Near Future science Fiction

[Dr Roberts]

As you may have realised based on my previous posts I am looking for some reading material. So, does anyone know any good books set in the near future?

[SpaceMarine93]

Neuromancer, by William Gibson, THE first Cyberpunk science fiction ever written. Ignoring the fact that some of the predictions are out of date (It was written in 1984 after all), it is a good near-future sci fi.

[lordofchange13]

I would recommend nearly any of Philip K. Dick, though his work is much like the Neuromancer, in that he wrote his stuff in the 60's

[Batman]

Define near future. Are we talking timeline or technology? Because if we're talking timeline, a lot of the stuff Heinlein and Asimov wrote are set in the past already.

[Iroscato]

Seeds of Earth, by Michael Cobley was a great read, set roughy 300 years into the future, on a far-flung colony. It might float your boat, but expect few explosions, and many dodgy political underhand dealings

[lordofchange13]

He means near future technology

[Batman]

He means near future technology

While I suspect this to be true I'd like him/her/it to tell me so.
Not to mention near future technology is impossible to nail down. Back in the 50s, near future technology meant a permanent moon base, a manned Mars mission a few years down the line, and colonies in the outer system before the end of the century.

[Number Theoretic]

How about the Bridge- or Idoru trilogy, also written by William Gibson but later than Neuromancer? Still very recognisable as Cyberpunk but it felt less dated than Neuromancer (although Neuromancer still is a very good read)

[TronPaul]

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is another good near future cyberpunk novel. I'm having difficulty describing why I enjoy it so much. I guess I need to read it again.

[edaw1982]

I suspect it means Tom Clancy-ish stuff.
A good example (well 'Good' being relative to your like/dislike of Tom Clancy), is Net Force. High-end VR internet, instead of sitting on your arse, typing at keys it's all the cool stuff they promised us back before 2000.
The VIRGILS (acronym, forget what it means), is basically a pimped-out GPS/Cellphone/etcetera.
But otherwise the tech is pretty much the same.

There's Babylon A.D., which from what I recall (of the movie anyway..haven't read the book) is a few nifty sci-fi things. Drones I think...and a foldable E-map, but not 'too' outrageous.

[Kingmaker]

Halting State, by Charles Stross is pretty good and set in the near future. The primary bit of new technology is ubiquitous Augmented Reality, and the plot centers around the fallout and ramifications of a bank robbery/hacking in an MMORPG. It's written in 2nd Person,though, which some people might find off-putting or annoying.

[Shroom Man 777]

The best thing about William Gibson's work is that he professed not actually giving a fuck about the realisticness or feasibility or whatever of the technology in his works and was taking a totally stylistic over substance approach to his portrayal of the future, which was why Neuromancer did in a literary sense to the cyberpunk genre what Blade Runner did for it in a visual aesthetic manner.

I suspect if Gibson filled us in with paragraphs of worthless bullshit about how this "realistic" "near-future" bullshit computron worked with its sci-fi vacuum tube transistors, his work would be even more dated and would be laughable and dull by now. But since he filled it with drug addicts, hookers with snikt-bub wolverine claws, poison sacks lining blood vessels, and encrypted-abalone narco-oyster huffing South African data-poachers surfboarding 3D cyber-sharks breaking through Black ICE firewalls to chomp biodigital sea lions swimming in the network-currents of the information superhighway, people loved it rather than getting bored senseless by it, and everyone cites Neuromancer to seem all cool and hip and shits.

Come on, it had androgynous child-molesting fucks beaming memetic holograms from his eyes getting harpooned by a blind ninja warrior monk with an arrow in a space station run by orbital rastafarians. Motherfuck me. Now that is the best kind of realistic near future science fiction, mon.

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, yes. Most 'near future' and even 'far future' SF has gotten dated, except insofar as it concentrates on characterization and social themes instead of on the hardware. Because it's a lot easier for us to predict things like how weird humans might act with the freedom of virtual reality than it is to predict the details of what computers will look like forty years from now.

[Kingmaker]

Shroom, I'm not sure you remember Neuromancer entirely correctly... And I don't know if you've read anything else by Gibson, but the number of cyborg ninja prostitutes drops precipitously after Neuromancer. Like, if you got into Gibson for that, you'd be sorely disappointed with his later work, which feature such cyberpunk archetypes as: a bike courier, a rent-a-cop, a teenage rock fangirl, and a media data analyst (who is totally not the man himself, no sir). I was seriously disappointed when I read Idoru. Not really.

I'm not sure what the point of the above was. Anyway.

What made Neuromancer interesting was not diamond hard computer science (since, you know...) but the questions it posed about the future of society with disenfranchisement and the seeming decline of America at the time and the increasingly important role of computers and corporations and stuff. I know he says its all about style over substance, but I think he nevertheless has a tremendous grasp of the essence of the substance he is writing about, even if he fabricates his own forms. Plus he's awesome because, unlike a lot of his mediocre imitators, he doesn't get resort to clumsy didacticism to get his point across.

P.S. I'm pretty sure the first Cyberpunk ever written was Cyberpunk.

[Shroom Man 777]

Honestly, yes. Most 'near future' and even 'far future' SF has gotten dated, except insofar as it concentrates on characterization and social themes instead of on the hardware. Because it's a lot easier for us to predict things like how weird humans might act with the freedom of virtual reality than it is to predict the details of what computers will look like forty years from now.

I think the effect on the people living in the future is more important than whether this information biodigital cyber-toaster's internal mechanics uses hard sci-fi quantum foam entanglement bread crust crispification, or medium-rare solid state singularity memetic carbon nanotube bucky ball deep frying. Human condition and all that stuff.


@ Kingmaker:

My post was a gross oversimplification yes, and it mentioned nothing of what Neuromancer was actually about.

Yes he was focusing on the human condition, on perception, on the mind and the nature of intelligences and all sorts of psychological stuff and the creation of a sentient self-aware sapient but ultimately very non-human mind yet somehow which communicated to human beings by creating a simulacrum of reality. He was also touching on disenfranchisement, notice how our titular main characters are all downtrodden miserable down-on-their-luck bottom-level street-dwelling shmucks eaten alive by their dismal future world. He was also touching on class differentials with how the Tessier-Ashpools being obscenely rich built up for themselves an ultimate ivory tower and sequestered themselves from the real world in a way beyond merely cyberdecking, by physically living in isolation until they degenerated into a bunch of lunatic clone-inbred incestruous psychosexual fuckers. He touched on many things in that, up to and including the atmosphere of cyberpunk and all that jazz.

I remember that.

But I haven't read Gibson's other works.

What I mean was that he wasn't dumping crappy substance of how-many-digital-gigajoules-this-future-computor-works while the audience dies of boredom. What he was doing was that he infused his materials with style. Like, there were intellectual substance nutrients and intellectual calories and proteins in his works, but he flavored them with stylistic spices and herbs and seasonings, infused them with atmosphere, so that they won't be dour bland tasteless literary imitation-gruels to our mental taste buds but the equivalent of a gourmet meal for the mind for us to savor.

His book was an equal parts dissection of all the themes you touched, as well as a tourist's experience of the future, with all the sights and sounds and the sceneries and the bizarre multi-cultural madness mesh of it all. His style, his panache, was what made it alive - and that living future he made went hand in hand with the messages and the substances he wanted to convey, which made it a very great read and which made it all the more effective.


Johnny Mnemonic was great though. In that great movie, we finally learned the answer to that age old question: Who would win in a fight, Dolph Lundgren or a Dolphin? Except this time, they were both cyborgs!

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't think it's so much the 'technology' or the details that are the problem, in that details/tech tend to be a substitute for maintaining plausibility and suspension of disbelief. Even with the horrid GIGATONS involved or really insane shit you can get some very engaging and believable and enjoyable sci fi - Alistair REynolds and John Scalzi are my personal favorites for 'non hard, but plausible seeming' sci fi, and they do all sorts of crazy-magic shit in them. If you want to go onto a real extreme end, I've always loved Simon R Green's Deathstalker series - to me that's how 40K OUGHT to be - By contrast, alot of the stuff in the SW EU, the 40K EU, or some of the baen series (Weber or Ringo) don't have that - they get so fixated on one particular thing to the exclusion of all else it becomes singleminded and repeittive and it loses its suspension of disbelief and ability to evoke anything imaginative.

To me you have to find a sort of balance between the 'seeming' realism - or rather as I think of it the plausibility and internal consistency of the universe you construct (which includes technology) and the 'fiction' - or hell, even the fantasy. (Yes I don't consider it bad to have 'fantasy' in your sci fi.) You need imagination and a sense of wonder and room to explore and expand and evolve (characters, settings, universes) as well as even a little mystery, danger, or even horror for it to be enjoyable.

I notice for example in reading 40K novels I tend to enjoy the stuff that actually breaks away more heavily from the themes and "rules" set down by the endless line of codexes or rulebooks or other silly stuff like tha. I like bizarre things like nuns who smoke, or mega untouchable doom fetuses or Slaaneshi starship sthat seem to have boob-cannons and other weird orifices we should not speculate on. (most of which originaed in Atlas Infernal which I just read, and enjoyed, because it reminde me alot of Ian Watson And Eye of Terror style 40K fiction. Which is far from a bad thing.)

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, you can have realistic or unrealistic or surrealistic tech-stuff. But that's just a component or a feature or an object in the work. The goodness or badness of a work depends entirely on other factors aside from tech, namely factors that also determine the goodness or badness of all sorts of other stories that may or may not have tech. Give your hero protagonist a ray gun for his sci-fi adventure, a fist for his kung-fu epic, a sword for his fantasy journey, or a box of chocolates for his Hugh Grant rom-com, either way its success or failure will depend on the inherent and universal things that touch people on a fundamental level.

This is why a lot of those classics are remembered throughout time, whereas those mindless pew-pew spectacles are forgotten. Even if the special effects become dated, even if the science fiction components in the plot become old, the fact that their portrayal touches that fundamental human thinggy - and that fundamental human thing does not change - means that those black and white classics won't get old.

[Connor MacLeod]

I'm kinda reminded of Lensman in this regard. It has almost nothing that can be called realistic, and it is far from as politically correct as possible (which is pretty silly and retarded and probably has all sorts of nasty undertones in it) but I can still like it for its flaws because it has absurd shit like doomsday planet-smashing superweapons, silly fairy dust magic drives and powerplants, abusrdly powerful rayguns and lots of pew pew shit. It also has that sense of awe and exploration and optimism that is characteristic of that age. It would be better if I didn't have to hear Doc Smith say for the umpteenth time 'But Rex Hardcock was a man, a real man' as if this was a thinly veiled space porno, but I can generlaly ignore that if the rest of it is passable.

I also have a strong fondness for 'Moon is a HArsh Mistress' for some reason, although it lacks most in the way of boomage (except for the possibility of dropping rocks), wheras I'm not really fond of Starship troopers (could never get into it. maybe because it has power armour.)

Contrast this with Honor Harrington. I still have a fondness for the series and still (somewhat) follow it, but I'm more particular about the early stuff because it was of a whole different flavor and attitude than the latter stuff when it became all about the new techno widgetry and hwo many missiles the latest novel's starships could throw out and the various ranges it engaged at. Don't get me wrong, I can find stuff to interest me in that kind of shit too (I can rationalize anything), but at the same time it doesn't excuse that its a flaw or that it ruins the balance of the series as a whole.

I find myself missing alot of that 'optimism' and 'awe' that was in sci fi. Tastes can vary, but I would much rather go for farscape or SG-1 than for (say) nBSG - even though nBSG has alot of good points to it from what I've heard.

[Kingmaker]

Well, you can have realistic or unrealistic or surrealistic tech-stuff. But that's just a component or a feature or an object in the work.

Well, if the story depends heavily on the tech in someway to communicate its theme, it is important to grasp the essence of the science/technology. This is where a lot of 'cautionary' science fiction falls down, because the 'what if' it presents is completely absurd but is meant to be taken seriously.

Also, with respect to Neuromancer and the fucked-upness of the Tessier-Ashpools, I thought I'd dump these two quotes on you:

"[T]he exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human." -from Count Zero, on brain-in-a jar-mega-billionaire Josef Virek
"The future is already here, it just isn't very evenly distributed." -from some interview that was probably otherwise utterly unremarkable.

A recurrening theme in Gibson's writing is a society bifurcated by access to technology. I think that characters like Virek and 3Jane and Ashpool are the most extreme manifestation of that, and a mirror to the disenfranchised ordinary human protagonists. While the rest of humanity is scraping by, these guys are going to infinity and beyond. Or at least trying. Or wallowing in decadence and incest. The point is, they literally and metaphorically exist on a different plane.

Which reminds me of another thing I find interesting about Neuromancer: in contrast to a lot of other cyberpunk, the protagonists aren't raging against the machine. They've got no ambitions to overthrow the existing order, not even a peep of "Man, these corps really fucking suck and life would be better if they were gone."

[Shroom Man 777]

They're just shmucks being pushed around by either corporations or AIs or corporate AIs or whatnot. Which is another layer of the message.

Those stories of the tech communicating its theme. Yes, you're right. But I'll argue that to convey the theme, it's much more important to portray the tech's effects on the people and the environment rather than paragraphs resembling something out of an operator's manual.

Like, Gibson never really discussed the hardware specifications or teraflops or algorithmic natures of the AIs in Neuromancer. But in its interactions with the character, its actions and effects in the world around it, we knew it was heavy shit. And arguably, paragraphs of AI anatomy fawning over quantum processors would've lessened the impact of that.

You could have a Jules Verne or H.G. Welles story on the terrors of chemical warfare and the technological impact of gas warfare. Yet they won't go into paragraphs explaining how the gas inhibits nerves and antagonizes neurotransmitters to induce systemic nervous system paralysis. Instead, the story will be about a young Kurdish boy huddling in fear inside a trench, cause he just lost his parents from Baron Shaddam's steampunk locomotive with a gas dispenser cannonade.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Timescape by Gregory Benford is a pretty good near-future novel, although it's depressing as hell. Basically, the world as we know it is ending, and the characters deal with it in different ways. Of course, it wouldn't be Sci Fi if one of the characters wasn't a scientist trying to send a warning back in time, or his boss who wants to abuse the possible(?) technology for self-enrichment.

[khursed]

One of the very best science fiction I've ever read was Chung kuo by David Wingrove.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Kuo_ ... _series%29

That is pure awesomeness!

BTW, it's from the mid 90ies or so. I'm seeing they will publish it again, looks awesome!