30 Best, Since 50-A Duel

[Oliver Xymoron]

On Mon, 31 Jul 1995, Steelhead wrote:

> OK.  Bonnie's assault on Gaddis set me off. It made me wonder exactly what
> all the technoheads think passes as "real literature" these days.  So I
> decided to do something totally absurd, which is to publish a list of what
> I, Steelhead, consider to be the 30 most important American books of
> fiction published since 1950.  Remember: I wasn't born till '59, and I've
> tried to sprinkle in a little diversity.  Here goes.
> 
> 1.  Gravity's Rainbow, TRP
...
> 21. Neuromancer, William Gibson

This line caught me by surprise. Neuromancer for me was a sign of the 
end. Cyberpunk as a genre clearly has a very limited lifespan - compare 
Neuromancer and Virtual Light (Gibson's latest?). Neuromancer is set well 
into the next century but looks tame compared with the anarchy and 
technology poised to appear in VL which is set 15-20 years in the future. 
And VL is the more plausible of the two, not to mention the slightly less 
pulpy. But both will look hopelessly dated within 5 years if they're not 
already. The fact that its already considered a science fiction classic 
points to the ever diminishing signal-to-noise ratio in paper-land and 
everywhere. Everyone has word processing, everyone has desktop 
publishing, anyone can write a book that takes the pulse of some segment 
of society and grab a momentary audience. But the world's collective 
memory and attention span is rapidly getting shorter. Will people be 
reading GR 50 years from now? How relevant will it seem in 20? Who will 
interrupt their info surfing for the requisite weeks or months needed for 
a proper reading? 

If I had to pick some sci-fi novels as being important, I'd go with
Foundation (the trilogy) by Asimov and Dune (just the first book) by Herbert.
A friend of mine recently came across a first edition of Dune and tells me
that there was a lot taken out in later editions. Now that I'm way off topic,
I'll mention that the recent movie Waterworld borrowed an awful lot from
Herbert's Lazarus Effect and Ascension Factor, not to mention Road Warrior. 

> 
> Flail away.  I can take it.

We know you like it, your baiting was too obvious.


http://waste.org/~oxymoron   /|/| Now the past is untrue, and this breath
W.A.S.T.E. =================< | |  is a lie, and the sun is an emptiness
oxymoron at waste.org (_)       \|\|   that burns through the sky  - swans