Looking Ahead: 2004

Warren Ellis is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
Surprise me.
That’s what I ask of 2004.
Some of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
But nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
Time passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
Of, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
But a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
So surprise me.

Warren Ellis is running a year-end series on his blog, where he asks various people to give their visions, or predictions, for 2004. Here’s my entry:
Surprise me.
That’s what I ask of 2004.
Some of the things I can predict for the year to come are good. Personal things, mostly. (Moving on to greener pastures, for one thing).Others are bad. Political things, mostly. (The re-election, coronation, and Ascension — in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” sense — of George W. Bush).
But nothing’s more dreary than predictability, the linear playing out of cause and effect.
Time passes: and that means that things can go off track, change course, suffer a phase transition, enter the orbit of a chaotic attractor.
Of, course, there’s no guarantee that these changes and surprises will be happy and fortunate ones. Sometimes they are, but other times they are tragic, unbearable, hideous.
But a world without change, in which everything is predictable, is a world that’s already dead.
So surprise me.