james_nicoll

sounds like 1980s nostalgia.

How old is the author?

Wiki says 1985 publication date, so figure on an early 1980s genesis.

Wiki also says the Soviet Union was still around in the 2800s? As what, a baseball franchise?

Reenactors.

That...would be a marvelous book. 20th century re-enactors.

Having spent quite a bit of time with Civil War re-enactors in the course of researching The Big Civil War Novel, I can see it already.

Oh. Thank you.

There is a passing reference to Cold War re-enactors in Charlie Stross's Accelerando.

I've always had this idea of "nowpunk," which is a hypothetical literary genre too stupid to actually exist.

The idea is that you conceive of the future of our society, then figure out what their anachronistic historical dramas set in our period would be like, and just write that without actually discussing the future society at all.

I laughed out loud, and would buy this book.

In the early 1980s, it was probably still obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Soviet Union would remain a superpower centuries (if not millenia) into the future.

There were still "USSR invades US" novels coming out for at least a couple of months after the Soviet Union fell.

It did outlast Nevada's ban on gambling.

I have it on my bookshelf at home. To be honest, it isn't bad, for what it is. I'm not quite understanding the hate-feel on the thread.

NM

Minimal.

Page 131 (circa 2200): "Many countries in Africa and Asia relied on extensive food aid well into the the twenty-third century."

Page 161: (circa 2650): "Many of the Tribal Republics created in the aftermath of the South African Revolution in the 21st century were reunited as the Kalahari Republic. Zaire absorbed Rawanda, Burundi, the Congo, Gabon, and Guinea to consolidate its status as the most influential African power." This is in the chapter in which cosmopolitanism becomes a more dominant meme than nationalism: Africa is depicted as being behind the times.

A mention of China: "[The USA's] statesmen had always called the US the land of the free, but even a superficial study of its history revealed that its governing elite had never been statistically representative of its people. It had elected black and Hispanic presidents, but over any period of time American politics had always been dominated by whites, just as the political elites in Indian and China were easily identified as racial groups."

You find lots of vaguely non-European-named persons doing interesting things, but they're always doing it in places dominated by European memes.

It's still one of my favorite books, although skimming through it today I can see just how tragically it has aged.

(I suspect the scene in which asteroid miners "crack Ceres" will send many a modern-reader into ashen-faced ecoshock. Mining the many numbered asteroids for minerals might be acceptable, but Ceres has a name. It would be like cracking Pluto: Children would never let you get away with it.)

It would be like cracking Pluto: Children would never let you get away with it.

One of the things that endeared the backstory of Mass Effect to me is that Charon turned out to be an ice-encrusted (and obviously inactive) alien artifact intended to link the solar system with a galaxy-wide network of FTL conduits. When humans turned it back on, they "broke" Charon and the cast-off did a fair level of damage to Pluto... said vandalism being opposed by conservationalists back home as well as those fearing what might lay behind that gateway.

-- Steve'll also note that the radical pro-human underground movement called itself "Cerberus" in its manifesto specifically to portray itself as a fearsome guardian between Charon's ferry and Pluto's realm.

I always get my Cerberus and Cerebus confused.

Want to feel better? Reread Robert W. Prehoda's 1980 (?) work, Your Next Fifty Years. That's the one where welfare mothers are shipped out to be domestics for the telecomuters.

Isn't that what happened?

Don't forget about how all of the crime problems of the 1970s were technomagically solved in less than a decade, because god forbid you have to build a hypothetical future on the foundation of the present. Better to just cast it off and start fresh!

Also Jim Baen being King of All Media in 2029.

Though, now that I think of it, how many of those global nuclear war background events in sf come from before the discovery of nuclear winter, and how many after? I imagine the prospect of the atomic treatment giving civilization a "fresh start" as a byproduct was somewhat easier to swallow when it wasn't realized how much damage a global thermonuclear war would do to the ecosphere.

I remember this book, from back when I was a kid. This is the one where the entire world adopts the One Child Policy... except Mauritania, which therefore goes on to attract rich first world immigrants who want to raise families. And the capital of the One World State, Amundsen City, is on the South Pole.

I think the Soviet Union, as such, is predicted to be a going concern for mist if the millennium, but communism as the state ideology goes away by the 2300s.

Amazing what details one can remember from a book one hasn't seen in more than 20 years.

Although a good chunk of the plot is hung off *19th* century nostaglia.

"darkest Africa"? Dear God.

1: Maybe the person speaking was trying to be funny

2: I don't want to think how many of the well-intentioned extremists in the 21st and 22nd centuries singled out groups in Africa for special attention, both WIEs within Africa and WEIs from other regions.

Quoting Paddington Bear?

I liked that better when it was done in Sewer, Gas, Electric.

-- Steve enjoyed the heck out of that very, very strange novel.

Is a WEI a "Well Extremist Intentionalist"? Because that totally works as well.

I don't think you could, at this point in time (let alone in a 100 - 200 years), really fuck up africa population wise with any sort of pathogen that only affected africans but which wouldn't spread like wildfire outside of africa as well.

It's been ages since I read The Third Millennium but IIRC one of the factors operating in Africa was that white people could afford on the whole better and more effective medicine than black people could. This got noticed and was one of the factors leading to the violent overthrow of white minority rule in South Africa during the 21st.

In TTM, Africa wasn't depopulated, though (not that I am sure it was in tAoE).

So it's a model to base the eventual breakup of the US on, when the majority violently overthrows rich minority rule?

(Am I understanding correctly that, ASIDE FROM medical inequality, the apartheid south africa of the setting was otherwise pretty okay on the inequality and injustice front?)