Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 77 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine, short story, clarkesworld, science fiction magazine, Hugo Award, fantasy magazine, short stories, semiprozine, weird, dark fantasy, Hugo Nominee, surreal
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2013-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Greg Kurzawa studied theology without purpose before being handed a career in information technology. He and his incredible wife are busy building a happy family. Some people mistake him for Gage Kurricke, with whom he co-authored Gideon’s Wall.

The Great Leap Sideways: SF and Social Media

Mark Cole

Science Fiction isn’t always about the big things.

Nor does it get it right all the time.

Consider the first SF visions of the internet: for William Gibson and the other pioneer Cyberpunks, the online world was home to a chosen few—the corporate elite on one hand, the radical fringe of cowboys and hackers on the other.

But it didn’t work out that way.

Instead it became something far more democratic, a vast virtual space filled with countless millions of users who had no idea how their computer worked or how to create new programming for it. Far from the secret data caches Johnny Mnemonic carried, most of that traffic is entertainment, commerce and even idle chatter. The gleaming city on a hill that was cyberspace had become sprawling suburban subdivisions within a generation. Perhaps the measure of how prosaic it has all become is that it is now possible to talk or write about social media without the once obligatory references to SF.

Not that SF has exactly ignored social media. Once it became a major force in our modern world, SF writers got busy extrapolating it into their future worlds. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2005) came out only a year after Facebook launched (although parts of it are already badly out of date!). You can even find its precursors as far back as 1909, in E.M Forster’s “When The Machine Stops,” in which everyone lives in his own little hexagonal box in a monstrous hive. They can chat with their friends or carry out their day to day activities without ever leaving their cubicle—one character even delivers a speech to her club from within her room.

However, no one guessed just how popular sharing the private details of our lives with the world would be, or how eager people would be to make virtual friends online. Reality had left SF in the dust. Social media burst into the consciousness of SF at about the same time it seized the attention of the rest of the world. And, curiously, it is one of the few realms in the world of SF which movies began exploring at the same time—or even before—the print media did.

One of the earliest appearances came in legendary anime director Mamoru Oshii’s live action film, Avalon (2001). Set in a rundown future, Avalon is an illegal MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) and one of the few ways to escape the harsh realities of the world. The greatest players, like the film’s protagonist, Ash, can actually make a living playing Avalon. The idea seemed strange at the time, but now many MMORPGs tie their currencies to real dollars. A select few Second Life players earn over one million dollars a year.

VR games have appeared in

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