In my rant about the new aesthetic of the future, I complained that there were few, if any, genuinely new visions of the future coming out of science fiction. Post-cyberpunk Author Neal Stephenson has been complaining about the lack of innovation in science fiction. Sci-fi author Charlie Stross …
Charlie Stross was more innovative, no, let’s just try “clairvoyant” about the near future than I would have ever thought possible.
How many people had any foreboding about Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991? Well, probably some people in military intelligence, the United Nations and human rights advocacy groups. “The Taqrit Horror” (a term used by Stross in his science fiction) was hardly visible in mainstream Western (or most other) media in the late 1980’s. Yet Charlie Stross wrote A Colder War (full text) a short story, well, more of a novella, about it. It is one of the scariest works of near-future science fiction I have ever read. There are heavy Lovecraftian overtones.
Stross contributes regularly to a blog-of-sorts. It is good reading, even though it isn’t science fiction.
(via notational)
