To a lesser extent I saw these tendencies in Daemon, even though that book is generally more competently written. I'm not talking about that kind of digression.) I found that I was unable to finish The Unincorporated Man because of a number of things that I can only associate with unprofessional habits/lack of skill, and the most egregious was the fixation on extraneous details that fail to flesh out the world and appear to be interesting only to the author (for instance, there are a couple pages about how the protagonist - ostensibly an old man with his youth recently artificially returned but characterized like a fifteen year old boy - decides to name his computer Sebastian). (I like Neal Stephenson's digressions because they're entertaining. And, I've seen it ruin a lot of otherwise good stuff: I had a hard time getting through John Shirley's A Song Called Youth because, up until quite close to the end, the neo-nazi antagonists were just Evil People Doing Evil Things even when it contradicted their ideology, before we finally got a good look into the mechanics of control and the details of the ideology that made their behavior make a little more sense.)Īnother thing that's prevented me from reading SF recently, that might not be as much an attribute of the medium as an attribute of recent trends in SF publishing, is pointless/masturbatory digressions. (Again, not strictly limited to SF, but something that breaks science fiction a lot more than other genres - it's not entirely unreasonable for a fantasy novel to contain EVIL as a literally-and-materially-existing force in the universe. Extra bonus hate for robots who are clearly emotional and creative but insist that they aren't.ĭesignated villans. On the other hand, we're nowhere near AGI right now and it's already obvious to everyone with even limited experience that AI can be creative (nothing is more creative than a PRNG) and emotional (since emotions are the least complex and most mechanical part of human experience and thus are easy to simulate). On the one hand, this is realistic because human beings have a tendency for othering other races with beliefs and assumptions that don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny (see, for instance, the relatively common belief in pre-1850 US that black people literally couldn't feel pain).
Forget about interstellar travel.Īny variation on the old chestnut of "robots/ais can't be emotional/creative".
Low earth orbit, not so much but, human beings in tin cans going to other planets within the solar system is an expensive multi-year endevour that is unlikely to be done on a more regular basis than people went back and forth between Europe and the americas prior to steam ships. Pretty much *any* form of large-scale space travel. (This is not *explicitly* limited to SF, but appears more often in branded-cyberpunk than one would hope for a subgenre borne out of Bruce Sterling being politically realistic in a zine.) Large scale conspiracies over large time scales that remain secret and don't fall apart.
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