Index

Contents
Features

OBSOLETE TOMORROWS

34 THE FUTURE IS HISTORY
It's 2001; where are all the domed cities and hovercars? Yesterday's 
tomorrows are way behind schedule. Actually, the problem isn't the 
future, says one vanguard science-fiction writer. It's Futurists.
By Jack Womack

42 DESERT OF DREAMS
The future isn't what is used to be. Excavating the ruins of the future 
at Arcosanti, Biosphere 2, a missile silo, and White Sands, New Mexico, 
birthplace of the apocalypse.
By Tom Vanderbilt

56 PAGING DR. MOREAU
Jellyfish genes and mad-science dreams, that's what switched-on 
dogs are made of. Eduardo Kac wants to create a real, live dog that 
glows in the dark. To Kac, it's "transgenic art." To some, it's a crime 
against nature.
By Gordon Grice

Columns

24 MEME CULTURE 
Heads are rolling in dot-com land, and the masses love it. Is it just our 
Revenge on the Nerds, or something deeper? 
By Andrew Ross 

26 FRINGE RESEARCH 
Visions of cyborgs danced in the author's head. He never dreamed he'd 
end up host to a high-tech implant of his own. 
By Gareth Branwyn 

30 VENT 
She may be the outgoing chair of the powerful ICANN, but Esther Dyson is 
still the gray eminence of backroom cyberpolitics—the well-connected, 
widely feared Queen of the Digerati.
By David Hudson

Scanner	

12 SPEED READING
Fast facts for the time-starved,

14 GADGETS & GIZMOS 
The I.T. Girl: 3Com's Audrey.
By David Pescovitz

16 COMMODITY CHECK
With its sleek, Shamu curves, the ORCA Mini Suffer is taking a byte. 
out of boomer and teenysomething markets.
By Mark Dery

20 MINDSHARE
Shrinking her head and cloning it are all in a day's work for Rona
Pondick.
By George Fifield

Reviews

64 MIND'S EYE
The LUMP (Life Form with Unevolved Mutant Properties) is just one
of Patricia Piccinini's little bundles of joy, nurtured in her virtual
nurseries.
By Edward Colless 

70 OBJECT LESSON
Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a garden of unearthly
delights, especially for typography junkies.
By Rick Poynor

74 RADIANT CITY
Preston Scott Cohen is fishing for new architectural forms in nature.
Catch of the Day? The bottom-feeding flatfish.
By Matthew DeBord

80 DEAD TREE
Diagnosing Maria Luisa Palumbo's Architectural Disorders.
By McKenzie Wark

86 SOUND
Adjusting godspeed's Antennas to Heaven!
By Simon Reynolds

90 SCREEN
On the trail of Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime.
By Richard Kadrey

96 EXIT STRATEGY 
Back to the future.
Photo by Bobby Neel Adams. Text by Mark Dery,