Unstable Networks Read online

  It saddens me to say these things, because it goes so much against my nature. I'm a science fiction writer. People pay me to dream stuff up. People have to have their dreams; without vision, the people perish.

  It's not that fabulous possibilities aren't real. They are real. In the cold objective eye of eternity, everyone who has ever flown across the Atlantic has done something just as marvelous as Lindbergh did. Lucky Lindy was met by cheering crowds who heralded the mighty dawn of the new age of flight. But if you were met by cheering crowds on the far side of the Atlantic when you flew to France in 1996, this would not be good. You would not be pleased to see that their sense of wonder about the act of flight was still intact. You wouldn't congratulate the French on their lack of disillusionment. On the contrary, you would know full well that something had gone terribly wrong with the human beings who were witnessing this event. It would be a sign of psychopathic disruption, a society stuck in an infinite loop, jaws always agape, learning nothing, experiencing nothing.

  We shouldn't blame ourselves when the wonder fades, much less blame our machinery. Instead, we should come to appreciate the way that human beings give ideas their substance. We can take fantastic abstractions and personify them, make them real. We're not disembodied intellects; that was a powerful dream of the last millennium, but a new millennium is at hand now, and our machines can play that dismal role for us. Infinity and eternity are not our problems.

  Science fiction writers say a lot of silly things, but H.G. Wells once said a very wise thing. "If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting." It's not the center of ideas that are interesting, these bloodless Platonic concepts of bogus purity and lifeless rigid order. It's the living, seething mess out there, where actions have consequences, where the street finds its own uses for things. That is our arena. And it's up to us, not just to imagine it, but to inhabit it. Not just to admire it and make gestures, but to judge it and take action.

  The future is unwritten.

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