| "Hieroglyph" [0] was an attempt to address this and write positive science fiction. It was a project at ASU and a book[1] of short stories accompanied by a webpage with essays describing the genesis of the stories and responses to the stories. The book included pieces by Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and others. I heard about it late last year and picked up a used copy. I ended up reading about 2/3 of the stories and, 10 years after the book's publication, my general feeling was: 1. The stories are overwhelmingly positive and sometimes compelling. But a decade later, the real-life uses of most of the technologies used a plot devices has fallen short of the aspirations in the stories. Reading the stories left me with a feeling of disappointment, seeing that we as a society opted to use most of the technologies in more negative ways (mass surveillance, continued indifference to the amount of carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere, etc.). As a result the stories also felt very naive. 2. The book contains copious links to essays that are hosted on the webpage [0]. They are all gone now; from what I can tell, none of the essays are available at the original URLs. There are also no redirects. The essays have disappeared. I suppose point 2 is perhaps simply ironic and not much more. I am not sure how to take point 1 though; maybe it is just difficult to read positive predictions that turned out to not happen. Maybe they had an impact though, and things could've been worse in the absence of the books? I am not sure. [0] https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/ [1] https://www.book-info.com/isbn/0-06-220471-8.htm |