TRAGIC!

[rmd]

I was reading the guardian.co.uk's top 20 geek novels, and
noticed that neither brunner's "shockwave rider" nor "stand on zanzibar" showed up on the list and were, in fact, conspicuously missing.

go read these, people.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I am adding Trouble with Lichen to my list. Besides the Watchmen, it's the only one I'm missing.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

I tried reading shockwave rider years ago, and found it boring. never finished it.

Geek SciFi and Television

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

What I found most outstanding about "Stand on Zanzibar" was that it predicted the entire choreography of a typical MTv video fifteen years before such things were common (and about ten years before they existed at all).

I have the same problems reading Norman Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron"; the television layouts and attack journalism pretty much came true between the time he wrote the book and the time I read it.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Total weirdness.

For some context - I was working staff at the Worldcon at which Brunner died; I didn't have to run much of the interference with the attendees while we were dealing with the fact that he had died, and was a personal friend of a substantial fraction of the staff who were now also dealing poorly, but I did have to run some, and was among the set of people who were informed early about that actual situation. It really sucked. In a weirdly personal note, a friend of mine had been meaning to ask for special dispensation for us to do a bunch of Nick Haflinger hackery. So I have an odd sort of relationship to Shockwave Rider.

I'm slowly coming around to the view that Snowcrash is in the same category &em; prescient by a mere few years, and a very different feel of book if you read it a mere decade or two after the book was written, because not only has too much of it come true, the bits that were wildly speculative are now disconcertingly plausible.

Although part of that may be due to the fact that a lot of my last few months, and my next six, can be boiled down to 'Making the world safe for Pizza delivery.'

(I also count Dream Park in a similar category; Fantasy Role Playing Gaming is now seriously woven into the mainstream culture, even though the activity itself is pretty fringey)

[kjc.livejournal.com]

Ooh, there are 7 books I haven't read yet. Sadly, mainly old SF that I feel I should read but never get around to it... (Asimov and Heinlen especially - I've read a couple of Brunner books and enjoyed them).

So I need to read: I, Robot; Foundation; Stranger in a Strange Land; The Man in the High Castle (which I might have read - I've read a lot of Dick - but I'm not sure); The Diamond Age; and Trouble with Lichen. Neat.

The book that utterly creeped me out the most was Brave New World because it was written in 1932. THIRTY-TWO! When I read it, I didn't know that, and figured it for a 1960's piece, 50's at the earliest. I read it, was terrified of it, and then found out when it originally came out and became frightened of Aldous Huxley.

I agree with xthread on Dream Park too...

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

I was reading the guardian.co.uk's top 20 geek novels, and
noticed that neither brunner's "shockwave rider" nor "stand on zanzibar" showed up on the list and were, in fact, conspicuously missing.

The problem with the older books like Shockwave Rider, is that they fade from public awareness as new books come out and new geeks are born.

Looking at the list, most of the books are either relatively recent, are taught in school, or have been made into movies, so they're likely to be on the shelves of a new book store.

"Trouble with Lichen" seems to be a bit of an anomaly, but perhaps John Wyndham is more popular in the UK (and his stories have been turned into movies).