Posts Tagged ‘Cyberpunk’
Kim Stanley Robinson: In Conversation
Monday, August 30th, 2010
On walking into the cavernous BMW Edge theatre to see Kim Stanley Robinson speak, my first thought was: why is it so empty? Or, more accurately: why are there any empty seats at all? Based purely on my own literary preferences, I’d rather been assuming that KSR’s talk would be one of the many sold out events; the fact that it wasn’t, rather than being a reflection on the speaker, seems to say more about the type of person likely to attend a mainstream literary festival – viz, readers who abstain from SF/fantasy.
But I digress.
Interviewed by the wonderful Lucy Sussex, Robinson spoke eloquently on a wide variety of topics, ranging from his criticism of cyberpunk as a genre in the 80s and 90s to his thoughts on society, environmentalism and literature. Geek that I am, it was the former of these topics which I found most fascinating, not least because it came at the issue from an angle I hadn’t hitherto considered – or at least, not in any depth. For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction characterised by its dystopian, near-future settings in a context where the presence of a virtual world has created a culturally relevant divide between the real and not-real elements of society. (more…)
