Panelists: Karl Schroeder, Geoffrey A. Landis, JD Luzio
Date and Time: Saturday, May 1, 2010; 9:00 PM
This panel ... wasn't what I was expecting, and I ended up not liking it very much. Anyway, the panel started off with a minor complaint from JD Deluzio. He had meant to have a panel talking about how the common views of the future had changed over time. It used to be that the future was either post-apocalyptic or it was the Star Trek future with humans colonizing the stars and winning all the battles. Now the two futures are a post-scarcity future, one where we've run out of some resource or another and the world has basically fallen apart; or a no-scarcity future - the one "the transhumanist optimistics" think of (there were a lot of digs at transhumanists in this panel, and it bothered me a lot).
The panelists talked about how there is always some type of scarcity, that things tend to balance out. One scarcity is solved only to be replaced by another, different scarcity. The panelists complained that there wasn't much ingenuity in the books that discuss such futures - because they always follow the same, or a similar, storyline.
They also talked about how they thought all futures would arrive - just not equally. The horrible post-scarcity future will come to some people, while others will experience the transhumanist future. I, personally, disagree with this, but that's for another time.
Finally, a lot of books were mentioned - many of which sounded interesting.
- Wind Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi was frequently referenced
- World made By Hand by James Kunstler
- Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
- Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder
- Accelerando by Charles Stross
- and anything by Greg Egan - I think Permutation City was specifically mentioned, but I'm likely wrong (Tene read it recently so I easily could have picked it out from the Amazon author page as looking and sounding familiar).
Penguicon 2010 Posts
Character Driven Storytelling
Non-Obvious Reflections of Culture in Science-Fiction
Methods of Life Hacking
Publicity 101
[[Post-Scarcity Futures]]
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