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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from The Ministry for the Future
  • I'm comparing it (somewhat unfairly) to another work of near-future SF I read recently, Distraction by Bruce Sterling, where climate change was present but was just one factor in a general sense of low-key societal collapse, and the characters work through the political process of trying to get things done and rebuild more workable institutions. The Sterling book was more fun and a lot more character-centric, and their struggles were imagined from within the situation, whereas something about The Ministry for the Future seems written from an abstract, outside-the-system perspective, and so somewhat lifeless.
from quarantine reading 2020
from swarming
  • Bruce Sterling Distraction opens with a swarming attack – a crowd of seemingly random people suddenly becomes a mob and strips a shopping center clean (or something like that). And of course he wrote the classic short story Swarm, that one is definitely on the agency required reading list.
from Bruce Sterling
  • I recently reread and have been recommending his 1998 novel Distraction.
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Distraction

30 Oct 2021 - 27 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq
    • book by Bruce Sterling
      • Takes place in near future (2045?) world of mostly-collapsed political order
      • Protagonist: Oscar, a slick independent political operative
      • Most of the action involves his soft takeover of a government science lab in East Texas
      • Oscar falls in with Greta, a neurologist who just wants to do science
      • Opposed by a lunatic Huey Long-esque governor of Louisiana (evil biohacking)
      • The boldness of Distraction is that it imagines a collapsing America that still feels livable.