SpecificAstronaut69

SpecificAstronaut69 t1_iy8dpaz wrote

Reply to comment by sadetheruiner in Robots will roam a university to study “a socio-technical problem” — will wander a Texas campus so researchers can study human-robot relations. by marketrent

> but purely from the standpoint of ignorant destruction for the sake of destruction is a bad trend for humanity.

I mean, it's been going' one for about 65,000 years, sooo...I wouldn't really call it a "trend" so much as "the status quo".

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SpecificAstronaut69 t1_iy864q3 wrote

Reply to Neuromancer isn’t as hard as I’ve heard… by mikeyboi2567

All right. Time for me, literary semi-wanker, to do this.

William Gibson is, pretty much, a literary author. He's an English major (and former antiques picker - hence the cloisonné).

Most science fictions are, frankly terrible fucking writers. What's considered "proper" spec fic writing is considered by pretty much everyone else, absolutely shithouse writing. Yet, of course, this sort of writing is so commonplace that it's become the hallmark of the genre - it's simply how you must write science fiction.

We're talking the exposition, the info-dumps, the overwrought detail, the pointless technical asides that add nothing to the plot - it's the author jerking off in your face about how smart he is, not telling a good story for the readers.

>This is my first dip into hard SF

Interestingly, a lot of people don't consider Gibson "hard" SF, or even cyberpunk in general to be "hard".

Now, it's been my experience as a massive Gibson fan, that most "proper" science-fiction fans absolutely hate Gibson, and will shit on him at every opportunity.

I made the mistake of mentioning I was a Gibson fan - his prose is amazing by the way, and his use of voice in ATP is amazing - during my fine arts writing degree in uni, and that meant, unfortunately, lecture fuckin' paired me up with the Comp Sci and Engineering students who took our classes as electives for - heh - "easy marks".

These were hardcore nerds who boasted about only reading science fiction, hard science fiction, diamond-dick hard science fiction, 900 page novels that were part of the seven book Heptology. Books that had the worse excesses of science fiction writing like I'd mentioned above.

And they hated Gibson. His prose is "fruity", and the lack of over-description meant he was "dumb" because he didn't prove he knew what he was one about. (Why isn't there three whole pages describing how Molly's lenses integrated with her orbital sockets? How they're powered? What material they're made from, and how it was fashioned into lenses? Truth is, for the story, it don't matter...)

The focus on humanity and human characters, not tech, driving the plot forward also bugged them, and keeping track of the characters is a problem.

I'd mention some of the authors they'd read here, if I could remember them. They were out-there names you've never heard of and have to really track down. Melvin Updike? Sergei Komininsky? Who knows?

Finally, unlike a lot of "proper" science fiction authors, Gibson has no institutionalised cultural capital. A lot of these guys were pissed that someone with an English degree was - gasp! - daring to write science fiction.

Long story short, these sort of SF fans tend to dominated SF. And they're gatekeepers, the guys who decide what's good SF and what's bad. And that's why you hear so much negativity around Gibson.

>It’s described in a way that makes me think that you’re not supposed to get everything from the text and you kinda fill it out in your mind. Some descriptions aren’t very clear at all but taking from what’s in the text and imagining what makes sense in my mind works perfectly fine.

And that, my friend, is good writing - which Gibson excels at, and most spec-fic authors frankly suck at. That's what good writing is meant to do, stimulate your imagination, not simply piss words into the empty space between your ears like your noggin's a skull-shaped urinal.

Gibson's a master of this. He does in a sentence or two what most SF authors wouldn't be able to resist into dragging out into a multi-para wank.

>>That blade's under three inches, broad as a soupspoon, wickedly serrated, and ceramic. Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself.

- Virtual Light

No "proper" SF author would've been able to restrain himself describing something so cool as a fractal-edge ceramic knife in only two lines.

One thing I tried drilling into the those engineering students' porcelain crania was the fact that less writing build more engagement with the reader. The more they have to pay attention and figure things out, the closer they'll read, and they'll read actively, not just gloss over whole paragraphs (my suspicion with those long-arse hard SF books is that no one really reads every line in 'em).

This is a basic tenet of good writing, but it's counterintuitive as hell. Few of them got it. Fewer still got anything more than a "Pass" in our classes...

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