From: kevin.calder@onetel.net   
      
   In message <1129316816.315193.288230@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,   
   alienthe@hotmail.com writes   
   >Brett L. Renwick wrote:   
   >> Wired For Chaos is a page-turner set twenty-nine years in the future   
   >   
   >[snip the rest]   
   >   
   >This reads like a massive avalance of cliches.   
      
   Yes, it was quite horrible wasn't it?   
      
   I think the presence of Will Smith might have been an attempt to signal   
   to movie producers that there might be a script in there somewhere.   
      
   Unfortunately there were too many scripts in there by far, and I've seen   
   them all already.   
      
   > In a newsgroup like this   
   >it might be more constructive to concentrate on what is actual new and   
   >what advances the genre.   
      
   >As always I am looking for what people think is Cyberpunk of the   
   >current decade.   
      
   Well Alienthe, you are our chief researcher, tell us, what is going on   
   out there? ;)   
      
   I just spent an hour or so reading the morning news, but I didn't see   
   anything that looked like it could have been extrapolated into good   
   sci-fi. Just the usual march of international authoritarianism and good   
   old fashioned mundane brutality.   
      
   What I enjoyed about the cp's was that they had their finger on some   
   kind of temporal pulse, they keyed in on some exciting/frightening   
   features of a particular era (admittedly more or less coming to an end   
   by the time many of the genre's "big" works were actually published) and   
   extrapolated a future from them.   
      
   We could do the same of course, but somehow none of the futures I can   
   imagine, extrapolated from the present, seem quite as colourful.  Maybe   
   this is the result of some kind of bizarre anachronistic-futures-fetish   
   on my part.  Or maybe we are nearing some kind of historical shelf that   
   makes it hard to envision a radical future because we are rapidly   
   nearing our own horizons.  The historical shelf idea has a twisted   
   appeal for me because it allows for the possibility the we will soon hit   
   the edge of the shelf, and the future will 'fall away' again.   
   Future-shock and vertigo for everyone!   
      
   Or maybe my coffee was just too strong this morning,   
      
   11   
   --   
   Kevin Calder   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)