Future Present

Seattle
I started and finished Pattern Recognition under the influence of jetlag, which is entirely appropriate given the novel. I read this just after finishing Cryptonomicon and find it fascinating that the most recent works by my two favorite "science fiction" authors are set in the present. I've always loved the genre of "science fiction the day after tomorrow" which extrapolates the present in ways that are at once familiar and strange. With these two books I'm guessing Stephenson and Gibson felt that the present was bizarre enough to use as material. It's been a bit exhilirating as well to read my own experiences in the pages of these books, such as Gibson's detailed description of the hotel in Tokyo I stayed at a couple of years ago. This convergence came to a head today when I perused Gibson's blog and found him enthusiastically writing about a camera phone his friend showed him a couple of days ago, just like the one I've been carrying around for the past two months.