Whatever happened to the future?

[hecubot]

I pulled Storming The Reality Studio off my bookshelf the other day and was shocked to see it was fourteen years old. This was my favorite of the cyberpunk primers, because it included so much of the theory behind the movement (pieces by Baudrillard, Derrida, Jameson), non-fiction essays and influences (Pynchon, Burroughs, Acker) along with the

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[hecubot]

> Could we have deescalated Christian/Muslim nation tensions had we been able to recognize it futher?

I know that a lot of my understanding of Muslim culture came from cyberpunk books. There's one short story in particular by Sterling where a Muslim assassin befriends a charismatic American rock star (who is like a cross between Bob Marley and Bruce Springsteen) and then assasinates him - where the whole point of the story was for the Muslim character to articulate the differences between his culture and the West. And for all that he was a hitman, he was a very sympathetic and thoughtful character.

I don't think the value of SF's predictive nature is to make actual changes in the world, so much as to provide insight and useful metaphors for how the world has already changed. I don't think science fiction's reach is broad enough to de-escalate anything, but for at least one reader (me) both the motives and the methods behind the 9/11 attack were very clear.

The cyberpunk genre also gave me a very useful framework to understand corporate multinationals - their influence and nature. I suppose I could've gotten the same thing from Noam Chomsky, but he hardly ever writes about sexy assassin girls with surgically inset mirrorshades.