My main man and local hero Bruce Sterling has weighed in on the topic of the day. It's his job to be over the top, outside the box, and sometimes beyond the pale, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that his scenarios are more like notes for a novel - make that seven novels - than the sort of ugly muddling-through that I suspect is likely.
I do find his scenario G intriguing in that it turns the "End of History" notion on its head. Some have said that 9/11 was "the end of the End of History" because it put the lie to the notion that globalized capitalism has reached its mature, steady-state destiny. Sterling calls one possible (by his reckoning 3%) aftermath of 9/11 "the End of History" for the opposite reason: the world becomes so chaotic that we can no longer make historical sense of it. It's a chilling image, but isn't that really the way the world has always worked if you look past the reductionism of historians, journalists and (ahem) novelists? (Thanks again to LMG for the link.)
And while I'm on the subject, this year I got partially caught up on my reading of Sterling, one of the two or three sf writers I still read. I'm afraid I found his Distraction (1998) a bit, well, distracting. Its characters didn't engage me much and its central ideas didn't have the "aha!" value of his better novels. But A Good Old-Fashioned Future, a short story collection from the same period, shows that he's still got the right stuff: ideas, situations and characters that left me wanting more. I particularly think the social networks of "Maneki Neko", the post-BSE world of "Sacred Cow" and the spooky experiment of "Taklamakan" would be worth revisiting. Here's hoping he keeps shoving manuscripts out from under the door of his Hyde Park villa.