SCIENCE fiction at its best offers dramatised glimpses of possible futures,
often carefully thought through. In Pat Cadigan鈥檚 Dervish is Digital (Macmillan,
拢9.99, ISBN 0333779533) detective Dore Konstantin chases a digital stalker
through the seamier regions of alternative reality. Funny, fast-paced and
suffused with future shock, this is an outsider鈥檚 troubled reaction to
cyberspace.
Meanwhile, the latest of Ken MacLeod鈥檚 witty and politically innovative
novels Cosmonaut Keep (Orbit, 拢16.99, ISBN 1857239865) sees a communist
European Union making contact with all-powerful aliens to whom capitalist
expansionism is anathema. Bruce Sterling, too, makes politics a focus of his
near future. His Distraction (Millennium, 拢6.99, ISBN 1857989287), winner
of this year鈥檚 Arthur C. Clarke Award, is set in an America in which white
Anglo-Saxons have become a minority, the Federal government can鈥檛 agree a
budget, and political power is devolving to the level of high-tech tribes.
All three authors extrapolate current trends, adding unique twists of their
own. Who knows? Any one of this trio could prove as accurate as the
futurologists in predicting the shape of tomorrow.
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