Trying Out Twitter '08

#MastadonMigration '24

Continuing on my track of re-reading the works of @GreatDismal , I just finished Virtual Light. It had been a while since I'd read it only once, so I had forgotten almost everything about it except for Chevette's name and the fact that it was centered on bike messenger culture in San Francisco.

If you're a fan of the #cyberpunk genre, I would encourage you to re-read these early works again now that it's been nearly 40 years since they were written. I'm picking up so many things that I missed the previous times that I've read them, and that's largely due to having the context of being "future-forward" past the timelines of those books.

It's not about just seeing what technology predictions the authors got right or missed, or even the aesthetics of the worlds they created, however important they may be to our imaginations. It's the characters themselves and the attitudes and perceptions of the events that, now some 30-odd years after the fact, we have all had the opportunity to experience for ourselves as we've watched the inexorable encroachment of technology.

These books are no longer set in our "future" and I would wager to say that the characters had more appropriate responses of revulsion to the invasion of technology that we, here in the now "present", have failed to recognize and share.