From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Subject: Re: Diamond-hard SF
Organization: TECHbooks of Beaverton Oregon - Public Access Unix
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 14:46:06 GMT


Examples of diamond-hard?  None that  I know of.  No work has at least 
one good, original _hard_ idea per page.  Ideas of several kinds,
with a variety of interactions, and rendered in a manner that creates
a fascinating work of art.  Not story with conventional character 
and plot, but _art_ with vivid communication and style.

But you want examples.  Here's some stuff I've read lately that comes 
close in some regards, but falls flat on others:

Tom Clancy, _The Hunt for Red October_
  (well described tech, but contemporary)
Annie Dillard, _Pilgrim at Tinker Creek_
  (non-fiction, nature-watching & describing)
James Hogan, _Two Faces of Janus_  
  (great content, poor style)
William Gibson, "Burning Chrome" and _Neuromancer_
Robert A. Heinlein, _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ and _Friday_
Bruce Sterling, "Twenty Evocations"
A.E. Van Vogt, _World of Null-A_
K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_ and _Unbounding the Future_
 (quite fictitious "non-fiction": speculation about nanotechnology etc.)
Marc Stiegler, _David's Sling_
 (great content, poor style)
Tom Wolfe, "Clean Fun at Riverhead", etc.
 (journalistic non-fiction; stylistically not different
  from his fiction _Bonfire of the Vanities_)

There may be others.  Vernor Vinge sounds promising, 
as does the following reccomendation:

> 3.  Transrealistic Fiction by Rudy Rucker (cf. Beyond Cyberpunk hyperstack
> from the Computer Lab, Route 4, Box 54C, Louisa, VA 23093 by snailmail).

Gibson is perhaps the exemplar.  He has a good understanding of how
tech and society interact.  He has skilled style, the ability
to vividly describe a wide variety of new situations.  Normal 
characters & plot?  Not much and not dwelt on.  Dilliard and
Wolfe are included because of their style and ability to describe
in the concrete, in a manner unprejudiced by contemporary 
attitude fads -- aka "political correctness", damn the
people who made ideology out of that useful phrase.

Does that make diamond-hard cyberpunk?  It will owe a debt to 
cyberpunk for reintroducing the art of prose to SF.  But diamond-hard 
isn't a single style, it's a way of _making_ styles.  Like
William Gibson et. al. made cyberpunk.  Diamond-hard's business 
is to come up with the new and, as Joseph Brenner well noted,
what it feels like and how we react to it.  Note that the
main human involved is the _reader_.  There may or may not be
people featured in the work.  If there are, it is hardly worthwhile
to have them do conventional things in the face of the
unconventional; the new is what diamond-hard is all about.

Great SF authors -- they _could_ be great, anyway -- who have little 
competence in traditional character or plot now feel compelled to 
gratuitously fill their books with it.  These conventions are being 
used far more for destruction than construction.  It's time to
dump "character", "plot", and the works of lit-police who pollute 
our pages with them, into the bit bucket.  


Nick Szabo					 szabo@techboook.com
-- 
Nick Szabo					 szabo@techboook.com
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written