ME:: Sounds like a great optimistic yet pessimistic retro history book so I ordered the 2019 edition with a new introduction ; Reviewed By Bruce Sterling:: March 24, 2008:: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton
Discovered: Jun 19, 2025 23:42 ME:: Sounds like a great optimistic yet pessimistic retro history book so I ordered the 2019 edition with a new introduction ; Reviewed By Bruce Sterling:: March 24, 2008:: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton
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- Read the whole thing i.e. review by Bruce Sterling:: Strange Horizons - The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton By Bruce Sterling
Having said all this—or rather, having paraphrased it—I now come to the part of the review where I lodge a mild protest.
Every futurist who’s any good is a historian—because the future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet. And, just as Dr Edgerton analyzes, futurism is old. Futurism tends to repeat the same things over and over again. World peace and universal communication, for instance: they were going to be brought to us by railroads, and then telegraphs, airplanes, then television, satellites, the Internet. These days, five minutes with the Internet is enough to tell that world peace is the last thing on its collective mind.
The reason for this is not that futurists are frauds or shallow; they are persistently describing an old human aspiration. Aspirations are old, but not passé. If you look into the past, obviously there’s no world peace and universal communication there. Everybody who made an effort at achieving it, H.G. Wells in painful particular, fell far short. If you want a more immediate assessment of our raw, tortuous, gloomy human condition, you can try Thomas Pynchon or J.G. Ballard (two novelists Dr Edgerton goes out of his way to praise).
I happen to much prefer Pynchon and Ballard to Wells myself. Still, trying to write Wells out of the historical picture as some kind of shallow optimist cannot work. People much prefer the Shock of the New to the Shock of the Old because people desire the living chance to make some fresh mistakes. The lesson of history is that nobody learns the lesson of history, and in the long run we are all dead. Yet the pageant of history isn’t a victimology. It’s a parade.
We start as kids who know nothing. If we’re lucky, we end as tottering geezers who lack new tricks and have forgotten most of the things we should have learned. That’s us.
We’re not Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, who stares at the rubble in horror as he’s flung backward into the future on titanic winds of change. We’re not angels at all, we’re at least half-beast, so we’ve got as much right to go “Wow!” at shiny, useless crap as the next pack-rat and jackdaw.
Wonder is wired into us. It’s like being twenty years old, and seeing someone gorgeous, naked. Is a skeptic’s cool indifference in order there? Should we make sure to approach that prospect in a sound, old-fashioned way, like our great-grandparents?
Yeah, maybe.