A Quote by Paul Di Filippo
It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.
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The BBC has tended over the years to be broadly liberal as opposed to broadly conservative for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons. The sort of people we've recruited - the best and the brightest - tended to come from universities and backgrounds where they're more likely to hold broadly liberal views than conservative.
Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters.
IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
At the age of 5, when I was in kindergarten, I often used to pass by the computer labs and see students doing work on computers. I realized that calculation, which would take us a long time to do, can be done in less than a second with the help of computers. So that is how my interest in computers began.
SF isn't a genre; SF is the matrix in which genres are embedded, and because the SF field is never going in any one direction at any one time, there is hardly a way to cut it off.
Drunk nerds. Not my thing.” “You like nerds.” “Not nerds who join fraternities,” Cath said. “That’s a whole subclass of nerds that I’m not interested in.
For the longest time, computers have been associated with work. Mainframes were for the Army, government agencies, and then large companies. Workstations were for engineers and software programmers. PCs were initially for other white-collar jobs.
I do find some of the meanest, most exclusionary people are the nerds. And they rebel against other nerds! What are you doing? As much as I love nerds and the nerd movement, the nerd-on-nerd violence is really bad. A lot of times, nerds are the meanest ones online. And also, the trolling can be very extensive because they're smart.
Working in the media, on camera, you could become obsessed with your appearance and how you look. But I have tended to go the other way and I have become less obsessed as I get older.
I always like Iain Banks science fiction stuff and William Gibson's cyberpunk stuff from the 1980s.
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.
Everything is being run by computers. Everything is reliant on these computers working. We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail.
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