But

I wasn't finished, quite. There'd be another night to brood about the Dutchman. I haven't told you about the Dutchman yet. It looks like they're going to hang him. Man Gets Death For Importing 1 Kg of Cannabis A MALAYAN man was yesterday sentenced to death by the High Court for importing not less than 1 kg of cannabis into Singapore more than two years ago. Mat Repin Mamat, 39, was found guilty of the offense committed at the Woodlands checkpoint on October 9, 1991, after a five-day trial.

Dear God. What a fate.

But perhaps I'm overly pessimistic here. I often am; it goes with the territory. (Though what could be more frightening, out here at the deep end of the 20th century, than a genuinely optimistic science fiction writer?) Perhaps Singapore's destiny will be to become nothing more than a smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity, amid a sea of unthinkable...weirdness. Fully enough to send one lunging up from one's armchair in the atrium lounge of the Meridien Singapore, calling for a taxi to the fractal-free
corridors of the Airtropolis.

They're good

at this stuff. Really good. But now they propose to become something else as well; a coherent city of information, its architecture planned from the ground up. And they expect that whole highways of data will flow into and through their city. Yet they also seem to expect that this won't affect them. And that baffles us, and perhaps it baffles the Singaporeans that it does. Myself, I'm inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through
the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.

emergency vehicles are

automatically green-lighted through to the source of the alarm. The
physical operation of the city's port, constant and quite unthinkably
complex, is managed by another system. A "smart-card" system is planned to
manage billings for cars entering the Restricted Zone. (The Restricted
Zone is that part of central Singapore which costs you something to enter
with a private vehicle. Though I suspect that if, say, Portland were to
try this, the signs would announce the "Clean Air Zone," or something
similar.)

IT

, of course, is "information technology," and we can all be suitably
impressed with Singapore's evident willingness to view such technology
with the utmost seriousness. In terms of applied tech, they seem to have
an awfully practical handle on what this stuff can do. The National
Computer Board has designed an immigration system capable of checking
foreign passports in 30 seconds, resident passports in fifteen.
Singapore's streets are planted with sensor loops to register real-time
traffic; the traffic lights are computer controlled, and the system
adjusts itself constantly to optimize the situation, creating "green
waves" whenever possible. A different sort of green wave will appear if a
building's fire sensor calls for help;

More important,

will denial of such access, in the coming
century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the
dumbest of policemen?

Hard to say. And therein, perhaps, lies Singapore's real importance. The
overt goal of the national IT2000 initiative is a simple one: to sustain
indefinitely, for a population of 2.8 million, annual increases in
productivity of three to four percent.

How will a

society founded on parental (well, paternal, mainly) guidance cope with the wilds of X-rated cyberspace? Or would they simply find ways not to have to? What if, while information elsewhere might be said to want to be free, the average Singaporean might be said to want, mainly, not to rock the boat? And to do very nicely, thank you, by not doing so? Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo anti-feminism out of straying local hands going to allow access to the geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is becoming?

And

you come to suspect that the reason you see so few actual police is that people here all have, to quote William Burroughs, "the policeman inside."And what will it be like when these folks, as they so manifestly intend to do, bring themselves online as the Intelligent Island, a single giant data-node whose computational architecture is more than a match for their Swiss-watch infrastructure? While there's no doubt that this is the current national project, one can't help but wonder how they plan to handle all that stuff without actually getting any on them?

But still.

And after all. It's boring here. And somehow it's the same ennui that lies in wait in any theme park, put particularly in those that are somehow in too gressively spiffy a state of repair. Everything painted so recently that it positively creaks with niceness, and even the odd rare police car sliding past starts to look like something out of a Chuck E. Cheese franchise...

The food in Singapore, particularly the endless variety of street
snacks in the hawker centers, is something to write home about. If you hit
the right three stalls in a row, you might decide these places are a
wonder of the modern world. And all of it quite safe to eat, thanks to the
thorough, not to say nitpickingly Singaporean auspices of the local
hygiene inspectors, and who could fault that? (Credit, please, where
credit is due.)

culture

will assure that the shopper periodically encounters either something new or something familiar in an unexpected context. Singapore's other primal passion is eating, and it really is fairly difficult to find any food in Singapore about which to complain. About the closest you could come would be the observation that it's all very
traditional fare of one kind or another, but that hardly seems fair. If there's one thing you can live without in Singapore, it's a Wolfgang Puck pizza.

But a more telling lack of creativity may have been evident in one of the
city's two primal passions: shopping. Allowing for the usual variations in
price range, the city's countless malls all sell essentially the same
goods, with extraordinarily little attempt to vary their presentation.
While this is generally true of malls elsewhere, and in fact is one of the
reasons people everywhere flock to malls, a genuinely competitive retail. More is in adress world4u.

Singapore

is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of
creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather
desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly-run ship
would lack innovative elan.So, while I had to admit that the trains did indeed run on time, I was
forced to take on some embarrassingly easy targets. Contemporary municipal
sculpture is always fairly easy to make fun of, and this is abundantly
true in Singapore. There was a pronounced tendency toward very large
objects that resembled the sort of thing Mad magazine once drew to make us
giggle at abstract art: ponderous lumps of bronze with equally ponderous
holes through them. Though perhaps, like certain other apparently
pointless features of the cityscape, these really served some arcane but
highly specific geomantic function. Perhaps they were actually conduits
for feng shui, and were only superficially intended
to resemble Henry Moore as reconfigured by a team of Holiday Inn furniture
designers.

Take dating.

Concerned that a series of earlier campaigns to reduce the national birth rate had proven entirely too successful, Singapore has instituted a system of mandatory mixers." I didn't find this particularly disturbing, under the circumstances, though I disliked the idea that refusal to participate is said to result in a "call" to one's employer. But there did seem to be a certain eugenic angle in effect, as mandatry dating for fast-track yuppies seemed to be handled by one government agency, while another dealt with the less educated. Though perhaps I misunderstood this, as Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like an aged cheese.

The heterosexual

hand-job business has been treated rather differently,
and one can only assume that it was seen to possess some genuine degree of
importance in the national Confucian scheme of things. Most shopping
centers currently offer at least one "health center" - establishments one
could easily take for slick mini-spas, but which in fact exist exclusively
to relieve the paying customer of nagging erections. That one of these
might be located between a Reebok outlet and a Rolex dealer continues to
strike me as evidence of some deliberate social policy, though I can't
quite imagine what it might be. But there is remarkably little, in
contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt
carefully deliberated social policy.

Singapore

, meanwhile, has dealt with its own sex industry in two ways: by
turning its traditional red-light district into a themed attraction in its
own right, and by moving its massage parlors into the Beverly Centers.Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of
place where one could have imagined meeting Noel Coward, ripped on opium,
cocaine, and the local tailoring, just off in his rickshaw for a night of
high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station
dropped on top of it. "Don't worry," the government said, "we'll put it
all back, just the way it was, as soon as we have the subway in." Needless
to say, the restored Bugis Street has all the sexual potential of
"Frontierland," and the transvestites are represented primarily by a
number of murals.

Everything that's fallen apart has
already been replaced with something new. (The word infrastructure takes
on a new and claustrophobic resonance here; somehow it's all
infrastructure.)

Failing to find any wrong side of the tracks, one can usually rely on a
study of the nightlife and the mechanisms of commercial sex to provide
some entree to the local subconscious. Singapore, as might be expected,
proved not at all big on the more intense forms of nightlife. Zouk,
arguably the city's hippest dance club (modelled, I was told, after the
rave scenes in Ibiza), is a pleasant enough place. It reminded me, on the
night I looked in, of a large Barcelona disco, though somehow minus the
party. Anyone seeking more raunchy action must cross the Causeway to
Johore, where Singaporean businessmen are said to sometimes go to indulge
in a little of the down and dirty. (But where else in the world today is
the adjoining sleazy bordertown Islamic?) One reads of clubs there having
their licenses pulled for stocking private cubicles with hapless
Filipinas, so I assumed that the Islamic Tijuana at the far end of the
Causeway was in one of those symbiotic pressure-valve relationships with
the island city-state, thereby serving a crucial psychic function that
would very likely never be officially admitted.

Ordinarily

, confronted with a strange city, I'm inclined to look for the
parts that have broken down and fallen apart, revealing the underlying
social mechanisms;
how the place is really wired beneath the lay of the
land as presented by the Chamber of Commerce. This won't do in Singapore,
because nothing is falling apart.

In the coastal

city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite
Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of
these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as
hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to
occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong"
in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many
fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But
Mr. Lee's Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese
seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.

to hold at bay

the triple threat of communism, pornography, and drugs.
The only problem being, of course, that it isn't 1956 in the rest of
world. Though that, one comes to suspect, is something that Singapore
would prefer to view as our problem. (But I begin to wonder, late at night
and in the privacy of my hotel room - what might the future prove to be,
if this view should turn out to be right?)
Because Singapore is one happening place, biz-wise. I mean, the future
here is so bright.... What other country is preparing to clone itself,
calving like some high-tech socioeconomic iceberg? Yes, here it is, the
first modern city-state to fully take advantage of the concept of
franchise operations Mini-Singapores! Many!

"Gosh

, dad, I'm really glad you took the time to explain the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts to us in such minutely comprehensive detail.""Look, son, here comes your mother with a nutritious low-cholesterol treat of fat-free lup cheong and skimmed coconut milk " And, in many ways, it really does seem like 1956 in Singapore; the war (or
economic struggle, in this case) has apparently been won, an expanded
middle class enjoys great prosperity, enormous public works have been
successfully undertaken, even more ambitious projects are under way, and a
deeply paternalistic government is prepared, at any cost,