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Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and treating the technology like an extension of that, not as the point.

(Compare that to someone like Neal Stephenson, who also helped define cyberpunk, but whose deep, deep geekiness about his subject is so unavoidable as to occasionally grind the books to a halt…)

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The heavily technical stuff is the reason that hard sci fi isn’t popular. Technically-minded people, even if they don’t get the specifics, are comfortable enough with technical stuff that it’s essentially decoration, and can probably intuit some things out if it through context. But non-technical people can’t just ignore what looks like a frustratingly opaque wall of gibberish, not realizing if any of it is crucial for plot advancement. Yet technical people are just as able to enjoy the vague vibe-tech stories as long as the author doesn’t try to fake the specifics. The system that Star Trek had in place was genius — the episode writers focused on writing characters, story arc, etc. and could add placeholders for tech talk. Then the script would get passed to specialized writers that could add in technical details to satisfy the persnickety trekkies fact-checking against their tech documentation.

Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific worldbuilding.

I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.

Three Body Problem is not even remotely close to hard sci-fi. The whole notion of "sophons" is ridiculous, for example, and the more the author tries to explain how it works, the more nonsense it ends up being.

If you want another example of actual hard sci-fi, I would suggest Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot. To give an example, I remember it being pretty much the first sci fi book that not only pointed out that laser beams are invisible in vacuum, but actually made it a major plot point of one of the stories.

Ah yes, the hard sci-fi staples such as riding to orbit on a crotch rocket and contributing to dimensional potluck at the end of time.

Katee Sackhoff did an interview with Ron Moore on her podcast, and one of the topics they discussed was how they would write the "technobabble" in Star Trek (and BSG). Moore said they would write the script and just say things like "they tech the tech with the tech until it techs" and then fill in the actual technobabble words later!

A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point.

It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephenson dives to build his themes. In some places it's a subtle framework, in other places it's... very noticeable, as you allude to!

Yeah, I certainly didn't mean it to denigrate Gibson - his writing is beautiful, and I think he's one of the most perceptive Sci-fi writers going. The Blue Ant trilogy was one of the best encapsulations of the "new" world at the turn of the millenium, and reading The Peripheral has the terrifying quality of being given a prophecy of a future you don't want.

I've mentioned it elsewhere, but "This Is How You Lose the Time War" is one of the few other sci-fi books I've read that has that same level of artistry - the Calvino-esque ability to conjure an entire world history out of a short description of three objects sitting on a table. It's much more polarizing for the sci-fi audience, because it doesn't stay in one place and it doesn't flatter as much as Gibson tends to, but it's quite beautiful.

Agree with your sentiment. How to Lose the Time War read like a poem.

I also think more accurate. The opening sentence of Neuromancer is one of the most beautifully perfect metaphors I've ever read - one that's also chock full of symbolism. It may be the single best line of writing I've ever read.

By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.

Really interesting, because his writing kinda gives you that wide-T sense, it's like the way Wu Tang rapped -- especially Raekwon, and to a lesser extend Ghostface -- where they avalanche you with all of these richly visualized and highly contrasted scenarios of this that and the other without ever go too deeply into any of them. Really does leave you awash in a lot of flavorful vibes and in 1991/1992 when I wasn't doing too much computering at all it gave me such a strong sense that sooner than later I'd be doing a lot of it

I went to one of his readings decades ago at a Borders for Pattern Recognition, I think, with no idea what he looked like at all. The first thing you notice is that he might be Buckaroo Bonzai. He speaks a little slower than most folks with a noticeable Southern drawl every few words, which I didn't expect, nor his near lifelong residency in Southern Virginia. His twitter handle as I remember it refers to the swamp he grew up near - Great Dismal. In every way his looks and history are about as antithetical to Sci fi writing as you could dream up but there you go ... genre Lord.

This is the best 'literary' comparison I have ever seen on this site. Since we're in hip-hop for a bit, I gotta point to the way less famous Camp Lo: They do this, but instead of kung-fu + hood drug dealing; they're more in the space of 70's Blaxploitation + Heist films with a dash of Neuromancer/Blade Runner.

For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense.

It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.

I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.

Ballard is much, much more grounded in his stories, and I wouldn’t describe even his most outlandish ones as sci-fi. I actually think a lot of his writing is a bit dry and much prefer Gibson in that sense.

PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.

Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.

Ahem:

https://www.gregegan.net/

Greg Eagan’s SF is so hard it makes ‘hard’ SF feel like soap bubbles.

That guy goes as hard as a math class.

For example, here's a page on his site explaining a concept in one of his books: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/02/02.html

His explanation of time dilation and different types of space-time geometry is far more accessible than any other I’ve seen.

https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

You can feel the shape of the fluting by the subtle dimples in the cardboard the characters are cut from!

One of my favorite authors in all honesty.

Egan is basically his own genre. And it is one of the my favorites.

> Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

Check out Pattern Recognition if you're interested in following him down this line of inquiry!

I don't think there's anything skin deep about Gibson. The words are in a certain style that splits a room, but the worldview, statements about the human condition, about existing in a world where power has become arbitrary an capricious? Never more relevant.

What you're missing in his writing is plausible sci-fi stuff: he doesn't care about the details of how biotech or AI will become tools of oppression, he just knows they will.

Stephenson is a good writer too, but he's pandering to an audience: the technical details are fleshed out and the good guys win an unambiguous victory via the virtues of being a nerd.

I'd like to live in Stephenson's world, but that one is made up.

As I’m sure you know, Gibson himself briefly worked as a fashion model. Unlike most male authors and most sci-fi authors, and especially unlike most male sci-fi authors, he describes what people are wearing with great precision and creativity. For example, Molly’s first appearance in Johnny Mnemonic has her “wearing leather jeans the color of dried blood.” I wanted to dig up a contrasting quote from Asimov, so I went to my Asimov shelf and although I had a great time looking, I had trouble finding a description of what any of the characters looked like, let alone what they were wearing.

Edit: ok, I found one. “They wore scarlet and gold uniforms and the shining, close-fitting plastic caps that were the sign of their judicial function.” But I think this proves my point. I know exactly what Molly’s jeans look like. Those uniforms are much harder to visualize.

I always felt that Asimov had good imagination and ideas, and could craft the plot well, but his actual writing skills were rather weak. He could get me curious, but I never felt any emotions when I read his books.

I think in Asimov, the real protagonist is always an idea, not a character. You can see this play out in the Foundation books; it’s especially clear in the Mule stories. The Foundation is one idea, the Mule is another, and they stand in opposition.

You know this makes a ton of sense and why his writing is so compelling. We experience the “vibe” of a world, not the technical details. And I am saying this as someone who came into Sci-Fi from Heinlein who to a fault focused on the technical. I think the moment you get into the mathematics of anything it starts feeling more mundane. But perceiving a different reality by how it feels is what we do as children and that’s why it’s such a magical feeling.

One of my pastimes is finding more plot holes in Harry Potter and one of the canonical ones is why do they deliver mail by owl? They have the ability to instantly teleport using several different methods. They have telepathy. Why owls? But owls are just really cool as mail carriers and no other reason is needed. I am sure to a wizard, reading those novels would range from boring to infuriating but if you aren’t a wizard, the setting is compelling (even if the plot and the author are not).

>his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself)

I read Zero History and found it supremely boring. Can't fathom this fashion interest.

Totally disagree. He has the deepest understanding of all, of humans, aesthetic, culture, and art. Much more important than specifics about technology which is almost always completely irrelevant.

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