PRESS SEND by John McLaren (Simon & Schuster, 拢10.99, ISBN
0 684 81919 8) is one of the clutch of Silicon Valley start-up novels bobbing in
the wake of Douglas Coupland鈥檚 frequently praised Microserfs. It鈥檚 not
giving away more of the largely predictable plot than the back cover does to
reveal that McLaren鈥檚 artificial intelligence company founder, Hilton Kask (who
has a twin brother, Conrad), races against his impending death to download
himself onto one of his machines鈥攈ardly a new idea.
The Edinburgh-raised McLaren was himself a San Francisco venture capitalist.
His characters are more like software programs than people. They have features
(abusive husband, high IQ), rather than personalities. How else could it be
possible for one character to mastermind a plan in which no one improvises and
no one makes a mistake? None of the messiness of real life here. It doesn鈥檛 help
that large chunks of the book are pure dialogue, as if someone had transcribed a
long series of telephone conversations from a distant listening post. Nor does
it help that McLaren has a tin ear鈥攈e gives his American characters
British speech patterns and his foreign characters have nearly flawless
English.
Melanie McGrath suffers from no such failings. Published by HarperCollins
(拢16.99, ISBN 0 00 255586 7), her Hard, Soft, and Wet (for
hardware, software and wetware鈥攈ello, humans) traces journeys she made
around the globe looking for a future she can 鈥渙wn鈥�. The book is a British cross
between John Seabrook鈥檚 Deeper and Douglas Rushkoff鈥檚 Cyberia.
Along the way, she is aided and abetted by a composite friend 鈥淣ancy鈥� in Silicon
Valley, a 19-year-old London lover she first meets on San Francisco鈥檚 Well
conferencing system, and others in London, Hamburg and Moscow.
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Following the standard progression from exhilarated newbie to exhausted
disillusion, McGrath eventually concludes that, 鈥渢he future isn鈥檛 mine to have鈥�.
Hers, she writes, is the last, transitional generation before the army of
digital futures she has spotted in her travels. You can disagree with McGrath
(I鈥檓 ten years older than she is, and a chunk of that future is mine, all mine).
But you can鈥檛 fault the quality of her observations or her writing.
If there is one flaw, it鈥檚 that she has sacrificed some literal truth to her
interest in keeping the narrative flowing: she compresses her experiences of
four years into a single year. This is unimportant with personal events, such as
her ongoing relationship with the digital DJ, Daniel, but it does matter when
you try to orient yourself in relation to the retracted Time cyberporn
cover story (June 1994), Kevin Mitnick鈥檚 capture (February 1995), and the Camden
Town anti-road protests (summer 1995).
The kids interviewed by McGrath may own the digital future, but right now the
shape of that future is being decided by a bunch of us forty-somethings. In
The Governance of Cyberspace(Routledge, 拢14.99, ISBN 0 415 14274 7),
Brian Loader of the University of Teesside pulls together the proceedings of a
one-day conference which looked at how computer networks are changing the power
of nation states. Only one contributor is American鈥攖he key escrow
apologist Dorothy Denning. The rest, except for a Canadian, are British and
European specialists in fields such as public policy, politics and
telecommunications. Intelligent commentary on cyberspace is predominantly
American, as is the technology behind it, so it鈥檚 easy to forget that there are
other points of view. This book is therefore welcome if only for providing some
new opinions.
The topics themselves are not entirely original: universal access, the future
of privacy, the gap between information haves and have-nots. If there is a
surprise, it鈥檚 that so much of the book is theoretical. There is more discussion
of virtual reality than there is of the everyday mess and sprawl of the Net as
we know it. It is particularly disappointing that issues of policing are
discussed only in the context of copyright and that Michael Whine鈥檚 discussion
of the far right鈥檚 activities on the Internet relies more on official news
sources than on first-hand reporting.
In one of the more practical essays, an explanation of the Telecities project
by Manchester City councillor Dave Carter, the author calls for better slip
roads to get citizens interested in the information superhighway. One such slip
road is the spiral-bound pocket guide Web Works(Norton, 拢10.95,
ISBN 0 393 97109 0), which insists it is not for dummies, but for smart people
who want a small book instead of a big one. Martin Irvine makes a reasonable job
of giving a potted explanation of the Web, how it works, how to choose an
Internet service provider, and the beginnings of how to build your own page. But
the book misses key information, such as getting the best out of search
engines鈥攁 topic which would not have taken up much space but could make a
huge difference to readers.