Rating: 
Summary: No meat and no potatoes..............
Review: I read the book in a little over two hours. In the title, Sterling says he is "envisioning the next fifty years." In fact the book is little about the next fifty years as it is Sterling's own thoughts about the past fifty years. In the introduction to the book he presents his "seven novel aspects of the twenty-first century." He does this using a character from Shakespeare's 'As You Like It'; Jaques, who is best know for his famous lecture, which begins with: "all the world's a stage" and ends with "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." It would have been more appropriate if Sterling had used Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing.' Sterling tells us he is both a Science Fiction writer and a Futurologist. I know a Futurologist when I see one, and Sterling is no Futurologist.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable forecast for the future
Review: Mr. Sterling's clever analogies and examples keep the pace of this book readable and interesting. So often "futurists" deal only in numbers, quoting Census statistics that do not illustrate the wealth of technological and other advances that will shape tomorrow. The subject mater of this text is usually fodder for scientists and think tanks. The Future Is Now provides a terrific "futuristic" outlook for those in a variety of professions and industries.
Rating:
Summary: Readable forecast for the future
Review: Mr. Sterling's clever analogies and examples keep the pace of this book readable and interesting. So often "futurists" deal only in numbers, quoting Census statistics that do not illustrate the wealth of technological and other advances that will shape tomorrow. The subject mater of this text is usually fodder for scientists and think tanks. The Future Is Now provides a terrific "futuristic" outlook for those in a variety of professions and industries.
Rating: 
Summary: Not very good...
Review: Not very good... tries to examine the social and institutional trends, but goes into much self-serving prose.
Rating:
Summary: Not very good...
Review: Not very good... tries to examine the social and institutional trends, but goes into much self-serving prose.
Rating:
Summary: Skip it
Review: Once, Bruce Sterling wrote daring, visionary SF but he has incrementally moved toward humor and trend-forecasting. Most of the ideas covered in this book have been introduced elsewhere before, and in better style. You won't want this one for your collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Tomorrow Never Knows
Review: Paradigm-shifts can stick in our collective craw like jawbreakers in a goose-neck. Galileo's carpet-pull on Ptolemy was no amateur-hour prank, and Darwin trumping Yahweh left a cantelope-sized goiter that still makes religious fundies bark and fume. Earth-shaking, yes, but taking decades, sometimes centuries to evolve their total, terraforming, reality-torquing impact -- slow-flying dreadnaughts of cultural metamorphosis whose meaning and trajectory still won't let us sleep at night.Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds? When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute? When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market? Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel. "Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked. Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation.... But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre: BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within. In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison. Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman. When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror. EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales. Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market. Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech. DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins. We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect. (In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing. It is simply inevitable.) We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists. Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction. Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel. WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar. Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack. And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy. LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders? Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power? Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories? DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that? Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold? But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264). We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines. Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface.... All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks. Some awesome riffs here. Kept me on tenterhooks throughout. Highest recommendation. --for Ian Vance
Rating:
Summary: Tomorrow Never Knows
Review: Paradigm-shifts can stick in our collective craw like jawbreakers in a goose-neck. Galileo's carpet-pull on Ptolemy was no amateur-hour prank, and Darwin trumping Yahweh left a cantelope-sized goiter that still makes religious fundies bark and fume. Earth-shaking, yes, but taking decades, sometimes centuries to evolve their total, terraforming, reality-torquing impact -- slow-flying dreadnaughts of cultural metamorphosis whose meaning and trajectory still won't let us sleep at night. Sterling's question is: What happens when the winds of change start storming the reality-studio at supersonic speeds? When whiplash upgrades seem to convulse the Zeitgeist every other minute? When dimensions start spinning like nerve-cells in a centrifuge, when ontology itself becomes as fluid as the global market? Leaning into the stormwinds of these queries, *Tomorrow Now* is less a bland Tofflerian forecast than a smoking flak-helmet pocked with the dents, scars, and impact-profiles of paradigm-shifts concussing like hot shrapnel. "Apocalypse is boring," as Sterling likes to say, the last-ditch noctuary of the evangelical, the helpless, the neo-Luddite, the future-shocked. Better to encounter futurity with all the Olympian resources of the secular visionary imagination, with conceptual thaumaturgy and high comedy, with new languages to be learned and created, new disciplines picked up and dropped on the fly, a new world racing a hairsbreadth ahead of social and environmental holocausts that have always accompanied technological innovation.... But hey, enough of my hero-worshipping agit-prop, here are some snapshots from Sterling's globalist Bazaar of the Bizarre: BIOTECH: Let's learn a lesson from our ancestor and brethren, the prokaryote -- let's pay homage to the two pounds of living bacteria that all humans carry within. In the microbe-literate society of the future, the elasticity and survival-skills of the bacterial swarm will make human cloning look like "a simpleminded stunt"(27) by comparison. Genetic engineering will heal the sick, fortify new deadly viruses, darken and transfigure every certainty, pump ontological coolants into the icy elysium of the posthuman. When evolution is reverse-engineered, becoming another stock-option in the industrial market sweep, Homo Prometheus will tap into genetic realms of unprecedented freedom, complexity, beauty, disfigurement, and terror. EDUCATION: Whisked and pummeled by constant change, traditions will corrode, protocols will deliquesce, and canons will bloom with rot like beached whales. Fields of learning and praxis will ooze squishily from discipline to discipline, producing a steady stream of dynamic hybrids to stay on top of the market. Cultural memory will become like Leonard in *Memento* trying to reassemble and deploy his rapidly obsolescing past, swimming inside of whirlpool of innovation, competition, ecological catastrophe, and an elephant's graveyard of accumulating dead tech. DESIGN: When things start to think, when domestic objects "love" you, when Shopping starts to look like Art and Philosophy, "visionary materialism" becomes a tasteless euphemism for a phase of cybernetic immersion that would have given McLuhan the spins. We will all be owned by our machines the way tribal peoples feel "owned" by the horizon, by the regenerative landscape of moon and tide, river and mountain, animal and insect. (In case you mistake my tone, this is not a "good" thing. It is simply inevitable.) We will all be passionate, obsessed fetishists. Think of the current ubiquity of cell-phones and telecom gear, and multiply it a thousandfold, in every direction. Trying to write "predictive" science-fiction in this maelstrom of voices and priorities will be like trying to set up a house of cards inside a wind-tunnel. WAR: Cocksure superpowers trying to net a swarm of locusts in Fourth World zones run by pirates, drug-runners, mercs, ethnic-genociders, and cold-eyed Arab theology students jumping from wreckage to wreckage in the transnational narco-arms bazaar. Just think Belgrade, Kabul, Chechnya, Baghdad, and Mogadishu on crack. And the Third World zones of controlled anarchy embedded in every First World technocracy. LAW, BUSINESS, POLITICS: Will there be much for governments to do in a post-ideological world, where public policy simpers beneath the windfalls of corporate underwriting, where human rights become a browser plug-in, where success and happiness is sold in terraced upgrades to graduated bidders? Will lawyers and legislators and police superstructures be installed as ornamental horticulture, migrant tenants surfing the crest of technology's raw, surging power? Will a democratic electorate retain its passion for activism and involvement, or will we vote with our money, our investments, our channel flipping, our site surfing, our zodiac of recorded purchases and credit histories? DEATH: Sure, the Atomic Age may have decked us out in a cozy, suburban Cold War where mutually assured destruction and commie witchhunts could guarantee rigid cultural identity, war-fever eschatology, and a sober sense of imperialist mission (in short, the technocratic inheritor of Judaeo-Christian End Times), but where's the corporate payoff in that? Why not treat human mortality as another marketing-scenario to be spun, merchandized, glossed and sold? But if Sterling is right, our species may, in the end, "outsmart itself to death, [if] human knowledge is...not compatible with human survival"(264). We've burrowed too deep and too greedily into the planet to give birth and sustenance to our machines. Every species lost in the quest to infect the ecosystem with our ubiquity is a piece of the planetary survival-plan that's been irretrievably eroded by our narcissism, our fear, our all-too-human frenzy for mastery and technique, our Faustian gamble with machine-interface.... All in all, Mr. Sterling puts the Zeit in Geist, and *Tomorrow Now* has enough Plutarchan zing, erudition, and vervy wisdom to keep you buzzing for weeks. Some awesome riffs here. Kept me on tenterhooks throughout. Highest recommendation. --for Ian Vance
Rating:
Summary: Globalize Your Head
Review: Sterling's career has been a fascinating ride, watching the young "blazing fanatic" who wrote Schismatrix decades ago grapple with and harness - but not tame - his revolutionary imagination. Bruce has become his own best protagonist, who since 198n has taken himself, and us, on a picaresque journey through the hyperreal present. With Tomorrow Now, the Huck-Finn-by-way-of-Baudrillard part of that journey is over: Sterling has matured, emerged, and come full circle (thinkers who have followed Sterling from the start will realize that Tomorrow Now is Schismatrix as non-fiction, or a manual). Reading "Tomorrow Now" (the title is not actually the vapid jingle is appears to be), i laughed the way i laugh when reading Zen masters. The honed clarity of this mind is Western Zen on the order of Mark Twain. To my X and Y cohorts who (as i once did a decade ago on the Well) complain that Sterling (and Gibson) appear to be writing on Prozac compared to the shiny aggression of their earlier work: let's do what Sterling is trying to get us to do and grow up. Instead of wasting more of our precious early midlife on faux-revolutionary pop imitations of early cyberpunk (the Matrix, etc.), let's do tomorrow, now: it's taking both the red and the blue pill. It's Gandhi's own Fight Club. (If you just have to fix on early Sterlingian visionary depth with more edge, read D.H.Lawrence's poems and nonfiction.) Have you noticed?: the rebirth of a new cultural core for liberal democracy is entering the third trimester. Bruce and that sci-fi character par excellence, Ken Wilber (wasn't he in the Artificial Kid?), are giving us the left and right prongs of a neo Hegelian pincer. It's up to us to man that pincer: I am in a Global Paris, and it is 1841. Get this book and join me.
Rating:
Summary: Sterling delivers
Review: Sterling's science fiction is characterized by a keen appreciation for social forces and the increasingly intimate realtionship between things seen and unseen (the latter being anything from genetically tailored microbes to omnipresent cultural agendas). In "Tomorrow Now," his first book-length nonfiction work since the dated but fascinating "The Hacker Crackdown" (a tome on computer crime and digital culture written in the Internet's infancy), Sterling envisions the trends, technologies, and mutant ideologies that will define the first half of the 21st century. "Tomorrow Now" is Sterling at his chatty, global-headed best. He writes about the future with skill and heartfelt exuberance, avoiding the perils of dystopian science fiction. Readers expecting biotech holocaust or maurauding robots will probably be disappointed in Sterling's close-to-home approach. But for readers into the political ramifications of computer networks, "ubicomp," and postindustrial design philosophy, "Tomorrow Now" delivers in spades. The future, in Sterling's eyes, is merely an alternate way of looking at history. As such, it's an artifact of our own desires and creative stamina: a perplexing realm where "dystopia" and "utopia" blend and ignite with incandescent results. True to his science-fictional visions, "Tomorrow Now" is both laugh-out-loud funny--read his commentary on the pervasive techno-ecology of pseudo-organic "blobjects"--and grimly cautionary. "Tomorrow Now" unveils a world that thrives off future-shock, held together by neobiological systems and threatened by greenhouse catastrophe. Along the way, we meet angst-ridden clones, digitally savvy terrorists, and our own posthuman descendants. "Tomorrow Now" is imminently readable, thoughtful, and soundly structured. Required reading for postcyberpunks and curious bystanders alike.
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