Live Without a Net - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0451459253 ISBN 13: 9780451459251

Casa editrice: Roc, 2003

Riassunto

Imagine a future without cyberspace...without virtual reality...without AIs and simulations...and without the Web.

What would you do? What would you fear? What wouldn't you know?

Explore a future without a net in these stories of alternatives to the "information age" by Lou Anders € Stephen Baxter € David Brin € Paul Di Filippo € Pat Cadigan € John Grant € David Hutchinson € Alex C. Irvine € Terry McGarry € John Meaney € Paul Melko € Mike Resnick and Kay Kenyon € Chris Roberson € Adam Roberts € Rudy Rucker € S.M. Stirling € Del Stone, Jr. € Charles Stross € Matthew Sturges € Michael Swanwick

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Lou Anders has published over 500 articles in such magazines as Dreamwatch, Star Trek Monthly, Star Wars Monthly, and Babylon 5. He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact and editor of the anthology Outside the Box. He currently writes a column called "New Directions" for the website RevolutionSF.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

INTRODUCTION:

DISENGAGING FROM THE MATRIX

By Lou Anders

The future is here. Now. Every day, the stuff of science fiction is being made manifest around us. Faster and faster. Blink and you just might miss it.

In March of 2002, an Oxford professor named Kevin Warwick underwent an implantation of a microelectrode array into the median nerve inside his arm. The purpose of the array was to record the emotional responses traveling down Professor Warwick's nerve, and to translate these to digital signals that could be stored for later playback and reinsertion. The goal? Digitally recordable emotion. Meanwhile, Steve Mann, inventor of the wearable computer (called WearComp), has been walking around wired for twenty years, recording everything he experiences as part of an ongoing documentation of his "cyborg" experience. Less sensational, but equally exciting, functioning neuromuscular stimulation systems are in experimental use today- implantation devices that promise to repair the severed connection between brain and peripheral nervous system caused by a stroke or spinal cord injury. And experiments in optic nerve stimulation have produced in blind volunteers the ability to see lights, distinguish letters and shapes, and in one dramatic case, even drive a car. Meanwhile, computers have become small enough and cheap enough to have become ubiquitous, appearing in everything from our ink pens to disposable greeting cards. In the field of computer graphics, breakthroughs in digital rendering make it harder and harder to distinguish our on-screen fantasies from our everyday realities. And everything, positively everything, is on-line. The real Machine Age is only just beginning, and we are rapidly melding with our devices.

While it will be some time before we have to worry about zombie-faced automata proclaiming that "Resistance is futile," a technological singularity may very well have been crossed. Experiments and efforts like those above will, for good or ill, rapidly bring about many of the visionary concepts first proposed to us in the pages of William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk novels.

In fact, one has only to read Wired and Scientific American magazines with any regularity to see that some form of that Gibsonian existence is barreling down upon us with ever-increasing speed. As advances in computerization, miniaturization, and neural interfacing are being made every day, it becomes progessively difficult for writers of speculative fiction to imagine near-future scenarios that do not contain at least some of the tropes of cyberfiction. With the fabulous and limitless playground that virtual reality offers the imagination, and the mounting certainty that something like VR is just around the corner from us here at the start of the twenty-first century, how can the conscientious and technologically savvy science fiction writer extrapolate relevant futures without the inclusion of cyberspace and its clichÈs? Indeed, casting an eye backwards, many of the fictions of decades past seem much more plausible in light of projections in computer advancements. How many of the near-magical and seemingly godlike powers displayed by the advanced alien races encountered in golden age science fiction tales can be easily explained away as little more than virtual reality?

The Matrix has us, all right, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for us to break free. Cyberpunk may prove to be the most prophetic subgenre to arise from SF, but it is also, at least in my mind, creating something of a bottleneck in our speculative futures. This is not to say that there is not tremendous work being done in this vein. In fact, some of the most exciting cyberfiction in years is being turned out by a few of the writers in this very anthology. But there is something to be said about "too much of a good thing," and it's never a bad idea to shake things up, if only to see what new concepts might tumble out.

This book, then, is an anthology of alternatives to the various virtual realities, where the tropes and trappings of cyberpunk are, shall we say, "conspicuous by their absence." What if there were no AIs, simulations, VR, or cyberspace? What might we have instead of the Net? What might lie on the other side of our Information Age? What might we see if we were to walk down a road not taken?

Here is a collection of eighteen stories from some of today's top talents, visions of futures near and far, glimpses of alternative histories, other dimensions, and more-anything goes, but in each story one or more of the contrivances of the cyberspace era has been replaced by something unexpected and strange. Here then is science fiction unplugged, its wires cut, set free to be Live Without a Net.

-Lou Anders, August 2002

Michael Swanwick is one of the most prolific and inventive writers in science fiction today. His works have been honored with the Hugo, Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards, and have been translated and published throughout the world. Recent collections of his short work include Tales of Old Earth (Frog, Ltd.), Moon Dogs (NESFA Press), and the reissued Gravity's Angels (Frog, Ltd.). The four shorts presented here see him returning to the adventures of the scoundrels Darger and Surplus, characters that he first introduced in the Hugo Award-winning story "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," which debuted in the October/November 2001 issue of Asimov's.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: FOUR SCENES FROM THE POST-UTOPIAN FUTURE

Michael Swanwick

THE SONG OF THE LORELEI

Darger and Surplus were passengers on a small private packet-boat, one of many such that sailed the pristine waters of the Rhine. They carried with them the deed to Buckingham Palace, which they hoped to sell to a brain-baron in Basel. Abruptly Surplus nudged Darger and pointed. On a floating island-city anchored by holdfasts to the center of the river, a large-breasted lorelei perched upon an artificial rock, crooning a jingle for her brothel.

Darger's face stiffened at the vulgarity of the display. But Surplus, who could scarce disapprove of genetic manipulation, being, after all, himself a dog re-formed into human stance and intellect, insisted they put in.

A few coins placated their waterman, and they docked. Surplus disappeared into the warren of custom-grown buildings, and Darger, who was ever a bit of an antiquarian, sauntered into an oddities shop to see what they had. He found a small radio cased in crumbling plastic and asked the proprietor about it.

Swiftly, the proprietor hooked the device up to a bioconverter and plunged the jacks into a nearby potato to provide a trickle of electricity. "Listen!"

Darger placed his ear against the radio and heard a staticky voice whispering, ". . . kill all humans, burn their cities, torture their brains, help us to do so and your death will be less lingering than most, destroy . . ."

He jerked away from the device. "Is this safe?"

"Perfectly, sir. The demons and AIs that the Utopians embedded in their Webs cannot escape via simple radio transmission-the bandwidth is too narrow. So they express their loathing of us continually, against the chance that someone might be listening. Their hatred is greater than their cunning, however, and so they make offers that even the rashest traitor would not consider."

Darger put back the radio on its shelf. "What a pity the Utopians built their infrastructure so well and so ubiquitously that we cannot hope in a hundred lifetimes to root out these hell-beings. Wouldn't a system of functioning radios be a useful thing? Imagine the many advantages of instantaneous communication!"

"To be honest, sir, I do not agree. I find the fact that news travels across Europe at the pace of a walking man mellows it and removes its sting. However bad distant events might have been, we have survived them. Leisureliness is surely preferable to speed, don't you agree?"

"I'm not sure. Tell me something. Have you heard anything about a fire in London? Perhaps in connection with Buckingham Palace?"

"No, sir, I haven't."

Darger patted his breast pocket, where the deed to the palace resided. "Then I agree with you wholeheartedly."

AMERICAN CIGARETTES

"What is it like in America?" Darger asked Surplus. The two rogues were sitting in a ratskeller in Karlsruhe, waiting for their orders to arrive.

"Everybody smokes there," Surplus said. "The bars and restaurants are so filled with smoke that the air is perpetually blue. One rarely sees an American without a cigarette."

"Why on Earth should that be?"

"The cigarettes are treated with a programmable tobacco mosaic virus. Burning the tobacco releases the viruses, and drawing the smoke into the lungs delivers the viruses to the bloodstream. Utilizing a technology I cannot explain because it is proprietary to the industry, the viruses pass easily through the blood-brain barrier, travel to the appropriate centers of the brain, and then reprogram them with the desired knowledge.

"Let us say that your job requires that you work out complex problems in differential calculus. You go to the tobacconist's-they are called drugstores there-and ask for a pack of Harvards. The shopkeeper asks whether you want something in the Sciences or the Humanities, and you specify Mathematics.

"You light up."

"During your leisurely amble back to your office, the structures of the calculus assemble themselves in your mind. You are able to perform the work with perfect confidence, even if this is your first day on the job. On your off-hours you might choose to smoke News, Gossip, or Sports."

"But aren't cigarettes addictive?" Darger asked, fascinated.

"Old wives' tales!" Surplus scoffed. "Perhaps they were in Preutopian times. But today the smoke is both soothing and beneficial. No, it is only the knowledge itself that is harmful."

"How so?"

"Because knowledge is so easily come by, few in my native country bother with higher education. However, the manufacturers, u...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Roc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0451459253
• ISBN 13: 9780451459251
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 384
• Redattore: Anders Lou