michael lambe's scrapbook

Boingboing has a link up today to a full scan of The Usborne Book of the Future: A Trip In Time to the Year 2000 and Beyond (1979). It’s a very exciting (to a schoolboy) and optimistic vision of a now alternate future of undersea cities, space travel, robots, incredible cybernetic advances in medicine… you know all the fantastical sci-fi stuff we dreamed about when we were kids. The thing is, I can clearly remember reading this as a small boy, poring over those beautiful illustrations and it totally coloured in my vision of what the future would be. I couldn’t wait to grow up and travel to Mars! No mention of Bush, the Iraq War or impending recession in there, eh? I’m still interested in visions of the near future, but these days I find myself reading stuff like this:

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Lot’s of good stuff in here; tales of genetic manipulation, the interweb, virtual reality, apocalypse and of emerging technologies that change what it means to be human and so also change the moral and mental landscape. My favorites would be the delightfully amoral “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick, the heart-breaking “Wedding Album” by David Marusek and “The Calorie Man” by Paolo Bacigalupi; a cautionary tale of what might be if we put too much trust in companies like Monsanto. But every story in here had something to teach me, and more importantly it was a damn good read. The anthology is peppered with excerpts from correspondence between writers Bruce Sterling and John Kessel. Here’s a representative snippet from Kessel to Sterling:

…You are nearer the quick of it with words like ‘wonder,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘visionary drive,’ ‘conceptual novelty’ – and especially ‘cosmic fear.’ This is the dirty little secret of science fiction: that its roots are planted not in the logical, positivistic assumptions of ‘science,’ but in some twisted apprehension (I use the word in the sense both of understanding and fear) that ‘the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.’ We fear and are attracted by that irrationality. It yawns like a pit beneath our attempts to understand technology’s effects on us; it tugs at us like a cliff whispering, ‘come on, jump.’
LINK

Speaking of strange… Last night, I watched the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore on Altertube. Alan Moore is a brilliant writer, and it is fascinating to hear his insights into storytelling, religion, war, pornography, spirituality & materialism, the very nature of the Self…

…Now this is the single most important thing that we can ever attain; the knowledge of our own Self. And yet there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge not just to ignore the Self, but actually seem to have the urge to obliterate themselves. This is horrific, but you can almost understand the desire to simply wipe out that awareness because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually possess such a thing as a Soul, such a precious thing. What if you break it? What if you lose it? Mightn’t it be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure? I think that the way people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self and then having to maintain it.
LINK

This news from Avaaz:

Huge news out of Japan: a top newspaper is reporting a major shift in climate policy, and citing Avaaz members as one of the reasons why!

The paper reports that at a critical, high-level meeting on global warming, the Environment Minister held up Avaaz’s “Titanic” newspaper ad from the Bali summit–showing Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda, with Bush, steering towards climate disaster… along with a call for tough 2020 emissions targets, signed by 90,000 Avaaz members.

“The world sees Japan as a force resisting change! Are we okay with this?” the minister asked. The Chief Cabinet Minister suggested setting a target. Days later, Prime Minister Fukuda announced his decision: at last, Japan would set a 2020 emissions target!

This is a genuine victory. Japan is a huge polluter, a key Bush ally, and host of this summer’s crucial G8 summit. Congratulations to everyone for the positive role we all played!

LINK to a scan of the Asahi Shimbun article.
LINK to Avaaz crisis fundraiser.