the spirit of the 20th century to satire, Sterling makes the most I’ve ever seen of the notion that the world is made of stories–Sterling comes at it more from a Derrida-meets-marketing stance than from a Sandman one, and the book is better for it. I’ve moved The Zenith Angle up the to-read queue quite a few spots, which well get me complete-and-up-to-date on Sterling’s novels–there’s a lot of other repositories of his writing, though, plus his blog at Wired.)
