Distraction

I’ve just finished re-reading Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. It’s one of his better ones; this is about the third time through for me. It came out in 1998, it’s set in 2044, and it’s holding up pretty impressively 15 years on. The future he paints is still about as plausible as at the time, maybe more so. It’s not like earlier sci-fi that got completely gutter-balled by cell phones, the internet, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In fact, you have to keep in mind while reading it that it pre-dates the 2000 election, the Patriot Act, the Maker movement, hurricane Katrina, crowdsourcing, the I-35 bridge collapse, the gulf oil spill, the 2008 stock market crash, and the sharing economy. None of that had happened, but the future he lays out is dominated by: a wrecked economy with alarming unemployment and economic disparity; crumbling infrastructure; a factionalized, squabbling and ineffective congress; and a perpetual State of Emergency. And much of it is set in a Louisiana devastated by hurricanes and pollution.

The cool thing about the book is that - despite all that - it’s not entirely dystopian, because the real theme is about people being smart and innovative in the face of adversity. It’s about bottom-up organizations and grass-roots action. It’s about using technology in a way that’s both empowering and humanizing. But it certainly doesn’t fall into being simple and utopian; a lot of the action revolves around how all that collides with traditional top-down power structures.

The point of science fiction is not to predict the future; it’s to help us think about the present. By that yardstick, this is probably a better book now than when it was written. The questions it’s asking - about how to cope with climate change, globalization, and technology - have only gotten more vivid and urgent.