I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.
There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.
I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, and some of his earlier short story collections, even at their most difficult. But I quit Diaspora fairly early.
I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler.
When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
I'd broadly agree with your comments about Diaspora. The characterisation isn't great, but what makes it so impressive to me is the colossal (time, space) scale of the thing.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.
There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.