There might be a master plan

‘You know what your trouble is?’ he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. ‘You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.’

I couldn’t resist trying Douwe’s rewritten version of Google Share for looking at the mindshare at some of my favorite sci-fi authors. Here is the result:

Interesting that Cory Doctorow seems to have a larger part of the web’s sci-fi-related mindshare than Charles Stross.

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant life form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.

The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

I’ve written in the past about sci-fi tackling interesting philosophical ideas. Bruce Sterling says it better:

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.

And SF writers have every opportunity to kick up our heels — we have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.

In a letter Rant wrote to me, he said, everybody being inside cars, you couldn’t tell women from men. Black from white. If you asked him, the tough teams to beat were always the gimps. Gimps or queers. You put hem in a car on a level playing field and you’d see some pent-up frustration. Nobody drove as hard as paraplegics with hand controls. Or skinny, hundred-pound girls.