On the issue of why many of us don't read as much SF as we once did... Speaking for myself, 1. I'm a lot older. The stuff that I thought was really great back when I was 14-22, or so, and even "pretty good" until I was about 25 or so, now really looks like dreck. (Not all of it, but more than I thought was dreck at the time.) Partly this is age and life experience, partly just increased sophistication. 2. As Duncan noted, helping make the future tends to make fantasies about the future less compelling. I often found my work at Intel in the 1970s and into the 80s to be much more exciting, and much more "science fictionish" than nearly anything I read in SF. And the same is largely true of recent years. Even the most interesting of modern SF writers--Vinge, Stephenson, Sterling--are explicitly using crypto and Cypherpunk themes. (Vernor V. claimed to a friend of mine that the day he spent talking to several of us was the most fruitful day he'd spent in a long time...I take this as evidence that folks like us are to the new generation of SF writers what folks like members of the British Interplanetary Society were to writers of past generations.) 3. Some of the best stuff written today is, in my opinion, as well-written as anything in the past. Some stuff I've liked in recent years: - Dan Simmons, "Hyperion," and "Hyperion Rising." Very creative, very literate, very absorbing, and a plausible future. Some cyberpunk themes as well, but mixed in with several other styles. (Interestingly, Eric Drexler says he cannot enjoy it because Simmons does not give nanotechnology a central enough role. This echoes the point Duncan made, that our personal visions of the future make us less tolerant of futures which don't match our visions closely enough. And as we get older, our visions solidify. We become more opinionated, and less "open-minded.") - David Zindell, "Neverness," "The Broken God," and a third novel in the series. Less known than Simmons, but well worth checking out. - Vernor Vinge, "True Names," obviously, "The Peace War," "Marooned in Real Time," "A Fire Upon the Deep," and his collections of short stories (incl. "The Ungoverned"). (Caveat: I've been invited to do a chapter for Vinge's forthcoming "True Names" book, containing essays about computers and society, and, of course, his novella of the same name. So I may be biased.) - John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider," and, my favorite, "Stand on Zanzibar." Required reading. As Shalmaneser would put it, "Christ, what an imagination he had." - Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." A good fictional exploration of online anony mity. In many ways, Cypherpunks was explicity a kind of combination of "Ender's Game," "True Names," "The Shockwave Rider," and "Atlas Shrugged." - Gibson, Stephenson, Fred Pohl, etc. - and of course Heinlein, though his best stuff is 30-45 years old now Fortunately, there's a vast amount of stuff to read even if SF is becoming somewhat worn out. (Another trend not mentioned yet is that the "science fiction" category is actually largely made up of "fantasy" and related themes. Readers are buyng the stuff, so it's hard to argue with it. I don't read it, except for the occasional fantasy classic (a la Tolkien)...it never spoke to me, and it never seemed "useful" to me. By "useful" I refer to the fact that when I was a kid I read SF for tips and motivation, for my chosen field, physics. The stuff I read, such as Heinlein's novels, truly did speak to me.) Finally, I could say I have "less time" than when I was younger. Though it seems this way, it objectively is not the case. When I was a kid I _made_ the time to read a lot. Of course, now my reading and writing is online--and I'm doing a lot more writing than I did when I was devouring an SF novel every evening, on average. --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."