Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Saturday, 12 March 2005

# 4:55 AM

a couple of links

I used to live in New York City, and I regret that I wasn't able to go see Christo's "The Gates" installation while it was there, last month. But! I can live vicariously through people on the Internet! Ben "Mako" Hill and Mika Matsuzaki went and photographed people photographing the installation. Delightfully metareferential; more importantly, captures what it was like to be there rather better than any other photoset I've seen.

In other news, Patrick Nielsen Hayden recently pointed out a 2001 essay entitled Science Fiction without the Science, which is about how modern science fiction is no longer nearly so goshwow enthusiastic about the future as it used to be. Ken Macleod has a good counterpoint, discussing how it's probably a good thing that the shine has worn off the notion that Science! Will! Cure! All! Man's! Ills! And then there's the Vingean singularity lurking in the closet; whether or not you buy the notion that superhuman AI is around the corner, I don't think it's a stretch to say that people aren't predicting the future so much these days because it's become deuced difficult to tell what the future's going to be like.