Bruce Sterling is one of my favorites, and I try to read whatever I can find of his. Maneki Neko got a Hugo nomination for best short story in 1999. When it was written we were on the cusp of the Web. I was on Compuserve at the time--there were several proprietary networks that worked sort of like the Internet was going to.
So Sterling imagines people organizing into mutual aid networks, with computers that keep track of the favors people do for each other. You do little favors for people, without knowing them or knowing why. Sterling portrays it as pretty much positive, but at the same time gives a pretty good picture of how it could be subverted. It's a really interesting short read, and with four stars you should go read it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Water Outlaws, by S. L. Huang
According to the introduction this book is intended to evoke "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (thought that title is not explicitl...
-
There are some interesting theories out there on what Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" short story means . Indeed, Wolfe is heavil...
-
Michael Swanwick is an inspired author, and has some brilliant work out there. He has a series of very short stories called The Sleep of Re...
-
Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga series tells the story of Kikuyu who have given up life in modern Kenya to reclaim their ancestral lives in a s...
No comments:
Post a Comment