Confessions of a Book Reviewer by Michael Cart

Author:Michael Cart [Cart, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN025000 Language Arts & Disciplines / Library & Information Science / General
Publisher: American Library Association

The Future Is Now

ACCORDING TO AN eye-catching headline in the Washington Post, “The Future Is Now.” The story that followed, by one of the Post’s resident bloggers, Joel Achenbach, examined how technology—ever changing and ever more complex—is transforming the way we live. The trouble, it seems, is that we’re not always aware of the changes or the engines that drive them. “Tomorrow’s revolutionary technology may be in plain sight,” Achenbach writes, “but everyone’s eyes, clouded by conventional thinking, just can’t detect it.” Even smarty-pants scientists don’t always recognize it, Achenbach asserts, concluding with the rather wistful question, “So where does that leave the rest of us?” His answer: “In technological Palookaville.”

Well, welcome to my world, Mr. A. For when it comes to technology, I can out-Palooka just about anybody. In fact, my personal mantra for the last ten years has been “Thank God, I’m old and won’t have to put up with this confusion much longer!”

But what’s a befuddled columnist to do in the meantime? Well, if you’re Achenbach, you turn for advice to Christine Peterson, who is vice president of the futuristically named Nanotech Institute in Menlo Park, California. Her recommendation? “Read science fiction, especially ‘hard science fiction’ that sticks rigorously to the scientifically possible. If you look into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn’t look like science fiction, it’s definitely wrong.”

Well, OK, but that pretty much leaves me out, since I’ve always thought it was called “hard” science fiction because it’s so blinkin’ hard to comprehend. Or, if it’s the cyberpunk variant, it’s not only hard but also so hideously depressing that I’d rather not know what the future has in store—for me or for humankind, thank you very much.

I suspect I’m not alone in these disgruntled feelings, since contemporary science fiction of all sorts has definitely taken a back seat to fantasy in recent years. Oh, sure, this is partly due to the popularity of the Harry Potter books and the market forces they unleashed, but I do wonder if it might also be due to that dizzyingly accelerating pace of change I mentioned earlier and the technological complexities that change is visiting on the world. When reality is even more outrageous than imagination, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling need for fiction, does there?

Good grief! What did I just say? Of course there will always be a need for fiction. Nevertheless, when one picks up the newspaper and finds speculation that the massive new particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider might, when activated, create a black hole that will swallow the earth, or that we can expect a billion-fold increase in information technology capability in the next twenty-five years, one does wonder just when it was that reality turned into fantasy, when the mundane became the marvelous. Maybe it was when the late Arthur C. Clarke first famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Well, whenever it was,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.