Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.
Sterling's post is also an indirect explanation of what happened to the Cyberpunk writers - their grand visions of a cyber-future became all too real, and hence banal, so they were reduced to writing about the present (William Gibson), the past (Neal Stephenson), or the real future (Sterling).
(h/t to O'Reilly Radar).
