411–420 of 427 posts
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Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
That’s also about people. And communism. Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
Somebody really should mention John Brunner. His "Stand on Zanzibar" and "The Sheep Look Up" predate Gibson and Sterling by a decade and both those authors have cited his influence on their works. I love Neuromancer but Zanzibar is also brilliant.
I want to recommend Vernor Vinge's books to anyone looking for some new sci-fi... I've read A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire upon the Deep. They were exemplary to the kind of logical structure of SciFi and made some relevant predictions which I won't spoil. The guy was a professor of computer science (RIP)
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Deepness in the Sky is one of my favorite books of all time! Fire Upon the Deep is a serious let-down by comparison, but the wolves are a cool concept. As I've gotten older I've realized that I have very little in common with Vinge philosophically. But he was a person who thought very deeply, and it shows.
Any essays or articles in particular you're thinking of in relation to his philosophy?
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comparing stephenson and gibson is interesting - gibson basically does no story-based exposition in a lot of his work, and stephenson can't help but dig into the nitty gritty details that support the world-building and story development to an almost obnoxious (but informative!) degree. i used to really enjoy Stephenson (especially having not gone to college- i feel like i was exposed to some interesting ideas through…
Stephenson's pre-cyberpunk first novel, Zodiac, is about an eco-warrior uncovering a chemical company pollution scheme. In Diamond Age, he talks about an air pollution crisis caused by dead nanobot swarms. From what I remember, most of his anti-corporate messaging was strongly tied to pollution but I don't even see that popping up in his later novels and I never really thought of anti-corporatism as a recuring Stephe…
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Just my opinion, but neither were .. revelatory for me. They were both just okay. I'm not really an avid reader though.
If you read Snow Crash before the age of 25 it's revelatory. If you read it after 25 it's laughably on-the-nose. In highschool it was the greatest book I ever read. Some books require the reader to be in a particular place in their lives.
Necromancer was cool. Never managed to get through the other cyberpunk classic Snowcrash though. Did I get the right book? Pizza delivery?
I think Snow Crash is an interesting book but I can see how people could be turned off by it. It kind of straddles a weird line where parts of it almost read like parody or an attempt to troll the audience but at the same time it explores serious concepts. It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
- music
- movies
- microcode (software)
- high-speed pizza delivery"
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I really hope they do it well. Some of the things that were new in Neuromancer are tropes these days. e.g. the payphone ringing, in the Matrix and more relevantly in Person of Interest. It's going to be very hard to navigate between faithfulness to the book and still have it feel fresh. That and inherent difficulty of taking Gibson's prose to the screen. Maybe it will be by voiceover.
I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting. I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading se…
Ursula K Leguin, 100%. The Dispossessed is about an anarchist society. Might also check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Kameron Hurley.
The Dispossessed is excellent literature regardless of one's politics, though. The anarchist society depicted in it is utopian, but shown with warts and all fully exposed, and that makes it that much more believable.
I find that it pairs great with Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which, while very different in terms of language and writing (but also great!), sort of does a similar exposition of an anarcho-capitalist utopia - again, warts and all.
I would recommend Snow Crash instead, another Sci-Fi classic from the same era which I found to be a much more enjoyable read & more commensurate to the hype.