The New Wave rejected all this for reasons that were partly aesthetic and partly political. For there was a political tradition that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by its chief theoretician (Campbell himself) and his right-hand man Robert Heinlein, the inventor of modern SF's characteristic technique of exposition by indirection. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion.

At the time, this very American position was generally thought of by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But the SF community's version was never conservative in the strict sense of venerating past social norms — how could it be, when SF literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social arrangements? SF's insistent individualism also led it to reject racism and feature strong female characters long before the rise of political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms of art.

After 1971, the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF was reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized as libertarianism. Libertarians, in fact, would draw inspiration from Golden Age SF; Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, H. Beam Piper's Lone Star Planet, and Poul Anderson's No Truce With Kings (among many others) would come to be seen retrospectively as proto-libertarian arguments not just by the readers but by the authors themselves...The New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one. Its inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.'s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop.  [How true!] The New Wave's later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field...But the New Wave, after 1965, was not so easily dismissed or assimilated. Amidst a great deal of self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few jewels — Phillp José Farmer's Riders of the Purple Wage, some of Harlan Ellison's work, Brian Aldiss's Hothouse stories, and Langdon Jones's The Great Clock stand out as examples. [and most of Thomas Disch in this period] ...Brin, and his collegues in the group that came to be known as the "Killer Bs" (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner. [Yes!]  ....

In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up with reality. Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Cathryn Cramer, whose analysis in the anthology The Ascent of Wonder finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all along. Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater stylistic and literary sophistication. While there are other modes of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery. [Yes!]

4:01:14 PM    

On Sci Fiction. a classic from Gardner Dozois - Flash Point, originally in Orbit #13, back in 1974

12:07:08 PM    

Another one of those mildly pointless quiz things that are good lunchtime distractions.

Discuss

1:11:17 PM    

About once every ten years, a Science Fiction novel appears that redefines the art form. One that describes a world different from our own, but recognisably ours - extrapolated from current trends, but richly evocative of its difference, adding words to the language that needed to be coined. Books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy,Snow Crash and now Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

What these books have in common are worlds that draw you in and make you believe in the technological underpinnings, accepting them implicitly and learning their terminology (TANSTAAFL, frood, Metaverse, Whuffie) as you go, while you follow the adventures of characters you come to care about.

Link  [Boing Boing Blog]

I haven't read Cory's book but to be put in the same company as TMIAHM, SnowCrash, it would have to be incredible beyond most SF books. I mean this is a comparison to two of the Top 20 SF books of all time, books that changed SF forever...

6:31:56 PM    

Whew! A Big Fall Cleaning. Sue and I have spent the last 4 hours cleaning out the spare bedroom of 9 bags of papers (trash), filed all the boxes of technical books back into the office, and refiled more than 400 Science Fiction books in alphabetical order in the office. Finally had to make an entire shelf and more just for Philip K Dick books and a few for Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker! Also uncovered in the rubble was my long lost HP Jornado PocketPC so now I can start playing with  Smart Device Extensions and .NET Compact Framework Beta 1

3:49:01 PM