I find new “wellness community” very interesting because they look at corruption in the medical industry and instead of drawing the conclusion of “a for profit healthcare system can incentivize unethical behaviour in the pursuit of profit” (a good example of this is Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis) they completely go off the deep end and start yelling about how how woke vaccines will make your children gay.
they are rightfully suspicious of the healthcare system, but instead of arguing for reform and medicare for all, the seem to draw the worst conclusions possible.
John Brunner - with The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider - was the first writer I thought of in the AST genre, but seems to be sadly absent from the discourse.
Not to belabor a point (and I’ll even spare my opinion on the merits of Nellie Bowles’s tech writing) buuuut… maybe it’s time to move off substack? I know that’s orthogonal (at best!) to your point, I’m dying to give you $10 a month again!
Haven’t read it yet but I’ve been wanting to read Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. It sounds like the ultimate AST. Described as “At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror” Apparently imagines petroleum as a basically demonic force working its way through our culture and history. Sounds rad as hell
Your description of Substackism makes me think it should also include the "This one weird trick" movement (what the "one trick" is depends on who you ask) which I think is related to the institution-skeptic, wellness, and "grindset" crowds. And maybe even is the link between them via microdosing.
Somewhat adjacent to AST, Max Haiven et al have written about science fiction / speculative fiction as a form of capitalist storytelling in the context of Amazon -- coopted dreams that justify capitalist goals despite overwhelming human and ecological cost. Was thinking of it in relation to those 2034 / 2054 books (written by military guys)... Maybe AST does the same for warfare? ie a form of speculative fiction that (preemptively) justify hawkishness and warmongering. (See section "3 Digital Capitalism and Speculative Fiction" at maxhaiven.com/writingback for examples in sf + capitalism)
- A Mind Forever Voyaging: a text adventure computer game from the golden era of the Infocom company: in brief, the player portrays a sentient AI who is tasked by a think tank to experience and extrapolate potential government policies. Viewed through an AST lens, the player feels in conversation with the author of the game as it progresses, something that's hard to convey in a non-interactive medium. (Of course in reality it remains a one-way conversation since interactive though it is it remains a linear experience.)
- Network Security in the Medium Term: 2061-2561: SF writer Charlie Stross gave this keynote at an academic computer security conference, extrapolating trends that seemed fantastical in 2011 but already exist today like always-video streaming cloud-connect wearables and carries forth implications for the infosec community.
War of the Worlds remains very worthwhile imo - the vivid descriptions of the effects (physical and psychological) of Martian weaponry are eerily prescient of both the blitzkrieg of WW2 and its shock-and-awe descendants today.
Nonfiction is also where my brain went with Systems Thrillers! I read a lot of history, and while I have some pet peeves with the current trend for narrative history (there's an annoying, very common tendency to describe what people of the past *might have felt* or *could have thought* as if it were fact) there are lots of fantastic books in that style. Adrian Tinniswood's 'The Rainborowes' certainly has an air of the apocalyptic, following a single family, on both sides of the Atlantic, through the political and social turmoil of the English Civil War. William Dalrymple's 'The Anarchy', about the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the East India Company, is less narrative but has a lot of fascinating recurring characters, given voice by Indian chronicles of the time. Would highly recommend both!
Good list of books in this post! I picked up McMafia on your recommendation. I think Robert Saviano's Gomorrah about how the mafia is involved in so many different aspects of Italian life might also fit the bill on the non-fiction side. On the fiction side, Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice is not necessarily apocalyptic, but it has a real systems bent to it and an undercurrent of unease. Dispossessed is a great one.
Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer probably fits this description. Near-future sci-fi in which a black hole passing through the solar system knocks the earth off its orbit. Summers get way hotter and winters get way colder, like climate change taken to an extreme.
it's mostly interested in how the characters try to survive in this world, so it's maybe not as wide in scope as some of these books, but I think it would count. some people might find the focus on nerdy science discussions to be off-putting but I enjoyed it.
This will be the way it is until mainstream recognizes the shit show that was Covid - otherwise this will eclipse the mainstream, and that's where I ended up after my own utter shit show during pandemic which brought me here
Would Cory Doctorow's fiction work fill that AST niche you're looking for? He's always been pretty open and transparent about viewing his own work as a very utilitarian tool for communicating ideas throughthe emotional manipulationof character development.
How about Willam Gibson, especially his Bridge Trilogy, as well as Nueromancer? I was also wondering about Scalzi, but I feel like, at least of the things of his I've read, he's got too much comedy to fall into the AST genre, but I'm happy to be wrong.
I find new “wellness community” very interesting because they look at corruption in the medical industry and instead of drawing the conclusion of “a for profit healthcare system can incentivize unethical behaviour in the pursuit of profit” (a good example of this is Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis) they completely go off the deep end and start yelling about how how woke vaccines will make your children gay.
they are rightfully suspicious of the healthcare system, but instead of arguing for reform and medicare for all, the seem to draw the worst conclusions possible.
John Brunner - with The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider - was the first writer I thought of in the AST genre, but seems to be sadly absent from the discourse.
you’ve probably read, but Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is very good on the “alt wellness” post-covid political shift!
Not to belabor a point (and I’ll even spare my opinion on the merits of Nellie Bowles’s tech writing) buuuut… maybe it’s time to move off substack? I know that’s orthogonal (at best!) to your point, I’m dying to give you $10 a month again!
Your point on how wellness discourse as shifted from left to right is very interesting. The pandemic sure helped spread the transition.
Haven’t read it yet but I’ve been wanting to read Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. It sounds like the ultimate AST. Described as “At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror” Apparently imagines petroleum as a basically demonic force working its way through our culture and history. Sounds rad as hell
Your description of Substackism makes me think it should also include the "This one weird trick" movement (what the "one trick" is depends on who you ask) which I think is related to the institution-skeptic, wellness, and "grindset" crowds. And maybe even is the link between them via microdosing.
Somewhat adjacent to AST, Max Haiven et al have written about science fiction / speculative fiction as a form of capitalist storytelling in the context of Amazon -- coopted dreams that justify capitalist goals despite overwhelming human and ecological cost. Was thinking of it in relation to those 2034 / 2054 books (written by military guys)... Maybe AST does the same for warfare? ie a form of speculative fiction that (preemptively) justify hawkishness and warmongering. (See section "3 Digital Capitalism and Speculative Fiction" at maxhaiven.com/writingback for examples in sf + capitalism)
A few AST suggestions from unlikely places:
- A Mind Forever Voyaging: a text adventure computer game from the golden era of the Infocom company: in brief, the player portrays a sentient AI who is tasked by a think tank to experience and extrapolate potential government policies. Viewed through an AST lens, the player feels in conversation with the author of the game as it progresses, something that's hard to convey in a non-interactive medium. (Of course in reality it remains a one-way conversation since interactive though it is it remains a linear experience.)
- Network Security in the Medium Term: 2061-2561: SF writer Charlie Stross gave this keynote at an academic computer security conference, extrapolating trends that seemed fantastical in 2011 but already exist today like always-video streaming cloud-connect wearables and carries forth implications for the infosec community.
War of the Worlds remains very worthwhile imo - the vivid descriptions of the effects (physical and psychological) of Martian weaponry are eerily prescient of both the blitzkrieg of WW2 and its shock-and-awe descendants today.
Nonfiction is also where my brain went with Systems Thrillers! I read a lot of history, and while I have some pet peeves with the current trend for narrative history (there's an annoying, very common tendency to describe what people of the past *might have felt* or *could have thought* as if it were fact) there are lots of fantastic books in that style. Adrian Tinniswood's 'The Rainborowes' certainly has an air of the apocalyptic, following a single family, on both sides of the Atlantic, through the political and social turmoil of the English Civil War. William Dalrymple's 'The Anarchy', about the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the East India Company, is less narrative but has a lot of fascinating recurring characters, given voice by Indian chronicles of the time. Would highly recommend both!
Good list of books in this post! I picked up McMafia on your recommendation. I think Robert Saviano's Gomorrah about how the mafia is involved in so many different aspects of Italian life might also fit the bill on the non-fiction side. On the fiction side, Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice is not necessarily apocalyptic, but it has a real systems bent to it and an undercurrent of unease. Dispossessed is a great one.
Greg Egan's Perihelion Summer probably fits this description. Near-future sci-fi in which a black hole passing through the solar system knocks the earth off its orbit. Summers get way hotter and winters get way colder, like climate change taken to an extreme.
it's mostly interested in how the characters try to survive in this world, so it's maybe not as wide in scope as some of these books, but I think it would count. some people might find the focus on nerdy science discussions to be off-putting but I enjoyed it.
I know it’s technically about WWII, but Gravity’s Rainbow falls into the category in pretty much every other way, right?
This will be the way it is until mainstream recognizes the shit show that was Covid - otherwise this will eclipse the mainstream, and that's where I ended up after my own utter shit show during pandemic which brought me here
Would Cory Doctorow's fiction work fill that AST niche you're looking for? He's always been pretty open and transparent about viewing his own work as a very utilitarian tool for communicating ideas throughthe emotional manipulationof character development.
How about Willam Gibson, especially his Bridge Trilogy, as well as Nueromancer? I was also wondering about Scalzi, but I feel like, at least of the things of his I've read, he's got too much comedy to fall into the AST genre, but I'm happy to be wrong.