Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. I have to confess, I think I prefer
Sterling when he is distilling his social predictions through his
fiction. Which is not to say this book wasn't a hugely entertaining
read, because it was. Really he is not forecasting the twenty-first
century so much as he is giving a rough outline for how to cope with it
when we get there. Taking the seven ages of man that Shakespeare lays
out in As You Like It (also a recent Burning Man theme), Sterling
associates each stage with a loose theme and then proceeds to riff. See
if you can recognize the Holy Fire chapter, the Distraction
chapter, the Zeitgeist chapter...I found a lot to identify with in
chapter 2, The Student, which concerns "information networks and new
paradigms for the scholar." As a confirmed autodidact, I appreciated
what Sterling had to say about how our educational system is still
preparing us for careers that are virtually nonexistent these days. Much
later, when he's talking about the damage we continue to do to our
environment, Sterling hypothesizes, "After a couple of geological epochs,
maybe the raccoons will take the stage and do rather better than we
did," which calls to mind a favorite e-sheep.com splash page of mine. In
the end, no one knows for sure, not even Bruce Sterling. I like his
guesses though.
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Heidi J. De Vries
