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A few thoughts on what I've read so far...

I'm struck by the manner in which science fiction has both anticipated and reinforced the computer age. To me, sci fi has always been about the excitement of technology, taking what it presently enables and adding imagination to speculate on where it might take us in the future.

In 1950 the vision was space flight and flying cars. These days, the Internet seems a huge influence on the science fiction imagination. Several of the short stories I've read imagine a future of impossibly dense worlds of information and virtual experience: virtual selves gone rogue and replicating themselves infinitely, worlds within worlds, and the chance to "download" your consciousness into different selves in each of them--a kind of immortality. These traits alone tie back to the "copy and paste" world of everyday computing, and the avatars and virtual realities of Second Life, Halo, or World of Warcraft.

As mentioned before, it's fun to see our present life now cast forward into the future, a telescoping imagination of what might be.]]>