to those produced naturally by the brain of a person in love; produced by gene-spliced bacteria and used by prostitutes from The Church of Ishtar, a religious organization providing sexual services to men. Synthetic THC Produced legally in Grenada in the form of small paper plasters stuck to the skin and releasing THC, the active substance in marijuana. Successful predictions The Net as a means of worldwide communication and the omnipresence of computers. B. Sterling: “I think it was a grand success to realize that big, dorky geek computers were going to become incredibly fashionable.” The institution of data havens; there has been an attempt to establish a data haven by HavenCo. The haven was established on the Sealand in the North Sea. “...the Sealand data haven in the North Sea is similar to the data havens described in my 1988 novel Islands in the Net." It's not clear that this has been a successful attempt as Sealand has not successfully established sovereignty. End of the Cold war - though how it ended in the novel is quite different than how it ended in reality. Wearable, personal computers (the watchphone). Assassination by drone. "Drugs, in the form of a pure synthetic THC, are also cheap and widely accessible." The end of apartheid in South Africa, which achieves Black majority rule. Failed predictions Islands anticipates that the Soviet Union will still be in existence in 2023 - in reality, the USSR was officially dissolved on December 8, 1991, just three years after the book was published. In Islands, communication on the Network relies on one-way messaging: pre-recorded video messages and telex. It misses both the interactive nature of the WWW and effects of Moore's Law on prices. Excerpt, p 16-17: "The Lodge did most of its business as telex, straight print sent by wire ... it was cheapest and simplest... Fax was good for graphics and still photos; the fax machine was essentially a Xerox with a phone ... Rizome favored one-way prerecorded calls because they were more efficient. There was less chance of expensive screwup in a one-way recorded call... Teleconferencing was the expensive borderland where phones blurred into television." South Africa having its name changed to Azania after the fall of apartheid and expanding greatly in size northward. References Source material External links Islands in the Net at Worlds Without End 1988 American novels 1988 science fiction novels Cyberpunk