2040: Diary of an interesting year

http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/12/21/091221fi_fiction_simpson?currentPage=all

by akkartik • 17 years ago

32 25 17 years ago

teuobk• 17 years ago

...and someone, far away in a remote part of the Rocky Mountains, puts his hand in the air and makes the sign of the dollar.

unalone• 17 years ago

...returns to the real world, and finds it's hard to find a welcome when you insist on looking at people like they're rodents.

Seriously, guys? We're still pretending like Rand wasn't batshit?

citatus• 17 years ago

God am I sick of tedious gloomy post-apocalyptic stories. I had them in school when they were about nukes. Now they're about the environment but they're the same boring gloomy defeatist stuff. Between those two dates, of course, we had tens of millions of Chinese and Indian people being lifted out of poverty, the fall of apartheid and the Soviet Union, democracy in Eastern Europe, the Internet...

The future is the Jetsons, baby, not this shit.

aresant• 17 years ago

I owe you a nickel each time I use "The future is the Jetsons, baby, not this shit" - awesome!

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

March 5, 2040.

Ate Astro today. It was either him or Elroy, and frankly the boy is more tolerable these days since we can no longer find refined sugar to feed him.

m0th87• 17 years ago

Whether or not you deem it a realistic scenario does not detract from the artistic quality of it. What about 1984? Brave New World? Dr. Strangelove? All of them gloomy and dystopian, and all of them damned good!

Nuclear warfare was (and still is) a very serious threat. Just because we've been lucky enough to skirt such a conflict doesn't mean it's not a viable threat. And depending on who you ask, ecological collapse is a very serious issue as well. I like these types of stories because they serve as a grim reminder of what could be. And maybe, just maybe, they effect enough change to steer us clear from it.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

I'm not even an optimist. I'm not necessarily a pessimist either but I know that the technological Genie is not going back into the bottle no matter what else.

Even if the future is going to be grim, it will be grim in a complex technological fashion, not this simplistic shit. Already the homeless have mobile phones.

rbanffy5• 17 years ago

I am not sure an economic collapse (although we more or less dodged that bullet last year the shooting continues) would not drag a big part of mankind into abject poverty.

We are seriously looking into a billion people having to move because of lack of water, and a huge disruption on coastal communities - and a huge people displacement because of that. We also have to contemplate a diminishing energy budget per person. And all that in the next 90 years.

The future is a dangerous place, even if some pockets of it may look like The Jetsons.

berntb6• 17 years ago

Why would the world have a lower energy budget?

Solar cells are getting cheaper about as fast as Moore's law. Nuclear power (and if we're really lucky, fusion) can solve most problems.

As usual, the probably real danger for people is... other people.

Russelldb• 17 years ago

Isn't this just Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'?

henrikschroder• 17 years ago

I recently finished "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan, he's most famous for his SF works, but this one is a near-future thriller where capitalism has gone slightly too far, the roads are mostly abandoned since most people cannot afford to drive anymore du to oil scarcity, so the roads are mostly used by the executives of various corporations for car-duels about business contracts. Our protagonist works for a "Conflict Investment" division, that essentially funds small wars and revolutions around the world, and they win their contracts by killing the representatives of the competing corporations on the road.

Ironically, he's driving a SAAB, which due to market forces probably won't be around for much longer. :-)

e40• 17 years ago

I want to point out that the above plot seems really silly. When I read the synopsis on Amazon, I didn't want to read it. A friend, who is also into Richard Morgan, read it and highly recommended it. So, I gave it a shot. It was a very good book. I was pleasantly surprised.

2040: Diary of an interesting year

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