Coffee Spew

First published in 2000 by Cambridge Book Review Press, Rod Clark’s Redshift: Greenstreem is now available in a 2011 second-printing, and as a Kindle ebook. Not one word has been changed from the book’s first edition. Clark eerily predicted much of our collective fate since the turn of the millennium. Redshift: Greenstreem is visionary science fiction that has come frighteningly true in the decade since it was written. The future is now. Here are the facts.

∞

News Item (4/9/09): Greenspan’s reputation continues to decline: “He’s a historical relic at this point” [1].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 47): “Greenspan’s predictions and admonitions were taken seriously by many millions of important people and actually influenced economic history, just as prophecies plucked from the entrails of chickens by the Oracles influenced the destinies of city states in ancient Greece. His power declined, however, in the wake of the economic crises that erupted during the first decade of the new millennium. Shortly thereafter, modern theories of greenflow gained ascendancy, and the power of the Federal Reserve rapidly faded away.”

∞

News Item (7/18/11): The Tea Party National Committee / The Sins of Federal Debt: “This is the horrifying consequence of America’s sinful addiction to federal debt: Young Americans are waking up into adulthood to the heart-stopping realization that they have been sold into debt to such organizations as the Communist Party of China …” [2].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 20): “Smiling, sincere, so very, very Christian Gary [Bauer] who had ridden smugly into the White House in the year 2016 on the slogan ‘DEBT IS PUNISHMENT FOR OUR SINS.’ ”

∞

News Item (6/19/11): China’s ghost towns: New satellite pictures show massive skyscraper cities which are STILL completely empty [3].

Redshift: Greenstreem (pp. 29-30): “Upstairs, outstairs, into the endless night, leviathans folded and unfolded on distant moons, carving labyrinths in inanimate rock, unrolling real estate plats on ancient asteroids, inexplicably building airless condominiums by the thousand on the uninhabitable wastes of Uranus and the moons of Jupiter, constructing skyscrapers on Saturn and vast complexes on Venus that had no known purpose, and often did not function at all—only to rip them down, and start again.”

 ∞

Spencer Walts illustration from “Redshift: Greenstreem.”

News Item (8/30/11): Suitcase Nuclear Reactors to Power Mars Colonies [4].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 49): “The first experimental macroset was created by Engineer Jack Dougal McCool in 2042. He called it a ‘factory in a suitcase’ or FIS …”

∞

News Item (8/30/11): Clive Thompson on the Problem with Online Ads: “Consider Facebook: Each year, it redesigns its site to gradually nudge users to make more and more of their material public. This is partly because CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to think publicness is inherently good—but it’s also a rational response to the demands of the ad market, which needs as many people looking at as many things as possible” [5].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 15): “ … [D]reemwaves … bathed the planet since early in the 21^st century when the triple ‘M’ (mesmeric microwave merchandizing) consortiums had begun inserting microscopic holo-projectors and speakers in the texture of virtually every manufactured item in the solar system to leverage the power of advertising.”

∞

News Item (1/8/10): Making Fortunes in Milliseconds: “It’s called high frequency trading (HFT), but it’s also described as algorithmic trading or quant trading” [6].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 31): “A positive rivulet of solvency could only be generated by anchoring vats of biosentient or AI investment software to the arcane task of constantly buying assets every fraction of a second, letting their value amplitude rise microscopically, and then almost instantly selling them, sometimes microseconds before they dissolved into nothingness—reinvesting the profits in commodities or securities that would be (for a few instants at least) of slightly greater value and duration.”

∞

New Item (3/10/11): An Introduction to Hyperinflation: “Imagine taking a road trip. At the start of the day, a can of soda at a convenience store costs exactly $1. By nightfall, that same can of soda costs $3. This sounds impossible, right? … Money can become essentially worthless …” [7].

Redshift: Greenstreem (p. 20): “Glancing down at the bill in his hand through gray-tinted goggles, he saw with dismay that digital monetary decay was already in rapid progress. The inflationary readout on what had been a hundred-dollar bill only a few minutes ago was now down to ninety-six bucks and dropping.”