We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day There was coffee. Life would go on.
– William Gibson. The Winter Market.
In truth, the anthology Burning Chrome contains some very fine short stories. I tend to think that it is a shame that Gibson gave up publishing stories pretty much immediately after he published his first novel, however iconic that novel might have been.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Nah… Burning Chrome and erm… the one that features the Autonomic Pilot were good, but I’m not enthusiastic about the rest of them in there.
Stunning return to form in Pattern Recognition though after the previous three which were total and utter bilge.
Amazing really how Neuromancer, Count Zero (better than Neuromancer by my reckoning) and Mona Lisa Overdrive were just in a different world from the last three – the names of which I forget even though I own them all and have read them all multiple times.
Bilge, I say!
Agreed Lascaille. The Bridge triology was awful*. All Tomorrow’s Parties was utterly abysmal.
Like you I also think Count Zero better than Neuromancer. TheBurning Chrome collection was very patchy but there’s some good stuff in it. Dogfight (is that the one you’re thinking of?) is excellent as is Winter Market that Michael quotes from. The latter is beautifully bleak and nihilistic.
For those looking for cyberpunk shorts I can recommend Bruce Sterling’s A Good Old Fashioned Future.
*The only two really brilliant sequences are the “Franz Kafka” theme bar and Berry Rydell’s job-interview at the shop selling Southern Gothic stuff. He’s from Tennessee but the proprietor doen’t think he is Faulkeneresque enough.
I’m probably going to get flamed for asking this, but why do so many libertarians (yes, Perry, I know that’s not a completely accuracte word for this site….) seem to obsess over having an almost obscurantist love of science fiction?
Perhaps my question is a bit harsh, but I find it a much more common occurrence here than any other site I visit to have to google things I’ve never heard of, only to find they’re references to some science fiction book I’ve never heard of.
Because Ted, the future’s so bright we gotta wear shades.
What Nick M said.
Incidentally, Ted, I agree with you about all the interesting things I learn on this site. I always have Google running in another browser when I’m here.
And I’ll bet there’s not another site on all of Al Gore’s Internet with a higher frequency of use of the word “risible”!