All Tomorrow's Cultures

An essay I wrote a few years ago that has emerged from behind its paywall . . .Let's hear it for Science Fiction Studies ! http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/collins109.htm

This piece of mine came out in a collection of essays on California science fiction: http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-networked-frontier/ I've always found him good to think with--his recent stuff, especially, which has this thoughtful open-endedness that I find particularly inviting.  An odd parallel: Le Guin's work is similarly trending towards ambiguity. 

Tesco's HomePlus virtual shopping in Seoul Along the walls of Seonreung Subway Station (선릉역) in Seoul, Tesco HomePlus (a popular shopping chain with corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom) has put up photographs of 500 commonly ordered products in a style similar to their display on the shelves of a physical HomePlus.  Subway passengers can scan accompanying QR codes with their smart phones; the products will be delivered to their homes that evening. Yes, yes--this is certainly convenient and suggests the degree to which Seoul is well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous computing city (or u-city)--and well ahead of cities in the United States.  But this also offers a more complex view of the occasionally simplistic logic behind the u-city.  When we look at cities and their built environments, we can identify what John Urry calls different "mobilities" that bring together people and objects in different spatio-temporal configurations: riding the subway v...

Laney reaches up and removes the bulky, old-fashioned eyephones. Yamazaki cannot see what outputs to them, but the shifting light from the display reveals Laney’s hollowed eyes. “It’s all going to change, Yamazaki. We’re coming up on the mother or all nodal points. I can see it, now. It’s all going to change. (William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties, 1999, p. 4) Two of William Gibson’s science fiction novels—Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties —feature Colin Laney, a online researcher whose particular talents allow him to identify networks on the cusp of becoming, the “nodal points” where people, ideas and technologies from disparate corners of the globe come together in surprising, paradigm-shattering ways. Gibson’s networks are the speculative shadows of the more quotidian networks capitalized on by entrepreneurs of computer mediated social networking, each of whom attempts to cash in on the “network” as an object to be constructed, maintained. And yet, as the Gibson quote suggests, “ne...