Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years [Hardcover]

To take one example, Sterling tells us in one paragraph that a "cruise missile ... is just a rich guy's truck bomb". But in the very next paragraph he emphasizes that there are in fact huge differences between cruise missiles and truck bombs that go far beyond the class background of their users. Cruise missiles are produced and deployed by complex, industrially advanced societies, while truck bombs are used by terrorists who operate beyond the ken of settled governments and civilized society.

Another, more serious example of some of the less-than-deep thinking that went into this book is its overall organizational gimmick, which is based on the "Seven Ages of Man" so poetically described by Shakespeare and Marlowe. Sterling emhasizes the chronological aspect of these "Ages" by labelling his chapters as stages. Stage 1 is the Infant, Stage 2 is the Student, and so on. He uses these stages as conceptual launching pads for fascinating riffs on a variety of subjects related to 21st century technology, culture and politics. In the chapter on the Infant, for instance, he writes at length about future bioengineering not just for babies but also adults and what this will mean for huminaty as a whole. In "Stage 4: The Soldier" he speculates on the nature of future warfare. Thus, Sterling is really often talking about cross-cutting themes rather that chronological ages, which is more than a little confusing. Why he did this, except that it is so cool to quote from Shakespeare, escapes me.

A final example of Sterling's inconsistency is the subtitle of the book itself: "Envisioning the Next 50 Years". In fact, he often describes trends from the late 21st century, which puts us more than 50 years ahead. So why didn't he just call the book "Envisioning the 21st Century"? Search me.

This is a great book, but Sterling's slickness can't completely compensate for these weaknesses. Cool soundbytes, technological virtuosity, cute wordplay and even large dollops of honest-to-God weighty insight are not enough to make up for some rather shoddy underlying illogic and conceptual weaknesses.

Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds? When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute? When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market? Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel.

"Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked. Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation....

But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre:

BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within. In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison. Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman. When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror.

EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales. Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market. Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech.

DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins. We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect. (In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing. It is simply inevitable.) We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists. Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction. Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel.

WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar. Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack. And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy.

LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders? Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power? Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories?

DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that? Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold? But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264). We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines. Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface....

All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks. Some awesome riffs here. Kept me on tenterhooks throughout. Highest recommendation.

--for Ian Vance