Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 items tagged “sciencefiction”

2023

Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we’re [sci-fi authors] not futurists, we’re entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it’s a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it.

Charles Stross # 11th November 2023, 1:09 am

2007

Unpacking the Zeitgeist. On WoW corpse spamming: “There are thirty years’ worth of future shock condensed into this one news item [...] a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.” # 8th July 2007, 5:36 pm