Stross answers his own question - he just doesn't want to go there.
Turn your back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Until the 21st century can accomplish this, it'll stay a tired, stale clone of the 20th.
SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?
There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels - Count Zero I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing") have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the reality:
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...
Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?
The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human beings understood much better before the Enlightenment. You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...
SF and even fantasy are existentially dependent on plausibility. The more rules you break, the more you have to obey the ones you don't break. How can anyone find Enlightenment values plausible in 2012? What Enlightenment experiment hasn't been tried? Which one succeeded?
There's a lovely bit of counterreality in one of the original Gibson novels - Count Zero I think - in which US housing projects (UK: "council housing") have become dynamic centers of green innovation, with windmills on the roof and everything. Could you believe this in 1983? Just barely. From 2010, the reality:
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-gre...
Don't miss the arguments (between cops!) about whether or not it was safe to take the elevators. What do your Enlightenment values have to say about that?
The next century (or two) will be about figuring out how to either (a) change human beings into something else, or (b) reconcile technical change with the grim, unspeakable reality of the human condition. That's a condition human beings understood much better before the Enlightenment. You certainly won't find any Cabrini-Greens in, say, Louis XIV's France...