Imagine a future without cyberspace...without virtual reality...without AIs and simulations...and without the Web. <br><br>What would you do? What would you fear? What wouldn't you know? <br><br>Explore a future without a net in these stories of alternatives to the "information age" by Lou Anders ý Stephen Baxter ý David Brin ý Paul Di Filippo ý Pat Cadigan ý John Grant ý David Hutchinson ý Alex C. Irvine ý Terry McGarry ý John Meaney ý Paul Melko ý Mike Resnick and Kay Kenyon ý more >>

Imagine a future without cyberspace...without virtual reality...without AIs and simulations...and without the Web. <br><br>What would you do? What would you fear? What wouldn't you know? <br><br>Explore a future without a net in these stories of alternatives to the "information age" by Lou Anders ý Stephen Baxter ý David Brin ý Paul Di Filippo ý Pat Cadigan ý John Grant ý David Hutchinson ý Alex C. Irvine ý Terry McGarry ý John Meaney ý Paul Melko ý Mike Resnick and Kay Kenyon ý Chris Roberson ý Adam Roberts ý Rudy Rucker ý S.M. Stirling ý Del Stone, Jr. ý Charles Stross ý Matthew Sturges ý Michael SwanwickLou Anders has published over 500 articles in such magazines as <i>Dreamwatch</i>, <i>Star Trek Monthly</i>, <i>Star Wars Monthly</i>, and <i>Babylon 5</i>. He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact and editor of the anthology Outside the Box. He currently writes a column called "New Directions" for the website RevolutionSF.<p><b>INTRODUCTION:</b><br><br><b>DISENGAGING FROM THE MATRIX</b><br><br>By Lou Anders <p>The future is here. Now. Every day, the stuff of science fiction is being made manifest around us. Faster and faster. Blink and you just might miss it. <p>In March of 2002, an Oxford professor named Kevin Warwick underwent an implantation of a microelectrode array into the median nerve inside his arm. The purpose of the array was to record the emotional responses traveling down Professor Warwick's nerve, and to translate these to digital signals that could be stored for later playback and reinsertion. The goal? Digitally recordable emotion. Meanwhile, Steve Mann, inventor of the wearable computer (called WearComp), has been walking around wired for twenty years, recording everything he experiences as part of an ongoing documentation of his "cyborg" experience. Less sensational, but equally exciting, functioning neuromuscular stimulation systems are in experimental use today- implantation devices that promise to repair the severed connection between brain and peripheral nervous system caused by a stroke or spinal cord injury. And experiments in optic nerve stimulation have produced in blind volunteers the ability to see lights, distinguish letters and shapes, and in one dramatic case, even drive a car. Meanwhile, computers have become small enough and cheap enough to have become ubiquitous, appearing in everything from our ink pens to disposable greeting cards. In the field of computer graphics, breakthroughs in digital rendering make it harder and harder to distinguish our on-screen fantasies from our everyday realities. And everything, positively everything, is on-line. The real Machine Age is only just beginning, and we are rapidly melding with our devices. <p>While it will be some time before we have to worry about zombie-faced automata proclaiming that "Resistance is futile," a technological singularity may very well have been crossed. Experiments and efforts like those above will, for good or ill, rapidly bring about many of the visionary concepts first proposed to us in the pages of William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk novels. <p>In fact, one has only to read <i>Wired</i>and <i>Scientific American</i>magazines with any regularity to see that some form of that Gibsonian existence is barreling down upon us with ever-increasing speed. As advances in computerization, miniaturization, and neural interfacing are being made every day, it becomes progessively difficult for writers of speculative fiction to imagine near-future scenarios that do not contain at least some of the tropes of cyberfiction. With the fabulous and limitless playground that virtual reality offers the imagination, and the mounting certainty that something like VR is just around the corner from us here at the start of the twenty-first century, how can the conscientious and technologically savvy science fiction writer extrapolate releva << less