Speculative Sacred Cows

This is in response to a note from puppytown here and specifically this attached note about sacred cows in speculative fiction.

My claim was that Neuromancer wasn't a sacred cow. Times past I'd heard it fairly seriously disputed that Gibson was the "father of cyberpunk". However, you'd be hard pressed to prove that using Google. Hmmm...have continued on to the Cyberpunk Information Database and consumed a few essays (including stuff by Mr. Sterling naturally).

Okay, maybe I need to reassess my position. A lot of people think of Gibson and company as ground-breaking and influential, obviously. It never struck me this way. Neuromancer seemed, um, inevitable I guess. It matched where several other forms of media were already headed. Blade Runner, a variety of comics. I'm not talking about cyberpunk really here, but Heavy Metal for example was carrying a lot of stuff in the 80s that looked like a cross between porn, music videos, science fiction, and superhero comics. Neuromancer was a logical extension in a lot of ways.

Sterling's essay on the above site talks about how he and bunch of other people in the 80s wanted to knock SF into something a little newer and more relevant. I don't think this is surprising and probably every generation of writers or so takes a stab at that. Hmmm...maybe that's all a sacred cow really is?

Other sacred cows? Well, it seems I'm too out of touch to be much of a reference here, but...

I would say Tim Power's Last Call did some things I hadn't really seen before in urban fantasy. I've only read a couple of Vernor Vinge novels, but they both did some things I hadn't seen before. I guess I'd point at Fire Upon the Deep there. Iain Banks is another guy with a fairly unique take on space travel and space faring civilization. Much more utopian than any cyberpunk stuff, though. Stand on Zanzibar was interesting, especially the ways in which it got some elements of Internet culture exactly right, in my opinion, but thought of it as the next stage in television instead. Solaris may not be the best example of Stanislaw Lem at work, but it's the only one I'm familiar with. Interesting because it talks in detail about the difficulty of research in truly hard topics and then posits a real stumbler: sapient planets.

Lots of fantasy novels (and horror too, oddly enough) talk about magic in a very "hermetic" tradition where spells are convoluted things with rules and procedures and ingredients. So in this regard, David Eddings Belgariad series was interesting because it showed magic as more of a simple force of will -- kinda Crowley-esque really. Guy Gavriel Kay is interesting because of the effort he makes to ground his work in historical research. Arguably this is somewhat derivative of Tolkien, but he's really made it his own. However, I don't know if I would point to a single piece of his work and say, "That's a sacred cow!"

So, I guess that gives other people a chance now to come on in and kill some of my cows. Come on down, the burgers are free!