Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:
(I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).
So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.
There's so much conversation within SF that he's missing, and it's kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he'd probably get more traction if he'd engaged with it more.
Yud:
Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky
Yud:
It's not just a load-bearing if, it's a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!
Despite the explicit exhortation to take the good parts from new things and integrate them into your own thinking, and the assertion that Campbellian SF teaches this, neither Yud nor any of the commenters seem to appreciate the possibility of doing this with cyberpunk. For them, if a story does not include a scientist expositing his ideas, it cannot be a story with ideas. The slightest amount of flourish in the prose makes even rather blunt themes like "the street will find its own uses for things" and "the rich are not even human" completely invisible.
When I was a youngster (before I had developed any such notion as "taste"), my SF reading ran the gamut from A Wrinkle In Time and The Giver, to The Caves of Steel, to The Ophiuchi Hotline. (I didn't finish The Difference Engine for the same reason I didn't finish Foundation: Stopping the book and starting over with all new characters confounded and discouraged me. So, I expect that Valis would have been too much for me, but that I might have finished A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.) When I tried to write an SF novel myself, it obviously ended up trying to do all those things. The native Martians had destroyed themselves and ruined their planet in nuclear war; one tiny faction tried to survive by turning themselves into data patterns in the computer of a subterranean city from which they could be resynthesized. One of the scientists on the human team investigsting the city millions of years later is the victim of social bias because he has a rare illness that both causes blindness and makes his body reject cybernetic implants. It eventually turns out that this illness is due to an ancient, noncorporeal life form trying to form a symbiotic relationship. Et cetera.
This is someone nakedly fantasizing about being L. Ron Hubbard.
Worst mental image of the day
neuromancer is brilliant prose first and foremost, and yudkowsky not being able to realise this is so very symptomatic
Yeah, all that "style over substance" nonsense is really strange given that those early sci-fi authors were more notable for cleverness and sheer volume of output than for consistent literary quality (and I say this as someone who also read and enjoyed a lot of Asimov and friends growing up). Like, Sturgeon may have coined the "90% of everything is crap" law, but when you write the amount that they did for the pulps you end up with some real gems in that 10%.
I liked it and I'm not really into sci-fi because I need good prose to read more than the content.