Alastair Reynolds on living in the future

[tamaranth]

[apologies if this has already been exhaustively linked]

"If you had been transported from 1997 into [2007, you would be incredulous and think of it as science fiction."

Funnily enough I was already thinking along the same lines: a quick trawl of the BBC news site produced:
- renegade wolf cloners
- NASA refusing to coordinate lunar exploration with Russians
- degree show staged in cyberspace
- gene therapy for sight disorder which deteriorates with age (and sounds similar to retinitis pigmentosa, which I first encountered via Tanya Huff's Blood series)
- homes in rural India lit by solar power
- international scandal centres on artificially-constructed celebrity (actually, there's a lot of this)

Worth noting, too, that although some of those stories are in the 'tech' section they are all linked from other parts of the site -- Health, Politics, Education, World News/

However, this is still the real world: where 'sci-fi' is a derogatory term

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

None of those would astonish me in 1997. I'd say "living in the future" (which we were saying in 1997), but only in the same spirit as I say it today. In 1987 I'd be impressed (because I wasn't personally on Usenet yet), but not until I think back to 1977 do I start to think how amazed I'd be, and mostly I'd be amazed at how humanity has effectively stopped caring about space exploration. I expected a return to the moon, a Mars mission, a better space station than this one, and the successor to the Space Shuttle by 2007. Of the Space Shuttles, Enterprise was built in 1976, Columbia in 1979, and Discovery, which is still flying today, in 1983.

So it's a future, just not the future I put my name on the waiting list for.

[reddragdiva]

Yeah. We're living in the same future we were living in in 1997 as far as I can tell.