The Setup: William Gibson

Post by bitwize » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 3:51 PM UTC

dextorious wrote: post #47

bitwize wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the belief that William Gibson pretty much hates computers which is why he wrote so much about them. He doesn't write SF, he writes anti-SF. An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. Gibson's novels about cyberspace and that relied extensively on handwaving, magical thinking, and "unseen, unknown threat" to develop their narratives. This isn't negative. Gibson probably knows…

> An SF author posits scientifically plausibe scenarios and shows his/her work. You probably missed all the "soft science fiction" movement after the sixties... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_science_fiction ). What you describe was 30-50s style "hard science fiction" --think Asimov, Clark, etc

Post by Semiapies » Tue, Oct 18, 2011, 8:35 PM UTC

swdunlop wrote: post #39

cstross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a novelist your career doesn't usually start rolling until you're in your mid-thirties. (You need life experience before you can depict characters folks want to read about.) Neophilia for its own sake usually wears off some time in the forties, even among many geeks. Moreover, if your job involves spinning text, just about any computer built in the past two decades will do the job. (I know one award-winning…

(I know one award-winning SF novelist who uses an obscure British word processor, originally for CP/M and MS-DOS) This is not so exotic; how many of us still adhere to vi in an xterm when we are in "time to stop fooling around and work" mode. ;)