The Sword and Laser discussion

I'm curious about something. Would a cyberpunk novel such as Little Brother by Cory Doctrow fit in to the Sword and Laser group? It's kind of a stretch of the definition of Science Fiction. What do you think?

I don't think I would call Little Brother cyberpunk. It basically takes place in the present day, with no future tech. It's certainly speculative fiction, but I'd almost lump it together with whatever genre contains Tom Clancy novels.

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom definitely has cyberpunk elements, though it's less dystopian than most cyberpunk that I've read. This book has been a selection of the podcast.

Other cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer and Snow Crash have been mentioned in the forums and on the podcast. I consider cyberpunk a subgenre of science fiction.

Thanks Tom. I thought I was stretching the definition a bit.

I haven't read Little Brother, but based on it's description and what I've heard of it, it sounds to me like it would fit under the "Soft SF" label. It may not be as Laser-ish as The Forever War or Ender's Game but it's still Science Fiction, I would say.

Good book. I enjoyed it. I would say it's close enough to sci-fi to work. Seems like folks here would enjoy it -- especially if you live in San Francisco (or have spent time there).

Cory Doctorow has a brand new YA book, For The Win:

Well, we've done a present-day (or just *slightly* ahead of present-day) tech-heavy book for this club before - Daniel Suarez's Daemon, so such a contemporary setting doesn't rule a book out so far. The fact that Little Brother received Hugo and Nebula nominations points to it having enough speculative content to fall in the Science Fiction fold (even if it's laser-less).

Cyberpunk always struck me as having more in common with Hammet and Chandler than Azimov and Heinlein. Gibson himself calls his recent novels fiction, saying that the science caught up to him.

On a more esoteric point, if Clarke is right and science at a certain level is magic, how would you draw the line between scifi and fantacy at all? Look at Jim Butcher's Alera series. That reads all the way through as pretty standard fantasy, but there is a scifi element in it for anyone that has finished the series.