It’s a Small World After All…
Two of the Well’s biggest stars, at least in the geek subcultural hierarchy, get together for Reason as Mike Godwin interviews Bruce Sterling. (In the interest of accuracy, I don’t think ‘bruces’ really spends that much time on the Well anymore; at least he had pretty low visibility when I was a regular member a few years back.) Addendum: Look’s like he’s hanging out on the Well right now, at least for a while.
I’ve been a fan of Sterling’s social-satire-disguised-as-SF for years, and thought The Hacker Crackdown was one of the first books that got the political and cultural implications of hacker culture right (though I said so in cringe-inducing tones, if you look all the way down.) So when PW asked me if I wanted to review his most recent non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now, I jumped at the chance, and I’m hoping the paperback blurbs the part where I called it “a fun hybrid of Robert Kaplan and Faith Popcorn.”
My favorite aphoristic quote from the interview: “Fanatical gestures capture the public’s imagination, but they’re just not as important to people’s lives as massive economic arrangements.” But his quickie analysis of Jules Verne is interesting, too.
6 January 2004 | uncategorized |
Imagine If He’d Gone on Oprah…
Barnes & Noble has just issued a press release to announce that they’ve sold over a million copies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Sigh.
The book (which I admit I haven’t read cover to cover) bugs me. Not so much for the alleged anti-Catholic undertones, about which Amy Welborn, among others, has written eloquently about, and I sorta see but not entirely. Maybe it’s just the way that Brown’s mainstreamed tropes that go back at least as far as the Illuminatus! trilogy and got a somewhat more highfalutin’ expression about 10-15 years ago in Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. (Although it is rather amusing, I must admit, to see Holy Blood, Holy Grail on the bestseller lists after, what, 20 years? Especially since I can dazzle neophytes who only know this stuff from Brown with my mastery of the field, heh heh.) But mostly it’s the bad (from my point of view, anyway) writing. And as a lifelong science fiction and, to a lesser extent, mystery/thriller fan, believe me, I know from bad writing. Oh, Brown can string together a roller coaster ride, but characters? From what I’ve seen, ptui.
I suppose somebody was going to get rich off the Illuminati someday, though.
6 January 2004 | uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
