Monday, June 17, 2013

new futurians

"The mix was of a genre that Stan was calling Weird Big Beat... He is still half listening to it, staring out of the window, his mind drifting when Joolzy gets on at Dartford and comes striding up the aisle toward him. Graeme pulls his earphones out to greet him....   For half an hour or so they settle back into their own worlds, half private, half public, their interfaced bubble, fiddling with their phones. checking streams and feeds, messages, making sporadic conversation around clicks and scrolls, screen taps, downloads, games, showing each other photos"

from Carl Neville aka The Impostume's new novel-in-progress Resolution Way, the first instalment of which is here and the second instalment (where the quote above comes from) is here

It reads to me as a welcome resurrection of the lost tradition of science fiction as the near-future (very-near-future, in this case) imagined through extrapolation of current trends...  s.f. as politically trenchant satire of the present (which can include left-wing critiques, e.g. The Space Merchants and right-wing critiques, e.g. 1985)

indeed that passage above is not satirically magnified or extrapolated so much as simply a supersharp description of the now...

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