The Apolyton Science Fiction Discussion Group: June Nominations

[JohnT]

PLEASE READ BEFORE POSTING AS ONE MAJOR CHANGE HAS OCCURRED SINCE THE LAST NOMINATION THREAD!!!!!!

This club doesn't have many rules, but what there are pretty much involve nominations and voting:

1. You must have read the book you are nominating.
2. Please nominate only 1 book, as to allow others' selections to be listed.
3. The books must be science fiction and must be properly "themed" (see rule 5).
4. Last months runner up will automatically be nominated. The person who nominated last months runner up can nominate another book if they desire, without effecting the runner up's nomination.
5. The person who nominated the winning book gets to pick the "theme" of the next month's nominations.

It would also be appreciated if you could link to a good description (Amazon, sfsite.com, whatever) of the book.

On the 15th (or so), I will post a thread listing the nominations with a multiple-choice poll which will allow you to select up to three (3) books. The poll will be timed to end at the end of the month, and the winner will be the book we read for June. If there is a tie, I make the decision as to which book to read.

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Since Che Guevara won the May vote for Red Mars, he has decided that the June theme is cyberpunk.

The runner-up in May's vote was, again, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, so it automatically is re-nominated for June.

[Wraith]

Cyberpunk? Ara, ara.

Well, I know Neuroamncer will get another nomination, and probably win. If not that, I'll be surprised if it isn't Gibson.

In any case, I'm going to have to nominate one of Walter Jon Williams' books. The real question is which one. Either Voice of the Whirlwind or Hardwired would be great. The latter is a very good cyberpunk book, and was actually written before Neuromancer. Publishing problems got it delayed so it wasn't released until afterwards, unfortunately.

Both are great reads. Kuso. I can't narrow it down just yet. I'll have to think about this and make my nomination later.

Wraith
"He must have to butter his ass to get into those pants."
-- Cowboy ("Hardwired")

[Clear Skies]

*is absolutely pants at determining the theme of a book, so will probably sit this month's nominations out unless someone cares to give him a crash course*

[St Leo]

Cyberpunk == Matrix

I've tried to read Neuromancer twice without success. It's very hard to suspend one's disbelief.

[JohnT]

Same here, Cold. I've no particular affinity for the genre and am uncertain as to whether I've ever read a cyberpunk book, other than Neuromancer - and I detested it so much I was seriously thinking of adding a temporary rule 6: "And no Neuromancer!"

Closest I've read to Cyber is Simmon's Hyperion. If there are no objections, that will be my June nominee. If there are objections, I'll look for something else...

[Lonestar]

Dune by Frank Herbert.

In the Universe, there is only one way to travel between the stars, by using the spice Melange. The spice can only be found on the Planet Arrakis, a harsh desert world of sandstorms, Fremen warriors, and the great worm Shai-hulud.

Every 80 years the Padishah Emperor allows another great house to administer the spice profits. This year, it goes to House Atreides, led by Duke Leto, a popular man whose popularity has garnered him enemies in House Harkonnen and the Emperor himself.

After Atreides is destroyed, Leto's son Paul goes on to become a messiah figure to the oppressed Fremen people. He makes them realise that whoever controls the spice controls the universe, and a new Jihad is brewing....

[JohnT]

Uhm, Lonestar? Dune isn't cyberpunk - anything but, actually.

[Lonestar]

Oh, yeah.


mmmmmmmmmmmmm.....


Damn, I hate Cyberpunk. I would've thought Dune would've been appropriate considering the state of affairs.

[Wraith]

--"so will probably sit this month's nominations out unless someone cares to give him a crash course"

Blatantly stealing this from the alt.cyberpunk FAQ:

1. What is cyberpunk, the literary movement?

Gardner Dozois, one of the editors of _Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine_ during the early '80s, is generally acknowledged as the first person to popularize the term "cyberpunk" describing a body of literature. Dozois doesn't claim to have coined the term; he says he picked it up "on the street somewhere". It is probably no coincidence that Bruce Bethke wrote a short story titled "Cyberpunk" in 1980, submitted it then to _Asimov's_ when Dozois may have been doing first readings, and got it published in _Amazing_ in 1983, when Dozois was editor of _1983 Year's Best SF_ and would be expected to be reading the major SF magazines. But as Bethke says, "who gives a rat's ass, anyway?!". (Bethke is not really a cyberpunk author; in mid-1995 he published _Headcrash_, which he calls "a cybernetically-aware comedy". Thanks to Bruce for his help on this issue.)

Before its christening, the "cyberpunk movement", known to its members as "The Movement", had existed for quite some time, centered around Bruce Sterling's samizdat, _Cheap Truth_. Authors like Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley submitted articles pseudonymously to this newsletter, hyping the works of people in the group and vigorously attacking the "SF mainstream". This helped form the core "movement consciousness". (The run of _Cheap Truth_ is available by anonymous FTP in the directory "ftp.io.com:/pub/usr/shiva/SMOF-BBS/cheap.truth".)

Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in technologically-enhanced cultural "systems". In cyberpunk stories' settings, there is usually a "system" which dominates the lives of most "ordinary" people, be it an oppresive government, a group of large, paternalistic corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems are enhanced by certain technologies (today advancing at a rate that is bewildering to most people), particularly "information technology" (computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its human "components" as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs, cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc. Humans themselves become part of "the Machine". This is the "cyber" aspect of cyberpunk.

However, in any cultural system, there are always those who live on its margins, on "the Edge": criminals, outcasts, visionaries, or those who simply want freedom for its own sake. Cyberpunk literature focuses on these people, and often on how they turn the system's technological tools to their own ends. This is the "punk" aspect of cyberpunk.

The best cyberpunk works are distinguished from previous work with similar themes by a certain style. The setting is urban, the mood is dark and pessimistic. Concepts are thrown at the reader without explanation, much like new developments are thrown at us in our everyday lives. There is often a sense of moral ambiguity; simply fighting "the system" (to topple it, or just to stay alive) does not make the main characters "heroes" or "good" in the traditional sense.

--"Cyberpunk == Matrix"

Well, they did try. Sort of. Matrix is more action than cyberpunk. Blade Runner is a better example of cyberpunk than the Matrix.

And it looks like I'll be nominating Voice of the Whirlwind. Hardwired is more in the classis Cyberpunk style, but it's also out of print except for an E-Book. Not sure if we're counting those.

So, Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams.

From the back cover:

Steward is a clone. A beta. His memories are fifteen years old, because his alpha never did have a brain-scan update. And in those fifteen years, the entire world has changed: The Oribital Policorp which held his allegience has collapsed; dozens of his friends died in an off-planet war which he survived; an alien race has established relations with humanity; both his first and second wives have divorced him.

And someone has murdered him.

Wraith
"Écrasez l'infâme."
-- Steward ("Voice of the Whirlwind")

[chequita guevara]

I was thinking about nominating Cryptonomicon, which is arguably Neal Stephenson's best work to date (he's one of my favorite authors), however, I had my memory jogged about my favorite cyberpunk book, Stephenson's Snow Crash.

I have been trying to get Theben to read this book for over a decade. The hero of the story, Hiro Protagonist, is a pizza delivery man and a freelance hacker. At the time I began badgering Theben, he had been working for Domino's pizza for years. I mean hey, a story where a pizza delivery man saves the world, what's not to like!

Anyway, the US has fallen apart into mini statelets, each basically a gated community with it's own set of rules. There's the US government, the New Confederacy (where our hero, being half-Japanese, is not welcome), and many more. There are lines in it like: "Jesus Christ, Mom, I just saved your ****ing life. The least you could do is offer me an Oreo."

From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible.

I should note that this is the book where the 90s got such terms as memes, or rather, popularized it to the point that it became a meme itself.

[St Leo]

Well, they did try. Sort of. Matrix is more action than cyberpunk. Blade Runner is a better example of cyberpunk than the Matrix.

You are probably right. Blade Runner's plot manages to make less sense than that of the Matrix.

I nominate Greg Egan's Diaspora. Most of the action in Diaspora happens inside computers, so I think that it qualifies as cyberpunk.

---

A book review by Danny Yee - http://dannyreviews.com/ - Copyright © 2000

Diaspora begins in 2975, when there are three major strands to humanity: fleshers, who retain biological bodies; gleisners, who have moved to humanoid robots; and citizens of the polises, who live as software running on central polis hardware. Within these there are further divisions. Some fleshers ("statics") have tried to stay close to the ancestral form, while others ("exuberants") have used biotechnology to modify themselves, sometimes drastically. Some polises have charters that encourage introversion and activity within simulated worlds; others try to remain in touch with the physical world. The plot itself is relatively simple. A nearby neutron-star binary collapses, violating the currently understood physics and generating a burst of gamma radiation that threatens the Earth. Two citizens from Konishi polis activate abandoned gleisner robots to try and warn the fleshers of what is to come.

Carter-Zimmerman polis subsequently dispatches copies of itself to other stars, seeking an explanation of what happened and some kind of certainty about the future. The protagonists end up chasing a species called the Transmuters (who have left behind them clues such a planet composed solely of deuterium and C-13 and other heavy isotopes).

There is plenty of "hard" science fiction around, but Diaspora makes most of it feel like talc. An explanation of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem and an introduction to gravitational astronomy are just warmups - not only does Egan speculate about 6-dimensional physics and visualisation in 5-space, but he makes a serious attempt to explain the mathematical concepts of "manifold", "embedding", and "fibre bundle"! Some of the physics is invented, but the basic ideas closely reflect real modern theoretical physics. You don't have to be able to follow all of this to appreciate Diaspora, but those without any interest in physics and mathematics are likely to find it rather tedious. (A twelve page glossary and two pages of references are included.)

As a novel Diaspora is limited - though the characters are all recognisably human, none of them ever really comes to life. But the speculations on philosophy of mind are more interesting in many ways than the physics. Polis citizens are created either by copying of a biological brain (using nanoware) or by simulated neuro-embryology. They can directly modify their own motivations (with "outlooks") and perceptual and cognitive abilities, as well as cloning themselves (and, under some circumstances, clones can subsequently merge). Unlike the physics and mathematics, which are necessarily presented in long passages of exposition, the ideas about mind and consciousness emerge more naturally from the story.

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[SlowwHand]

I'm nearing the end of Dreamcatcher.

Don't know about the movie, but the book is good.

[Drake Tungsten]

Dune by Frank Herbert.

I was going to nominate Dune as well, until I saw the stupid "cyberpunk" theme. Best sci-fi novel ever, but not cyberpunk in the least...

[Ramo]

I'll nominate A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (does that qualify as cyberpunk?).

In this Hugo-winning 1991 SF novel, Vernor Vinge gives us a wild new cosmology, a galaxy-spanning "Net of a Million Lies," some finely imagined aliens, and much nail-biting suspense.

Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone--but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond. Outside that again is the Transcend, full of unguessable, godlike "Powers." When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools. And the half-mythical Countermeasure, if it exists, is lost with two human children on primitive Tines World.

Serious complications follow. One paranoid alien alliance blames humanity for the Blight and launches a genocidal strike. Pham Nuwen, the man who knows about Countermeasure, escapes this ruin in the spacecraft Out of Band--heading for more violence and treachery, with 500 warships soon in hot pursuit. On his destination world, the fascinating Tines are intelligent only in combination: named "individuals" are small packs of the doglike aliens. Primitive doesn't mean stupid, and opposed Tine leaders wheedle the young castaways for information about guns and radios. Low-tech war looms, with elaborately nested betrayals and schemes to seize Out of Band if it ever arrives. The tension becomes extreme... while half the Beyond debates the issues on galactic Usenet.

Vinge's climax is suitably mindboggling. This epic combines the flash and dazzle of old-style space opera with modern, polished thoughtfulness. Pham Nuwen also appears in the nifty prequel set 30,000 years earlier, A Deepness in the Sky. Both recommended. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk

[Imran Siddiqui]

Btw, can we have a list of all the books that have been selected so far?