Strange Weather

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ross ( No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture ) delves into the ways in which technocratic elites (military, corporate, scientific) have set the agenda for public opinion and examines the challenges to those elites posed by popular and alternative cultures. He explores groups--such as New Agers and cyberpunk SF purveyors and fans--who have marginalized themselves by choice and by their potential resistance to a techno-fascist future. In elegant prose and carefully worked out thought, Ross shows these groups to be communities of shared interests that encourage participation by all, the mechanisms of ``a more radically democratic future.'' He is not blind, however, to the their limitations, expressing forcefully his objections to the sour dystopias of the cyberpunks and the failure of much eco-futurology to recognize the complexity of the human presence on earth, eliding differences of race, class and gender. The book's other theme, perhaps its most important one, is that science and technology, like economics and politics, are the products of social formations. (Nov.)

Library Journal

The essays collected here continue Ross's middle-level discussion begun in his No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture ( LJ 5/15/89). In each book Ross seeks a common language between intellectual leaders and common people. An English professor and cultural critic, he discusses in case studies several scientific countercultures: the New Age, hackers, cyberpunk fiction, futurists, global warming, and weather forecasting. He urges these communities to refine their analysis of hard science and technology in order to achieve more influence on the social and environmental outcomes of future sci-tech projects. Although the book assumes wide reading in these areas, examples are selected to support the author's position but not the richness of the community. For example, science is equated with factual knowledge. The debate generated by such writers as Bruno Latour in his Science in Action (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1987) is neglected here. A conclusion, glossary, and bibliography would enhance accessibility. An optional purchase for large public and academic libraries.-- Christopher R. Jocius, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora