Heavy Weather

Bruce Sterlingwrites about his visit to Singapore and mentions in passing the contrast between the competent technocracy of the City Of Lions and the squalidly self-justifying incompetence of our own in relation to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Bruce's novels Heavy Weather and Distraction foretold the social backdrop of the drowning of New Orleans. The omnivorous network, the certain knowledge that no one with any actual power has a clue, much less a grip, the dazed victims eating state-of-the-art self-heating meals in squalid and unhygienic surrounds, botched and ill-conceived attempts at making things better that actually make it worse. He was quite visionary about the social future and predictably wrong about the technical one in some respects.