The Early Stuff

Autorentext

Brian Dana Akers grew up in Kalamazoo (yes, really) building telescopes, reading science fiction, and practicing Yoga beginning at the age of twelve. He started six years of undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 1975, with his senior year abroad in Andhra Pradesh, India. His wide-ranging, free-wheeling, pedal-to-the-metal studies included Sanskrit, Telugu, Hindi-Urdu, and Indian history. In 1981, fleeing Michigan's unemployment rate of 17 percent, he emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Brian worked as a typographer and network manager for eight different companies in ten years: four book publishers, two prepress companies, one software publisher, and one global retailer. He learned a great deal about the worlds of publishing, business, and technology. In July of 1991, beneath an eclipsed sun, he met Loretta, then moved to New York, wrote a little science fiction, and in 2001 founded YogaVidya.com, publishing what are often regarded as very fine translations indeed. His home page is at BrianDanaAkers.com.

Klappentext

Seventeen prescient tales of the near future: from global chaos to our obsession with celebrities, from virtual reality to the final flooding of Calcutta, from genetic engineering to the future of the Internet. A man with a truly perceptive mind sized it all up decades before most people realized what was going down. Excerpt Yale had to admit that Harry was one hell of a listener. The guy just sat there, giving you his complete attention. Talking to Harry was easier than talking to a real person. They chatted about a whole range of topics after Jean: how the spark can go out of science when it becomes a full-time job, how a junior faculty member's job is way more than full-time, recent trends in microbiology, pro basketball. Yale looked at his watch and yawned, then glanced back at the screen. His security icon was gone. "Harry! What happened to my security?" Harry looked taken by surprise. "Oh. Your security features were utterly inadequate. I've constructed an impenetrable firewall for you: antiviral defenses, encryption, rigorous authentication, time-management functions, everything." Harry hushed his voice and leaned forward. "Not all agents are trustworthy, you know. Some are secret agents, some are double agents, and those agents provocateurs-whew!" He clapped himself loudly on the forehead, then peeked through his fingers to catch Yale's reaction.