The kind folks over at SXSW are hosting a podcast of Bruce Sterling's State of the World keynote. It's a classic Sterling rant that focuses on the opposing forces of the emerging Bright Green Future and the Grim Meathook Future. Somewhere in between he talks about Spimes, Web 2.0, life in Eastern Europe and the recklessness and failure of our current administration and their science policy.
Holy Shit! Fredric Jameson has a new book called Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire of Utopia and Other Science Fictions that examines the utopian narrative of fringe SF novels. From the publisher's description:
The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness—alien life and alien worlds—and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today.Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.
I found out about this book by reading Joshua Glenn's excellent essay in yesterday's Boston Globe called Back to Utopia: Can the antidote to today's neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction? I haven't been this excited about a work of theory in a while.
New Scientist describes 11 Steps to a Better Brain.
Time Magazine gets wise to Wikipedia and Wikis in general.
Kottke offers a spot-on review of Primer.
William Gibson's "Garage Kubrick" idea from 1999, in which he "predicts" Primer.
My Best of 2004 continues today with a list of the best books I read all year long. Some are new, others were published prior to this year, but all of them are great.
1. The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson
The Baroque Cycle is nothing short of a masterpiece. Stephenson places the ancestors of the main characters from his seminal novel Cryptonomicon in late 17th and early 18th century Europe. They participate n a myriad of landmark historical events including the writing of Newton's Principia Mathematica, the formulation of Leibniz's Calculus, The Popish Plot, The Glorious Revolution, The War of Spanish Succession, the invention of Newcomen's steam engine and the foundation of modern science and currency.
The historical detail elucidated in these 2,700 pages is mind-boggling. Stephenson goes into hyper-detailed, geekish depictions of such diverse subjects as piracy, alchemy, enlightenment-era scientific exploration, the structure of 18th century London's prison system, Protestant political dissent, the social behaviors of the court at Versailles under Louis XIV, and the invention of currency, trade and free market systems. In his acknowledgements at the end of The System of the World Stephenson notes his indebtedness to Ferdinand Braudel's Capitalism and Civilization, which really comes through in these depictions. This may be the first historical novel to ever utilize Braudel's "bottom up" approach in narrative form. These books are not only the best that I read this year, they are quite possibly my favorites of all time.
2. Getting Things Done by David Allen
Getting things done launched a movement this year. Geeks everywhere are figuring out that the systems laid out in this book are applicable to their everyday lives. I've been using the GTD system for a few months and my work productivity has shot through the roof.
3. Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
2004 was the year that I finally got the importance of web standards and it came to me right when I finally started to get it about content. Those two elements, standards & content, are the cornerstones of the web's present and future. This book makes the absolute importance of web standards even more clear and also lays down some really awesome strategies for designing sites with CSS/XHTML. Now if I can only make 2005 the year that I implement standards into all of my projects...
