Read years ago, lost, found, re-read. The Paul Di Filippo story stuck with me, and there's a good introduction to the Darger and Surplus setting. ( )

If the internet had never been invented, what might have taken its place? A 2003 collection of SF what-if stories attempts to answer that question. If the world was run by Imperial China, the abacus might still be the primary means of calculation. Chemistry or biology, instead of electronics, might create new data storage. "Cloud storage" might be accomplished literally, with programmable weather!

Some of these worlds had a Net, but have been pushed on to a post-apocalyptic scenario. Few of the stories predicted analogs for the morass of trolls and malware that the net actually became or the ubiquity of the Internet of Things in quite the way it's actually worked out. More jacked-in bio connections, fewer apps and selfies. One story does at least recognize that the main content sent over the Net is porn and makes it the primary use of virtual reality, even before gaming. Other stories focused more on replacement computation methods than on a different kind of WWW, like the Fleming/Bond WWII pastiche where Einstein had been a geneticist instead of a physicist and all our mechanical infrastructure (transport, communication, calculation, armament) was bio-engineered.

I liked a few of the stories, but most were just OK and didn't really meet what I was expecting the theme of the book to be. ( )

Much like the proverbial curate’s egg ( )