Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

 

13. “The Beautiful and the Sublime” by Bruce Sterling

This was interesting. So far as the idea of science fiction as futurism goes, this story feels like it has hit the mark more closely than many others. A world in which socially networked computing has been a locus of generation gap, as privacy norms diverge and romantic extravagance and artistry gain pre-eminent social cachet over any sort of mercantile materialism or nationalism.

The death of ‘the tradition of Western analytical thought’, as the narrator put it, with some satisfaction, thanks to the outsourcing of such drudging tasks as flight, medicine and science to uninspired artificial intelligence, maybe economy and governance also and leave the world with a vast leisure class free to pursue its emotional callings.

I think being published as science fiction for a science fiction audience this story may well have been intended as a tale of disquiet. Transformative AI bringing a comfortable sort of utopia to Earth, but at what cost? I suppose I am disquieted, because this seems like just such a world in which I may be able to… at least make an attempt at performing science, even if I were still foredoomed to failure. But in this world such a pursuit is so deprecated as to seemingly require wealthy patronage in what feels like contradiction against the freedom of others to pursue art. So, disquiet that in an imagined world where existing barriers to my pursuit of a passion are eliminated there are instead new barriers which keep almost anyone out.

Ah, but who am I kidding? There is no world in which myself coincides with the pursuit of science. This however is a good story I reckon[*].

*Caveatly of course, like de-industrialisation of North America but no hint of any sort of decolonisation in this world.