Yesterday’s book: Earthweb

No, it isn’t a tell all about the classic developer website. Cool techie science fiction author Marc Steigler uses 1999’s EarthWeb, The Book to explore ideas about the future of the internet and politics in a world under extreme pressure and largely succeeds. Earth has been attacked four times, once every five years, by a mysterious alien race that never communicates, unless deployment of advanced munitions is considered a form of communication. The alien ships, named Shiva by Humanity, never quite succeed due to the efforts of Morgan McBride although the planet’s national governments have fallen apart in their wake and been replaced by the Earth Defense Agency. The story is pretty basic and comes to the expected conclusion, although it’s well-written and the characters are nicely developed. Steigler is more interested in his ideas, which are fairly nifty and the most significant is a new economy based on an ideas future market. That is, methods for thousands or even millions of individuals globally to provide forecasts and bet on them, to allow the most probable to bubble up to attention and the original poster to be rewarded based on the results. For example, when the actual attack on the fifth Shiva happens, several key parts of the action are suggested by forecasts posted in real time by diverse characters we’ve previously met. I was really disappointed only by one thing; Steigler just leaves us hanging as far as the longterm result of the human-alien conflict.