I think part of the angst about writing near-future sf at the moment comes from the feeling that everything is changing all at once, and it's too much for anyone to capture in a book.
I'd agree, except that this feeling isn't new to us now. People seem to have felt much the same as far back as the 1700s (at least), if not the whole of history. Descartes complained about the bloody kids causing the downfall of society, I'd be shocked if the Greek elders didn't think that change was happening too fast. as Neil Gaiman says in Signal To Noise "We are always living in the end times."
What's new now, I think, is that people who have grown up reading the likes of Neuromancer are now building on that, in much the same way that the cyberpunk writers had grown up on earlier SF and were building on that.
What you're getting is the SF equivalent of Grant Morrison writing the JLA - idea thrown upon idea, referencing back into the vast amounts of lore built up, and put together by a brain used to taking in lots of confusing information at once and building its own world out of it.
It stands to reason that as a genre builds up a back catalogue writers are going to either tear it down because it's too confining or build upon its ideas and go deeper into what they see as the most exciting parts of it. And that when the latter occurs, the writers who have gone deeply into the genre are going to be less accessible to those people still standing outside of it, unsure of even the most basic jargon in use.
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Date: 2006-03-07 11:29 am (UTC)I'd agree, except that this feeling isn't new to us now. People seem to have felt much the same as far back as the 1700s (at least), if not the whole of history. Descartes complained about the bloody kids causing the downfall of society, I'd be shocked if the Greek elders didn't think that change was happening too fast. as Neil Gaiman says in Signal To Noise "We are always living in the end times."
What's new now, I think, is that people who have grown up reading the likes of Neuromancer are now building on that, in much the same way that the cyberpunk writers had grown up on earlier SF and were building on that.
What you're getting is the SF equivalent of Grant Morrison writing the JLA - idea thrown upon idea, referencing back into the vast amounts of lore built up, and put together by a brain used to taking in lots of confusing information at once and building its own world out of it.
It stands to reason that as a genre builds up a back catalogue writers are going to either tear it down because it's too confining or build upon its ideas and go deeper into what they see as the most exciting parts of it. And that when the latter occurs, the writers who have gone deeply into the genre are going to be less accessible to those people still standing outside of it, unsure of even the most basic jargon in use.