So we can all agree that the world around us is not without its challenges. What better time to contemplate what could be, if only we lived 11000 years in the future. If you could choose any future society to reside in then, which one would it be? For me…

In third place Peter F Hamilton’s confederation – perhaps life as an itinerant spaceship captain owning a twenty-year old junker playing an uncertain trade between the star systems. I’d have a small flat on a chichi converted asteroid and maybe a ranch on a frontier world. Shameless romantic adventuring. Either that or joining the Confederation Navy.

In second place William Gibson’s sprawl from the Neuromancer trilogy – where the sky is the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel. Being a console jockey, riding an Oto-Sendai deck to infiltrate corporate ice deep in cyberspace. Hanging out in dive bars with burned out ex-hackers, chatting away with eccentric AI’s and riding the shuttle up to an orbital hab on a decaying orbit.

But…way out in front is Iain M Bank’s Culture. Waaay in the future there’s humanoids across thousands of stars across the galaxy. Bank’s anarcho socialist post-scarcity » Continue Reading.