As someone who grew up with Greg Egan on the shelf, I want to note that Greg Egan said basically the same thing about “Neuromancer” (that it cares more about being fashionable than having the characters think through their situation), and “Quarantine” and “Permutation City” were in part responses to cyberpunk, so perhaps all is not lost.
Backing that up with Greg Egan interview quotes.
From the Karen Burnham interview, on hating “Neuromancer”, and on the influence of cyberpunk on “Quarantine”:
I read Neuromancer in 1985, because I was voting for the Hugos that year and I thought I ought to read all the nominated novels. I really hated it; aside from the style and the characters, which definitely weren’t to my taste, a lot of things about the technology in the book seemed very contrived and unlikely, especially the idea that anyone would plug in a brain-computer interface that they knew a third party could use to harm them.
Over the next few years I read some Rucker and Sterling novels, which I definitely enjoyed more than Gibson. So there was some reasonable stuff written under the cyberpunk banner, but none of it felt very groundbreaking to anyone who’d been reading Dick and Delany, and if it hadn’t been wrapped in so much hype I probably would have enjoyed it more. In fact, the way cyberpunk as a movement influenced me most was a sense of irritation with its obsession with hipness. I don’t think there’s much doubt that “Axiomatic” and the opening sections of Quarantine have a kind of cyberpunk flavour to them, but my thinking at the time would have been less “Maybe I can join the cyberpunk club!” and more “Maybe I can steal back private eyes and brain-computer interfaces for people who think mirror shades are pretentious, and do something more interesting with them.”
From the Marisa O’Keeffe interview, something that corroborates what Eliezer Yudkowsky said about “Neuromancer” characters worrying how things look on a t-shirt:
A lot of cyberpunk said, in effect: “Computers are interesting because cool, cynical men (or occasionally women) in mirrorshades do dangerous things with them.” If that really is the most interesting thing you can imagine about a computer, you shouldn’t be writing SF.
I recall being very bored and dissatisfied with the way most cyberpunk writers were treating virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the ’80s; a lot of people were churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology. I wrote a story called “Dust”, which was later expanded into Permutation City, that pushed very hard in the opposite direction, trying to take as seriously as possible all the implications of what it would mean to be software. In the case of Permutation City that included some metaphysical ideas that I certainly wouldn’t want to repeat in everything I wrote, but the basic notions about the way people will be able to manipulate themselves if they ever become software, which I developed a bit further in Diaspora, seem logically unavoidable to me.
Something depressing is certainly going on in mainstream culture, since for example “The New York Times” hasn’t had a review of a Greg Egan book since “Diaspora” in 1998, except to suggest “that Egan doesn’t fully understand how oppression works — or that he is trying to make an inappropriate point”.
But science fiction seems alright, if it reacted to “Neuromancer” exactly along the lines of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s reaction to this post, producing some of the most beloved (by sci-fans) science fiction of the 90s. And I still see every new Alastair Reynolds book in the sci-fi sections of non-specialty bookstores.
As someone who grew up with Greg Egan on the shelf, I want to note that Greg Egan said basically the same thing about “Neuromancer” (that it cares more about being fashionable than having the characters think through their situation), and “Quarantine” and “Permutation City” were in part responses to cyberpunk, so perhaps all is not lost.
Backing that up with Greg Egan interview quotes.
From the Karen Burnham interview, on hating “Neuromancer”, and on the influence of cyberpunk on “Quarantine”:
From the Marisa O’Keeffe interview, something that corroborates what Eliezer Yudkowsky said about “Neuromancer” characters worrying how things look on a t-shirt:
From the Russell Blackford interview, on the influence of cyberpunk on “Permutation City”:
Something depressing is certainly going on in mainstream culture, since for example “The New York Times” hasn’t had a review of a Greg Egan book since “Diaspora” in 1998, except to suggest “that Egan doesn’t fully understand how oppression works — or that he is trying to make an inappropriate point”.
But science fiction seems alright, if it reacted to “Neuromancer” exactly along the lines of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s reaction to this post, producing some of the most beloved (by sci-fans) science fiction of the 90s. And I still see every new Alastair Reynolds book in the sci-fi sections of non-specialty bookstores.