|
Next
Event
Friday, October 24, 2008, 07:00 PM: Life Extension with Jerry Emanuelson
Jerry will be talking about his 25+ year experience with life extension treatments, including hormone injections, his longevity doctor, what treatments to ask a doctor for, how to find and guide a doctor, an interesting example of the 'medical priesthood vs. empowered patient' conflict as more healthcare treatments are about prevention/enhancement, getting his DNA scanned with deCODEme and opensourcing his genome on the SNPedia.com, and more.
More...
|
|
|
|
Science Fiction
|
Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions. Even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day.
Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic."
|
 William Gibson is likely the most influential science fiction writer of the last quarter century, but reading his most recent books, you'd be forgiven for wondering if he's writing science fiction at all these days. As the world has formed itself into a remarkable likeness of the near future that Gibson began imagining for us in 1984 with his revolutionary "cyberpunk" novel, Neuromancer, Gibson has found a new challenge in writing about living in a present that often feels like it's the future. His 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition, was his first set in the present, and it was his most acclaimed since Neuromancer, putting him on the New York Times hardcover bestseller lists for the first time and many best-of-the-year lists as well. His new book, Spook Country, shares much of its world (that is, our world) with Pattern Recognition, with a story that connects a rock star-turned-journalist, a very skilled member of the Cuban-American underworld, an art-world "producer" with a strange talent for understanding complex geographical data, and many others in a search for the mysterious contents of an anonymous shipping container.
|
|
As Lenin and Hitler recede into history, the idea that a civilized nation can descend so deep into a totalitarianism maintained by fear seems less and less plausible. Huxley’s dystopia, by contrast, is all too plausible. Indeed, the unsettling thing about Huxley’s imagined future is that it is not easy for a modern reader to say what, exactly, is so bad about it. To be sure, we maintain our democracy, religion is still alive, and our inclination to join up in pairs and raise our own children seems to be ineradicable. In many other respects, though, we have settled happily into the infantile hedonism of Brave New World.
|
 William Gibson, the 'Godfather of Cyberpunk', is midway through a gruelling, continent-hopping promotional tour and apologises for his exhaustion with an apt digital age metaphor: "The buffer's still loading extra memory," he quips.
His latest novel, however, the political thriller Spook Country, sees Gibson abandoning dystopian tomorrows for an all too recognisable here and now. And while some have registered surprise at Gibson's decision to forsake the future, he seems genuinely bemused by the fuss as he explains his stance matter of factly: "For at least a decade prior to writing Pattern Recognition, my previous novel, I think I've said at least once in every interview that I thought it would be possible to write a novel set in the present with relatively little imaginary technology, and have it feel very much like these 21st-century imaginary futures I'd created."
Meanwhile, the idea that human progress might be leading to a glorious technological apex futurists call 'The Singularity' is one he approaches with jocular suspicion. Likening that belief with the more outré ideas of Christian End Timers, he calls it "The Geek Rapture".
|
|
|
|
