Post #2225889

This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018: […] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents’ collection of science fiction. My parents’ collection of old science fiction. Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books. And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as… icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there’s way too much flash and it ate the substance, it’s showing off way too hard. And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing. (I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up). So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard. There’s so much conversation within SF that he’s missing, and it’s kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he’d probably get more traction if he’d engaged with it more.