I am ready for ruricomp and the digital countryside. Sick of losing my internet-senses every time I leave town. Bring me my green fields of 3G, spimey trees, arboreal AR and grass that twitters the temperature.
~ Warren Ellis (via plsj)
I am not quite ready for this. But I am ready to see more writers ask & explore what a ‘digital countryside’ means for their characters and stories, rather than continue writing the urban as if it exists in the present while trapping the rural a century back. Not necessarily — or not only — by writing about these technologies in their stories, but by creating characters whose mental and cultural spaces are contemporary and networked even when they aren’t in the city. Because, you know, folks in the country have Facebook, too, and tractors are satellite-guided.
So far, the best example of this I’ve read is Peter Angus Campbell’s Invisible Islands. But Tom McCarthy’s C, which I’m reading just now, seems so far to explore related terrain.