Fall 2023
Ian Campbell
When I sit here at my desk at home editing and typesetting the Review, with my cats fighting over who gets to sit on the coveted Kitty Towel next to my keyboard, I like to listen to mindless, cheery techno music. Because my daughter always hogs Spotify, I usually just use YouTube for this, but over the past couple of weeks, YouTube has become increasingly aggressive in its absolutely delusional belief that it can order me into turning off any of my half-dozen adblockers, let alone all of them. I’d be willing to put up with thirty seconds of ads at the beginning of a DJ’s set—sure, they have to pay for all those servers and so forth—but intrusive, unskippable ads every few minutes? Yeah, no: especially since it takes basically three ads to go from cat food to Joe Rogan to straight-up fascism. So, now I’m watching an accelerated evolutionary arms race between Google, which has a trillion dollars yet still manages to run every product they create or buy straight into the ground, and the guy who writes the code for uBlock Origin, who does it for free and open source. If I get to amend the US Constitution, it will be to give everyone the right to be free from advertising.
SF long ago predicted the sheer ubiquity and intrusiveness of advertising, beginning in 1952 with Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. Gibson’s Neuromancer gave us both the first iteration of the Internet and its dominance by all-powerful and unaccountable corporate interests. Recently, Cory Doctorow wrote at length about what he terms “enshittification“: if you have not yet read this, please do, as it explains much about why the internet used to be fun and no longer is. Doctorow’s point is that it’s not even the advertisers that win out—as with nearly everything else, it’s our parasitic oligarchy. Frankly, I miss the Internet That Was, where everyone had to code their own page and people just talked to one another or enjoyed cat pictures.
In this issue, among many other things, we at the Editorial Collective have a conversation about the Nebula nominees for Best Novel, and why a retreat from tech to fantasy seems to be the order of the day. As always, we welcome your participation: feel welcome to submit to our CFP, to review for us, or to send us your thoughts on SF and how it addresses the issues of the day.
SFRA Review 