Imagine if he had known what was going on in there. It would have been a much different environment if he even would have the inspiration to write about it at all.
Sometimes, a butterfly flaps its wings. Sometimes, it’s because someone didn’t know. And sometimes, the mystery is more intriguing than the actuality.
Clearly, this helps make works of sci Fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk and related genres relevant far into the future.
If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
When you have to invent new future tech, it still feels mysterious and interesting.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
As I recall, his communication satellite depiction included humans living on it full time to keep it running. Also not quite how it turned out.
I have the utmost respect for him, but he was not immune to getting the future wrong like other science fiction authors.
Luckily tech improved a lot, so now many more things are possible for much less capitol.
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.
In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.
I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
Alastair Reynolds is a modern master of this, in my opinion, with a lot of interconnected far-future “stuff” that still basically hangs together.
This is not a negative. Sci fi is always about people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...
EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
The sci-fi I enjoyed the most would make one impactful change, say allow for intergalactic travel like in The Forever War, or allowing people to backup and restore their brains like in Altered Carbon, and see where that leads.
Others just use sci-fi as a backdrop for an otherwise conventional story, without really engaging with the sci-fi elements. They can be good stories, but I enjoyed the former much more.
I love books that attempt to deal with time dilation/travel correctly.
Only some of the people in the series are space ships.
By a literal definition communism means the collective ownership of the means of production.
In the Culture the means of production own themselves, and they don’t seem to answer to anyone unless it suits them.
Communism is a later stage of such abundance that money, classes and state power become redundant and are abolished.
The Culture is an imagining of the latter, where many means of production become people. They thus become workers that can labour for each other if they collectively decide to.
Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
I’ve heard it said (I’m sure someone can find the exact quote) that the best scifi is written when the author takes the world as it is, changes one thing, and extrapolates to the future.
He has sometimes talked about Blade Runner and worrying when it came out that people would think his stuff was derivative of it (it wasn't), and then said he eventually got to talk with Ridley Scott about it, and it turns out both of them had similar inspirations, namely Metal Hurlant.
I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner from was the Paris Review [1] which is archived here [2]
[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...
"Tron nostalgia: When I was writing Neuromancer, that was the bleeding-edge digital aesthetic. Those sparse green lines! Pong, meet Case."
Now you are being redundant :D
(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
If you want another example of actual hard sci-fi, I would suggest Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. To give an example, I remember it being pretty much the first sci fi book that not only pointed out that laser beams are invisible in vacuum, but actually made it a major plot point of one of the stories.
It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.
Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
For example, here's a page on his site explaining a concept in one of his books: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/02/02.html
One of my favorite authors in all honesty.
It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.
I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.
Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!
I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.
Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.
One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).
What you're missing in his writing is plausible sci-fi stuff: he doesn't care about the details of how biotech or AI will become tools of oppression, he just knows they will.
Stephenson is a good writer too, but he's pandering to an audience: the technical details are fleshed out and the good guys win an unambiguous victory via the virtues of being a nerd.
I'd like to live in Stephenson's world, but that one is made up.
has 3 main themes: 1) Gibson talking about Americana because he had a captive audience (the director) who promised to listen. 2) Gibson being self-deprecating because he promised the director he’d answer questions about himself. 3) Lots of other writers explaining what an experience it was to read Neuromancer when it first came out.
And the only reason every tech based scifi story is interesting is because nobody bothers to consider that all tech leads to absolute fascism and tracking of every living being in existence way way before the creation of the really powerful interesting stuff