Re: Why I Don't Read SF Much Anymore

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

On the issue of why many of us don't read as much SF as we once did...

Speaking for myself,

1. I'm a lot older. The stuff that I thought was really great back when I
was 14-22, or so, and even "pretty good" until I was about 25 or so, now
really looks like dreck. (Not all of it, but more than I thought was dreck
at the time.)

Partly this is age and life experience, partly just increased sophistication.

2. As Duncan noted, helping make the future tends to make fantasies about
the future less compelling.

I often found my work at Intel in the 1970s and into the 80s to be much
more exciting, and much more "science fictionish" than nearly anything I
read in SF. And the same is largely true of recent years. Even the most
interesting of modern SF writers--Vinge, Stephenson, Sterling--are
explicitly using crypto and Cypherpunk themes.

(Vernor V. claimed to a friend of mine that the day he spent talking to
several of us was the most fruitful day he'd spent in a long time...I take
this as evidence that folks like us are to the new generation of SF writers
what folks like members of the British Interplanetary Society were to
writers of past generations.)

3. Some of the best stuff written today is, in my opinion, as well-written
as anything in the past. Some stuff I've liked in recent years:

- Dan Simmons, "Hyperion," and "Hyperion Rising." Very creative, very
literate, very absorbing, and a plausible future. Some cyberpunk themes as
well, but mixed in with several other styles.

(Interestingly, Eric Drexler says he cannot enjoy it because Simmons does
not give nanotechnology a central enough role. This echoes the point Duncan
made, that our personal visions of the future make us less tolerant of
futures which don't match our visions closely enough. And as we get older,
our visions solidify. We become more opinionated, and less "open-minded.")

- David Zindell, "Neverness," "The Broken God," and a third novel in the
series. Less known than Simmons, but well worth checking out.

- Vernor Vinge, "True Names," obviously, "The Peace War," "Marooned in Real
Time," "A Fire Upon the Deep," and his collections of short stories (incl.
"The Ungoverned").

(Caveat: I've been invited to do a chapter for Vinge's forthcoming "True
Names" book, containing essays about computers and society, and, of course,
his novella of the same name. So I may be biased.)

- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider," and, my favorite, "Stand on
Zanzibar." Required reading. As Shalmaneser would put it, "Christ, what an
imagination he had."

- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." A good fictional exploration of online
anony mity. In many ways, Cypherpunks was explicity a kind of combination
of "Ender's Game," "True Names," "The Shockwave Rider," and "Atlas
Shrugged."

- Gibson, Stephenson, Fred Pohl, etc.

- and of course Heinlein, though his best stuff is 30-45 years old now

Fortunately, there's a vast amount of stuff to read even if SF is becoming
somewhat worn out.

(Another trend not mentioned yet is that the "science fiction" category is
actually largely made up of "fantasy" and related themes. Readers are buyng
the stuff, so it's hard to argue with it. I don't read it, except for the
occasional fantasy classic (a la Tolkien)...it never spoke to me, and it
never seemed "useful" to me. By "useful" I refer to the fact that when I
was a kid I read SF for tips and motivation, for my chosen field, physics.
The stuff I read, such as Heinlein's novels, truly did speak to me.)

Finally, I could say I have "less time" than when I was younger. Though it
seems this way, it objectively is not the case. When I was a kid I _made_
the time to read a lot. Of course, now my reading and writing is
online--and I'm doing a lot more writing than I did when I was devouring an
SF novel every evening, on average.

--Tim May



Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside"
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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