Esce oggi “The Caryatids”
24 February 2009 | Commenta
Oggi esce “The Caryatids”, il nuovo libro di Bruce Sterling. Il tema è quello del Global Warming:In The Caryatids, global warming has melted practically every government in the world (except China) — leaving behind a slurry of refugees, rising seas, and inconceivable misery. But there are two stable monoliths sticking out of the chaos, a pair of “civil society groups” that embody the two major schools of smart green thought today: the Dispensation are Al Gore green capitalists based out of California who understand that glamor and profits, properly aimed, achieve more than any amount of stern determination and chaste conservation; their rivals are the Aquis, mostly European anarcho-techno-geeks who have abandoned money in favor of technologically mediated communal life where giant, powerful, barely controlled machines are deployed to save the refugees and heal the Earth.
More importantly, the future of The Caryatids is one in which human beings confront the terrible reality that technology favors attackers — favors those who would disrupt the status quo because it gives them force-multiplier power, and undermines defenders because the complexity of a technological society always creates potential fault-lines that attackers can exploit. And in that society, Sterling’s civil society types — who care about saving the planet, even though they disagree about the best way to do this — do their damnedest to build stable technological societies. Because in Earth’s future — and in Sterling’s — there’s no going back to the land for us. Not because the land is too poisoned, but because billions of charcoal-burning hunter-gatherers are far more hazardous to the planet than a neatly ordered world of cities in which technology is used to minimize our footprints by giving us smarter handprints.
Most importantly, the future of The Caryatids is one in which there is hope. Not naive, wishful thinking hope. Hard-nosed, utterly plausible hope, for a future in which the human race outthinks its worse impulses and survives despite all the odds.
Credo di poter affermare con certezza che valga pena leggerlo.
Bruce Sterling è celebre per Mirrorshades, un’antologia di racconti di fantascienza del 1986 che ha contribuito a definire il filone cyberpunk, Sterling ha pubblicato diversi romanzi di fantascienza, testi di tipo giornalistico e alcuni saggi. Collabora al mensile Wired e al quotidiano torinese La Stampa dove cura insieme alla moglie Jasmina Tešanović la rubrica “Globalisti a Torino”.
Nel 2003 è stato nominato professore alla European Graduate School, dove insegna nei corsi intensivi di Media e Design. Dal 2007 vive a Torino, come si nota dalla rubrica “Globalisti a Torino”.
Gli estratti in inglese sono di Boing Boing.
Il libro è disponibile su Amazon (in inglese).
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