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

[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)