Green days in Brunei
--------------------

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Bruce Sterling, given the whole 
"Circumlunar Space" thing.  This has been true for close to two 
decades, but I certainly still haven't read everything he's published 
yet.  I think I'm getting close.  Ish.  Yesterday I read a short 
story he wrote in 1985, called "Green Days in Brunei".  I am so glad 
that I read this for the first time now, and not close to two decades 
ago when I first started getting into him.  I feel like I read it at 
*exactly* the right time, give or take a year or maybe two.  I am 
just astonished at how closely some of the ideas in this book line up 
with my own thoughts and those of many others active in Gopher- and 
Geminispace, and on pubnixes and the Fediverse.  It would not have 
resonated with me anywhere near as hard if I'd read it 10 or 15 years 
ago.

I don't want to give too much away.  I will say that it touches on, 
or at least comes very close to, ideas that many of you reading this 
will have seen discussed recently under labels like solarpunk and 
salvage computing, as well as some of the Smolnet philosophy of 
disconnecting from a noisy and manipulative global network and 
replacing it with something else.  I will share a couple of choice 
extracts below.  I have changed the names of people and places to 
clearly ridiculous alternatives (typed in capitals) and shuffled the 
order of things, to try to avoid creating even a ghost of a narrative 
which might form proto-spoilers in the mind of anybody who goes on to 
read it.

I'll also share a link to a pirate PDF copy[1] of the short story 
collection "Crystal Express", where this story was first collected 
(it first appeared by itself in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction 
Magazine).  I don't feel bad doing this - the story is 35 years old 
and as far as I can tell Crystal Express is out of print.  At least, 
you can't buy a new copy from Amazon or any of the other large online 
bookstores I quickly checked at.  The only legal way to read it today 
is to buy a used paper copy - which is exactly what I did, but only 
because I like paper books.  Bruce didn't see a cent of the money I 
spent.  If you really enjoy the PDF, buy something else of his that's 
still in print.

> He would live here and help them. SOUTH CAROLINA was a new world, a 
> world built on a human scale, where people mattered

(I was flabbergasted to see the phrase "human scale" used in the 
context of technology in a book from 1985.  I didn't hear people 
start talking that way until twenty-something-teen.)

> "I don't understand," MARIO said. "They're just sailboats." LUIGI 
> smiled. "To you, maybe. But imagine you're a LATVIAN dock worker 
> living on fish meal and single-cell protein. What're you gonna think 
> of a ship that costs nothing to build, nothing to run, and gives away 
> free food?"

> "Freedom of speech," SONIC said.  "How free is it when only rich 
> nations can afford to talk? The Net's expensive, SONIC. To you it's a 
> way of life, but for us it's just a giant megaphone for Coca-Cola. We 
> built this to block the shouting of the outside world.

> [we] could use a man like you. You're a bricoleur, LINK.  You can 
> make do. You can retrofit. That's what bricolage is -- it's using the 
> clutter and rubble to make something worth having. HYRULE's too poor 
> now to start over with fresh clean plans. We've got nothing but the 
> junk the West conned us into buying, every last bloody Coke can and 
> two-car garage. And now we have to live in the rubble, and make it a 
> community.

If all goes to plan this won't be the last post I make this year 
related to Bruce's work, although the other stuff will concern his 
non-fiction writing...

[1] https://wtf.tw/ref/sterling_crystal_express.pdf