The Sword and Laser discussion

I mentioned in another post that I had read Neuromancer many moons ago and again last year. While you can call it cyberpunk, it is definitely sci fi. I recently read both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. It would be a stretch to call them sci fi. There is a little techie aspect to them, but nothing beyond the capabilities of the here and now.

I was also pretty disappointed with the endings of both books (well, Neuromancer, as well, but...). It seems like Gibson has great ideas for characters and stories, but doesn't know how to wrap it up. All in all, I'd give them a "meh".

Am I all alone in this belief? Am a blaspheming the Father of Cyberpunk?

I don't believe there's any requirement for science fiction to be about futuristic technology. It's all about the "what if" in science. That science can be future, present, even past, as long as you're speculating about unusual applications.

There's a reason it's called SCIENCE fiction instead of FUTURE fiction.

Gord wrote: "I don't believe there's any requirement for science fiction to be about futuristic technology. It's all about the "what if" in science. That science can be future, present, even past, as long as yo..."

Hmm... so, if you throw an iPad and a little surveillance into a novel, it becomes sci-fi?

EDIT: This was bit snarky, but my point is that there was nothing really scientific about Pattern Recognition or Spook Country. It was more spy thriller than sci-fi.

That depends on how you use them. What're the questions being asked about them, or about the consequences of their use? Just having them there isn't enough of course. What's the speculation?

Ok, fair enough. Still a bit of stretch, but I see your point. That really does open the field quite a bit, though.

I've always been of the opinion that one of science fiction's problems is that it's too narrow at times. Sometimes it feels like it's just space opera and near-future, when it can really be so much more.

One of my favorite examples of how it can be more is Robert J. Sawyer's Neandertal Parallax trilogy. In it, humanity comes into contact with a parallel world in which it was the Neandertals that survived while Homo sapiens went extinct. (This of course was written a few years ago, before we knew Neandertals survive in us.)

The Neandertals possess technologies we don't, which appear to be slightly more advanced in some respects, but that's not the focus of the story. The speculation of it, the "What if?" is all centered on the larger questions; what would they have been like if they survived instead of us? What sort of society would they create? What beliefs would they hold? How would their unique traits influence their development? How would they react to us and our world?

None of that requires ray guns and supercomputers. It's just pure speculation, about science, done with logic, according to the known evidence of the time.

EDIT: Hominids is the first book in the series.

I read (well, listened to) Hominids. I really enjoyed it and have been meaning to continue the series. But I would say that falls into sci-fi, maybe fantasy (not real sure where the line is there), since it takes something no longer of this world and reintroduces it and because it introduces an alternate universe.

I can't see that as the cause for it's classification I guess. The way I see it, the alternate universe isn't the subject of any of the questioning, it's just a means to an end. Science fiction is a branch of speculative fiction, and it's that exploration that makes it what it is, not the trappings. YMMV, I suppose.

I'm curious about Sawyer's Dino-series:

I read Far-Seer just recently, it was fantastic. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Can Isaac Asimov be considered a science fiction author? Sure, he wrote a couple of well-known sci-fi books. He also wrote a bunch of mysteries, a few books on religion and history, and a bunch of books about math and science.
Douglas Adams wrote Last Chance to See, a travelogue about searching out endangered species around the world. And The Meaning of Liff is just a book about funny words.
Neal Stephenson wrote Cobweb, a tale about an anthrax terrorism plot in the midwest.
Just because someone writes a book in another genre doesn't mean they are kicked out of the club.

But I wouldn't call Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams sci-fi writers. Just because someone writes a sci-fi books shouldn't pigeonhole them as a sci-fi writer.

Many authors have this issue. They become popular or "known" for a certain genre and that's what people think they write. Stephen King is "known" as a horror author. Not all of his books are stricly horror novels. Gibson is the same. He's best known for writing SF and for pioneering a sub-genre of SF but that's not all he's done.

Ultimately it is a marketing problem. I remember having this discussion when I worked at a local used book store. It boiled down to "where does the customer expect to find this book?" Gibson is going to end up in the SF section, King will end up in Horror and Robert Patterson will end up in the thrillers even though there are books he's written that aren't strictly thrillers.

For what it's worth, I'm a cataloger at a public library system, and we put Gibson's last three books in the Fiction section as opposed to Science Fiction.