Here’s a Maureen Dowd column. It’s about politics (which I avoid on this blog), but I was struck by this sentence:
Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet headed to Detroit, travelers could see we had made no progress toward a technologically wondrous Philip K. Dick universe.
One suspects that Ms. Dowd has only experienced Philip K. Dick secondhand via Hollywood interpretations of his work. Yes, a typical Dick novel will have some pretty nifty scientific advances, but generally they’re places of suspicion and paranoia, where overwhelming, impersonal forces acting in a hostile and illogical manner threaten a person’s identity and even their perception of reality.
In short: Something very close to the airliner security policies we have today.
Next up: Maureen Dowd on the homespun simplicity of Charles Stross’ futures…