Most critics think of sci-fi as something like comic book writing and much of it is. But some isn't. I might actually go order one her later works. Maybe the one referrenced. I too am tired of reality, the pointless struggles and so forth. Why read it when you live it?
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To hell with these critics - we should use their spines as belts to accessorize our stylish, kevlar coated suits.
William Gibson, whose fiction has travelled steadily backwards in time from a proposed future set several centuries from now (the time of the "Sprawl") to the day before yesterday recently stated that modern science fiction isn't dreaming of fanciful tommorows, it's mapping the present:
T. Virgil Parker: Your early Sci-Fi commented obliquely on contemporary issues, but it gave you a very unique set of strategies that you're using to explicate the present.
William Gibson: Well, I don't actually think they're unique because I acquired them through the course of working in the genre of science-fiction, but I also acquired a conviction that what they're actually good for, maybe the only thing that they're really good for, is trying to get a handle on our sort of increasingly confused and confusing present.
TVP: Do you think that from your perspective, reality caught up to science fiction in certain ways? Just by creating so surreal a contemporary landscape that it parallels Sci-Fi?
WG: Well, in a sense, although I think when I started, one of the assumptions that I had was that science fiction is necessarily always about the day in which it was written. And that was my conviction from having read a lot of old science fiction. 19th century science fiction obviously expresses all of the concerns and the neuroses of the 19th century and science fiction from the 1940's is the 1940's. George Orwell's 1984 is really 1948, the year in which he wrote it. It can't be about the future. It's about where the person who wrote it thought their present was, because you can't envision a future without having some sort of conviction, whether you express it or not in the text, about where your present is.
I also started with the assumption that all fiction is speculative. That all fiction is an attempt to make a model of reality and any model of reality is necessarily speculative because it's generated by an individual writer. It can't be absolute. Fiction is never reality. I know I had those ideas to handle when I started writing because I was an English major and I was studying things like Comparative Literary Criticism. I came into it with a kind of mild, post-modern spin, and I think I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing than someone who would have started writing science fiction forty years before. I think that as I've gone along, somehow that's all geared up with the result that I now find myself writing speculative fiction about last February, rather than the middle of the coming century.
There's a character in my previous novel, Pattern Recognition , who argues that we can't culturally have futures the way that we used to have futures because we don't have a present in the sense that we used to have a present. Things are moving too quickly for us to have a present to stand on from which we can say, "oh, the future, it's over there and it looks like this."
TVP: The present is contingent upon a kind of objectivity that no longer exists.
WG: Yeah, exactly.
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full -
<http://www.collegecrier.com/interviews/int-0040.asp>
With all due respect to talented and insightful writers of naturalist literature, I note that we live in a world of spider/goat genetic hybrids, floating surveillance robots and uncontrolled atmospheric experimentation.
Who is exploring the implications?
.d.