Notes
Just reading this week. Prepping for some possible site organization changes, but no changes yet (well, if you look carefully, there's a new SSL cert).
Completed
Chronicles from the land of the Happiest People on Earth. Things wrapped up bringng some distant threads together. This is not the book with "staggering" in the title, but perhaps should. It's a broad work, covering lots of societal/political ground. Some of it seems well over the top, but in the same way that electing DJT prez in 2016 was over the top. Strange hard-to-believe things, but the kind that can actually happen.
While fictional (the book, not me), I did start the novel (last year) googling some things to see if they were real or not (they weren't). I still don't have the clearest recollection of some of the earlier book, but it's too voluminous to read from the beginning again. Maybe someday. It would be worth it.
Short but nice Acknowledgements and a bio at the end that mentions that Wole Soyinka destroyed his green card after Trump's election in 2016. Which fits.
Continuing Reading
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I haven't actually read any this week, but then, I didn't return it to the library either. Wanting to finish the Soyinka provided a good excuse for not doing so, but then I started Homo Deus and still have not got back to it.
Started
I have only read so far as laying the groundwork; the premise is that for most of human history, war, famine, and pestilence were facts of life, not anything one questions, just the way it is. But now we are entering an age where that is no longer true. What will be humanity's aims in such a world? What we will be trying to achieve? And how might that go?
The premise, supported by substantial historical background, makes sense, though when it comes to pestilence (or disease, if you prefer), it was a bit weird. This book was written before 2020, so the extended description of the Spanish Flu Pandemic and the like as something that doesn't happen any more had a certain dissonance to it.
But I'm mischaracterizing the premise a bit. It isn't that pandemics don't happen anymore, it's that they are not taken as a given. The same goes for war and famine. Yes, they still happen, but they are now regarded as aberrations or errors - they shouldn't have happened! That they happened indicates that somebody somewhere screwed up! This is the attitude that is different. Rather than a bland acceptance that this is just how the world is, we believe they shouldn't happen. And they don't as much. So where do we go from here.
I'm interested to read his explorations of this new world. Although I come in skeptical of futurist proclamations in general, even if wrong, the consideration of what might be should be interesting.
In conclusion
The future ain't what it used to be.