Now, in response to The_Quiet_Earth’s question about time-traveling marines, Erwin started typing. He posted his answer in a series of comments in the thread. Within an hour, he was an online celebrity. Within three hours, a film producer had reached out to him. Within two weeks, he was offered a deal to write a movie based on his Reddit comments. Within two months, he had taken a leave from his job to become a full-time Hollywood screenwriter.

At any given moment on the inter-webs there are probably dozens of irate Sci-Fi / Fantasy fans getting agitated about those damn literary authors coming and writing genre, while genre writers themselves miss out on the credit they deserve. Which is about as silly as shouting at someone for stealing your flowers when they have plucked some bluebells in the forest. (Unless you happen to own an entire forest. Do you? Well OK then.) SF and Fantasy are common ground that any writer can build their house upon, but pretending to own them just makes you look silly.
And it’s doubly silly if you’re an aspiring writer of the fantastic, because you may be hurling away the best chance to learn you will ever get. If as a writer you are only as good as what you read, then how good can you expect to be if your book diet is filled with derivative works of pulp fiction? A fast food diet may please the taste buds, but you wouldn’t expect to dine out on Big Macs every day and become an olympic athlete. So why expect to write even a good book without reading them first?

William Gibson famously coined the term "cyberspace," and gave us a singular vision of the future in early cyberpunk novels Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In the three decades since, his fiction has crept closer to a recognizably contemporary setting; the gradual change isn't surprising, given his belief that "cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical."


Along the way he's taken on the occasional nonfiction assignment, with the results collected for the first time in his latest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor . The title refers to Gibson's dislike of the "exasperated visionary" tone of H.G. Wells, a voice Gibson hears in much mainstream sci-fi. Rather than imagine himself capable of predicting the future, he explores our fragmented, ever-changing present, curating the choicest bits on his Twitter feed, @GreatDismal. (The name comes from the Great Dismal Swamp Wildlife Refuge, located near his childhood home in Virginia.) During his recent book tour, he took time to talk about writing nonfiction, his love of cities, and his particular view of the present – all delivered in careful, precise words barely tinted with Southern accent.

I want a good Sci Fi book to read.

I've sort of dropped off my novel reading in the past few years and I think I have to unplug from the snack reading of Internet and sink into books again.

But I go into book stores and the "Sci-Fi" section is full of Fantasy.  Vampires and Lord of The Ring knockoffs.  And perhaps Star Wars novels.  Quality "hard" Sci-Fi seems to be thin on the water nowadays.

So who are the sharp Sci-Fi writers now?  Who are the new William Gibson and Bruce Sterling?  Are there any recent books that would make me go "Whoa, I've never looked at the world that way!"?

The last one that did that to me was Vernor Vince's "Rainbow's End", set in a world of Wearables... where everyone with smart contact lenses that put an overlay of Internet and Enhanced Reality over everything.  One of his Singularity themed books.

So what's new and good?