I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.
Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
Agreed, our real-life corporations are still trying to convince themselves (by 'them' I mean employees) that they're the good guys and wrap everything in a layer of HR-speak' "We're helping connect the world! Yay!", " We're collaborating with the ministry of War to zero people, but only if they have a signed judicial order", etc.
I mean we've got Anthropic openly advertising that they may be engineering the end of the world, we have an AI that called itself "MechaHitler" after its founder did a couple of Sieg Heils at a Presidential inauguration, we've got a major company that named itself Palantir.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.
Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?
You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
That's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
There was some coolness in the tech, though. The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII deck, the mirror shade digital glasses (cut Gibson some slack, it was the 1980s), artificial limbs finished in onyx or chrome.
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.
These things were cool when coveted or adopted by the cool characters.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
And some idiots actually want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia (some dude literally said to me one he would "do anything he could to bring it about"), because they were so enamored with the tech the dystopia part flew over their heads.
Why would someone who has never experienced systemic oppression fear systemic oppression? Techbros and techbrowannabes live in a magnitude-10 reality distortion field.
Old dystopias were too neat. Even the evil systems had a plan. Reality is messier and more absurd. Maybe aliens are the only thing left that's still safely fictional.
Something recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.
I love that Gibsons cyberpunk is "realistic" and mundane (at this point): a girl replaces a virtual singer (Mona Lisa Overdrive), another girl steals glasses containing plans for urban redevelopment (Virtual Light), virtual world is as inhabited as real one and you only need helmet to access it (Pattern Recognition). We already are living with these stories and dystopia is already here, to a degree.
I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.
I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage.
When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.
I think a lot of this is the cultural force of the US being the gravitational center of world politics and finance for several decades. It’s always had a strong anti-intellectual faction, and now as we enter it’s “decaying Roman Empire” phase, it will behave increasingly erratically as it’s elite strip it for parts and the citizenry watch in shock.
As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
> As China rises to become the new gravitational center
I don't think you can just state something like that as some sort of axiom without providing any rationale. Obviously China has become much more powerful and important over the past 4 decades, but I highly doubt they will be the new "gravitational center", for two primary reasons.
First, their demographics are horrible - their population peaked 5 years ago and will continue to decline, meaning they will need to look inward to dedicate more resources to supporting their aging population. While fertility rates are well below replacement in nearly all of the developed world, the extreme ethnic homogeneity and near complete inability to assimilate immigrants long term make East Asia's demographics much more problematic.
Second, nobody wants a conformist autocratic society to be the "center of gravity" of the world. For decades following WWII, the US, despite all of its problems, really was looked up to as a beneficial force by many (yes, again, I know we did some extremely shitty things during the Cold War, but just looking at surveys of different countries' views of the US it was overwhelmingly positive in the Western world). Whereas today, despite China being essentially "the world's workshop", basically all of their trading partners look at them with suspicion and reticence.
I think we're looking at a near and mid-term future where there is basically no (or a crumbling) center of gravity. And this is basically what existed in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire for centuries after its collapse until the rise of Charlemagne, so I think your comparison to "decaying Roman Empire" phase is apropos.
I have to post my rant every time Idiocracy gets mentioned, so feel free to downvote (it is the best way to spend my karma!)
What we're seeing is fundamentally nothing like idiocracy - the similarities are only surface deep, but the structures are vastly different. In Idiocracy, the nation is led by a person who cares about the well-being of all his constituents and seeks out the most capable person in order to improve the material state of his people. Despite his wrestling persona, President Comacho is far, far, FAR closer to Jed Bartlet from the West Wing, than Trump. People in the 2000s could not imagine the true nature of the 2020s.
What you're seeing is a sort of slow-motion civil war. The Trumpist Republicans fundamentally believe only they are allowed to rule and everyone outside their group is an enemy. They despise their enemies and wish to see them suffer, from denying disaster relief, to targeting cities with ICE, the more suffering there is the better. Sadly, reality turned out nothing like Idiocracy.
There is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.
Depends on what you're after. Ballard had several modes in which he wrote.
The early works were generally overtly sci-fi, but mostly earthbound, fitting into the British New Wave of the 1960s, alongside John Brunner. The Drowning World and The Crystal World are both fantastic and unusual for the genre. The short stories are often excellent, and in my opinion some of his most original work is in this period.
The major transition came with The Atrocity Exhibition, a "cut up" novel that was more Cronenberg/Borroughs/Lynch than what came before, and magnified themes that had been emerging in his short stories. Alienation, pop culture fetishism, clinical descriptions of injuries, war (the book was originally called Love and Napalm), the horror lurking under placid suburban utopia. Crash, High-Rise etc. followed in that vein. Crash is probably the best from this period.
He wrote two autobiographical mainstream novels: Empire of the Sun is the famous one.
The late 90s/2000s novels like Super-Cannes are all rethreads of earlier stuff; the Freudian pop-psych view that we are basically animals denied the outlet of violence got a bit tired at this point. They're really well written, but I felt Ballard had lost his edge and didn't have anything insightful to add. His last novel is quite average.
So: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, maybe The Crystal World or the collected short stories.
I highly recommend the “collected interviews” of Ballard that was released some years ago … very interesting exchanges and some almost shockingly present judgments about the future… Especially the future of media in the YouTube age.
I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics".
(Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
My favorite is "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard".
It has some of his best sci-fi, and they're all under 50 pages. His longer fiction (Cocaine Nights, Empire of the Sun, etc.) is okay, but IMO short stories are where he really shined.
The unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing.
A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.
the future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted
conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to precious for mundane or general use, and still at this moment ALL technolgy is powered by fire, wheels and levers at it's base and is instantly understandable and intuitive in it's use, but as others are pointing out, that matters little in relation to the setting and the style of our gadjets and tools, which as some others point out, may be impossible to understand from a certain asthetic back ground or as I am always happy to find out that something is in fact a WHOLE THING which a bunch of people are realy realy into, or even better when someone has a THING thats just for them.
all fine by me.
Or, as the quote attributed to the late Paul Harvey goes,
"Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."
I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.
On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.
Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.
EDIT:
Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).
> Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data
Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.
> I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through
I'm in the same boat - I wanted to re-read, but couldn't find my copy of Neuromancer (which was a chore to get through the first time I read it years ago), so I've started Mona Lisa Overdrive - same thing. Everything is desribed in some dense street subculture patois or as some Sony or Mitsubishi future-product. I guess if the point is "things are recognizable, but this is now a well-established 'different' culture" - mission accomplished. As mentioned though it is a chore. An unrelenting chore. Once you're done though, it's satisfying to reflect on it.
I don't think the novel necessarily implies this consciousness. It is left ambiguous.
It could be an allegory for some artistic types who go on a sort of creative bender and work compulsively, nearly suppressing their regular personality and lives. The machine is somehow a tortured, artistic soul. But it could also just be some ironic malfunction, or could itself be an art installation built intentionally but anonymously out of orbital scrap.
That orbital machine certainly is tuned in a way that tickles Easter eggs in the human mind. But it also just seems to loop endlessly, like a forgotten, automated factory.
There is another similarly ambiguous scene, where an artificial construct represents the knowledge and speaking style of a deceased hacker. It is hooked to a doorbell to respond to visitors, but the narrator tells us it also scans the empty alley as snow falls. The scene is poetic, but it does not tell you whether the construct has a mind and is appreciating the snow versus just being triggered by motion and just trying to localize a potential visitor. Any answer you have there, you brought yourself. The book isn't telling.
That ambiguity seemed like half the point with Gibson. And it also seems prescient for our current LLM-meets-humanity moment too.
> Another thing they got right was [...] None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world and affects how us as we sit here judging how "today" compares to past dystopias.
In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying" nihilism, because it mentally exhausts their victims and deters organizing among those who believe things quite strongly.
In other words, a dystopia may show a moral-fog as something that simply exists among the hive of scum and villainy... but in the real world, perhaps we should be checking for some beekeepers with smoke-pots.
> I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable.
I think we might just not have run out of money yet.
A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.
The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.
Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.
Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
I think the fact that these kinds of companies were portrayed as such in fiction kind of prevents them from adopting the cool aesthetic. Like they need something to separate them from being the exact image of an evil futuristic corporation that lives in our heads. Or else we might actually recognize what they are.
Agreed, our real-life corporations are still trying to convince themselves (by 'them' I mean employees) that they're the good guys and wrap everything in a layer of HR-speak' "We're helping connect the world! Yay!", " We're collaborating with the ministry of War to zero people, but only if they have a signed judicial order", etc.
Their fictional counterparts don't bother.
I mean we've got Anthropic openly advertising that they may be engineering the end of the world, we have an AI that called itself "MechaHitler" after its founder did a couple of Sieg Heils at a Presidential inauguration, we've got a major company that named itself Palantir.
People are reaching pretty hard if they don't see what we're dealing with here.
What a fucking depressing timeline. We could have built such a beautiful world instead
Today's billionaires aren't like yesterday's. They could be doing cool shit but they are just padding their own private real estate and stock portfolios. Yawn.
Why not make an epic bridge or tower with gargoyles on it? Why not a museum or park?
You can walk around Europe and see buildings from centuries ago. Who is building the things and spaces people in 2426 will marvel at?
These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.
I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
This comment feels like it's from the early 90's when people were being critical of bands for selling out.
AKA the good old times when it wasn't as culturally accepted to be openly evil if it made money.
Reminds me of Tool's reaction to that trend, "Hooker with a Penis"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooker_with_a_Penis
Is there something wrong with being critical of bands for selling out, though?
Except this is being critical of the popularity and fans, not the band.
That's a very different situation. An individual "anchoring their identity" to a brand isn't doing so to earn money, which is why bands "sell out". It's just a choice they make about who they are, and I have to agree with GP that that seems tragically uncool.
Apple is the only big tech company with a decent aesthetic tho.
The dystopia will be televised in Corporate Memphis.
At least with Gibson, I think cyberpunk idolized actual punk culture. The coolness was found, brought, or arranged by these characters.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
There was some coolness in the tech, though. The Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII deck, the mirror shade digital glasses (cut Gibson some slack, it was the 1980s), artificial limbs finished in onyx or chrome.
Meanwhile in the real world we get Nvidia DGX Spark which has a front finished in beige carpeting, or Meta glasses which make you look like either a dork or a pervert.
These things were cool when coveted or adopted by the cool characters.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
writing often romanticizes everything, reality feels stupid by comparison
They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.
Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
And some idiots actually want to live in a cyberpunk dystopia (some dude literally said to me one he would "do anything he could to bring it about"), because they were so enamored with the tech the dystopia part flew over their heads.
Why would someone who has never experienced systemic oppression fear systemic oppression? Techbros and techbrowannabes live in a magnitude-10 reality distortion field.
I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...
Old dystopias were too neat. Even the evil systems had a plan. Reality is messier and more absurd. Maybe aliens are the only thing left that's still safely fictional.
I'm cheering for the San Ti. They can't be worse than what we currently have.
Aaah don't jinx it aaaaah
Maybe they'll be cute though. Like Grogu.
Something recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.
The Bull's Hour by Ivan Yefremov comes to mind and its closer to reality.
I love that Gibsons cyberpunk is "realistic" and mundane (at this point): a girl replaces a virtual singer (Mona Lisa Overdrive), another girl steals glasses containing plans for urban redevelopment (Virtual Light), virtual world is as inhabited as real one and you only need helmet to access it (Pattern Recognition). We already are living with these stories and dystopia is already here, to a degree.
Don't forget also Screamers is happening
Paper clippings
Mmm, delicious
Totally lame without the megastructures.
Commanding Heights by Yergin & Stanislaw
I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.
With CRISPR and AI, sapient pearwood is just a few years out.
Caves of Qud had it right all along.
Live and drink friend
100%
I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage.
When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.
Idiocracy seems like the most likely sci-fi outcome.
I think a lot of this is the cultural force of the US being the gravitational center of world politics and finance for several decades. It’s always had a strong anti-intellectual faction, and now as we enter it’s “decaying Roman Empire” phase, it will behave increasingly erratically as it’s elite strip it for parts and the citizenry watch in shock.
As China rises to become the new gravitational center, it will be interesting to see how they reshape things in their image. On the one hand, they seem to be more engineering-brained than lawyer-brained, which bodes well (might be a more viable path to cyberpunk). But just as the west has been haunted by its history of white supremacy, China will be haunted by its history of Han supremacy, so I am not holding my breath that we net out to some sort of multi-cultural utopia.
> As China rises to become the new gravitational center
I don't think you can just state something like that as some sort of axiom without providing any rationale. Obviously China has become much more powerful and important over the past 4 decades, but I highly doubt they will be the new "gravitational center", for two primary reasons.
First, their demographics are horrible - their population peaked 5 years ago and will continue to decline, meaning they will need to look inward to dedicate more resources to supporting their aging population. While fertility rates are well below replacement in nearly all of the developed world, the extreme ethnic homogeneity and near complete inability to assimilate immigrants long term make East Asia's demographics much more problematic.
Second, nobody wants a conformist autocratic society to be the "center of gravity" of the world. For decades following WWII, the US, despite all of its problems, really was looked up to as a beneficial force by many (yes, again, I know we did some extremely shitty things during the Cold War, but just looking at surveys of different countries' views of the US it was overwhelmingly positive in the Western world). Whereas today, despite China being essentially "the world's workshop", basically all of their trading partners look at them with suspicion and reticence.
I think we're looking at a near and mid-term future where there is basically no (or a crumbling) center of gravity. And this is basically what existed in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire for centuries after its collapse until the rise of Charlemagne, so I think your comparison to "decaying Roman Empire" phase is apropos.
I have to post my rant every time Idiocracy gets mentioned, so feel free to downvote (it is the best way to spend my karma!)
What we're seeing is fundamentally nothing like idiocracy - the similarities are only surface deep, but the structures are vastly different. In Idiocracy, the nation is led by a person who cares about the well-being of all his constituents and seeks out the most capable person in order to improve the material state of his people. Despite his wrestling persona, President Comacho is far, far, FAR closer to Jed Bartlet from the West Wing, than Trump. People in the 2000s could not imagine the true nature of the 2020s.
What you're seeing is a sort of slow-motion civil war. The Trumpist Republicans fundamentally believe only they are allowed to rule and everyone outside their group is an enemy. They despise their enemies and wish to see them suffer, from denying disaster relief, to targeting cities with ICE, the more suffering there is the better. Sadly, reality turned out nothing like Idiocracy.
You're still being very magnanimous. Feels more like a tech Ankh-Morpork without the humour to me.
We get the future that sells the most novels?
There is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.
The only reason I know who J.G. Ballard is is because of Jean Baudrillard.
I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.
Where would you recommend I start with J.G.? I got into Baudrillard and have been meaning to go further down the train of thought.
Depends on what you're after. Ballard had several modes in which he wrote.
The early works were generally overtly sci-fi, but mostly earthbound, fitting into the British New Wave of the 1960s, alongside John Brunner. The Drowning World and The Crystal World are both fantastic and unusual for the genre. The short stories are often excellent, and in my opinion some of his most original work is in this period.
The major transition came with The Atrocity Exhibition, a "cut up" novel that was more Cronenberg/Borroughs/Lynch than what came before, and magnified themes that had been emerging in his short stories. Alienation, pop culture fetishism, clinical descriptions of injuries, war (the book was originally called Love and Napalm), the horror lurking under placid suburban utopia. Crash, High-Rise etc. followed in that vein. Crash is probably the best from this period.
He wrote two autobiographical mainstream novels: Empire of the Sun is the famous one.
The late 90s/2000s novels like Super-Cannes are all rethreads of earlier stuff; the Freudian pop-psych view that we are basically animals denied the outlet of violence got a bit tired at this point. They're really well written, but I felt Ballard had lost his edge and didn't have anything insightful to add. His last novel is quite average.
So: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, maybe The Crystal World or the collected short stories.
I highly recommend the “collected interviews” of Ballard that was released some years ago … very interesting exchanges and some almost shockingly present judgments about the future… Especially the future of media in the YouTube age.
Then I would read Empire of the Sun.
Super Cannes should be a perfect place to start for anyone reading this site.
Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise
"Crash" I know of by reputation.
I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics".
(Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
My favorite is "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard".
It has some of his best sci-fi, and they're all under 50 pages. His longer fiction (Cocaine Nights, Empire of the Sun, etc.) is okay, but IMO short stories are where he really shined.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70239.The_Best_Short_Sto...
It's more like a deliberate, manufactured future by the bigdiks that slowly takes place in certain countries.
The unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing.
A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.
Yes, the diversity of Gibson is amazing “in an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
Nah, I wasn't talking about WG and his quote.
the future is here, it's just not evenly distrubuted conversly, there is no human technology that isn't still bieng practiced in it's original form, ie: there are still people knapping stone tools that learned it from there parents and grandparents going on strait back to the first members of our "species" who learned it from there hybrid parents, in an unbroken chain, which is directly connected to ALL modern technology, in that early metal working was done with stone tools, as metal was far to precious for mundane or general use, and still at this moment ALL technolgy is powered by fire, wheels and levers at it's base and is instantly understandable and intuitive in it's use, but as others are pointing out, that matters little in relation to the setting and the style of our gadjets and tools, which as some others point out, may be impossible to understand from a certain asthetic back ground or as I am always happy to find out that something is in fact a WHOLE THING which a bunch of people are realy realy into, or even better when someone has a THING thats just for them. all fine by me.
Or, as the quote attributed to the late Paul Harvey goes,
"Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
It's telling that The Ghost in the Shell, the 2026 adaptation, is still set in 2029-2030.
Dystopian fiction was supposed to be a manual but a warning that was ignored.
I'm not sure it was ignored, so much as people are apathetic.
Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."
I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.
On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.
Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.
EDIT:
Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).
> Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data
Data painted and performed music: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data#The_arts
To be fair, his motivation was to become more human. But at least he did have intrinsic motivations that didn’t appear to come from some training.
That aside, there are many examples that long predate Gibson:
Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC (1950): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story). It also has the motive of a human passing off the AI’s artistic creation as his own.
C. M. Kornbluth’s “With These Hands” (1951): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531
Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatiza...
Incidentally, J. G. Ballard’s “Studio 5, The Stars” (1961): https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/some-dance-to-forget
Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.
Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.
> I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through
I'm in the same boat - I wanted to re-read, but couldn't find my copy of Neuromancer (which was a chore to get through the first time I read it years ago), so I've started Mona Lisa Overdrive - same thing. Everything is desribed in some dense street subculture patois or as some Sony or Mitsubishi future-product. I guess if the point is "things are recognizable, but this is now a well-established 'different' culture" - mission accomplished. As mentioned though it is a chore. An unrelenting chore. Once you're done though, it's satisfying to reflect on it.
AI and creativity/art is actually explored through Data in Star Trek. He was a painter, played the violin, gave poetry readings...
> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this
Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.
The difference is that the AI-made art is strikingly good. And that underlines that it's a superconsciouness and not just a bot.
I don't think the novel necessarily implies this consciousness. It is left ambiguous.
It could be an allegory for some artistic types who go on a sort of creative bender and work compulsively, nearly suppressing their regular personality and lives. The machine is somehow a tortured, artistic soul. But it could also just be some ironic malfunction, or could itself be an art installation built intentionally but anonymously out of orbital scrap.
That orbital machine certainly is tuned in a way that tickles Easter eggs in the human mind. But it also just seems to loop endlessly, like a forgotten, automated factory.
There is another similarly ambiguous scene, where an artificial construct represents the knowledge and speaking style of a deceased hacker. It is hooked to a doorbell to respond to visitors, but the narrator tells us it also scans the empty alley as snow falls. The scene is poetic, but it does not tell you whether the construct has a mind and is appreciating the snow versus just being triggered by motion and just trying to localize a potential visitor. Any answer you have there, you brought yourself. The book isn't telling.
That ambiguity seemed like half the point with Gibson. And it also seems prescient for our current LLM-meets-humanity moment too.
> Another thing they got right was [...] None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
I think it's worth asking whether "nobody really believes anything" is itself the cynical manipulative play, one that occurs in the real world and affects how us as we sit here judging how "today" compares to past dystopias.
In particular I'm thinking of how certain regimes encourage a kind of "everybody is lying" nihilism, because it mentally exhausts their victims and deters organizing among those who believe things quite strongly.
In other words, a dystopia may show a moral-fog as something that simply exists among the hive of scum and villainy... but in the real world, perhaps we should be checking for some beekeepers with smoke-pots.
> I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable.
I think we might just not have run out of money yet. A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.
The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.
"They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate."
Sounds unlikely to me without the caveat "within this particular brand of politics and socioeconomics".
Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have and what they will choose to do with it. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
There's some Pynchon in these times too.
Exactly. I'm seeing pullback more and more.