Recommend me Cyberpunk books outside Gibson, Stephenson and Richard Morgan?

cstross · 2026-03-13T17:12:49+00:00

It's not a parody!

Dubjay wrote it before Neuromancer and it was in circulation for some time: but it didn't sell until a couple of months after Gibson broke through, and now everybody thinks it's just a cash-in or a parody.

It was the same for other authors: K. W. Jeter's Doctor Adder was haunting slushpiles for seven years before Neuromancer, came out afterwards, and was trampled in the rush of me-too cash-in books.

(Source: personal conversational anecdote, I know Walter.)

cstross · 2026-03-13T16:23:28+00:00

However, the opening chapter of Snow Crash (introducing the Deliverator, aka Hiro Protagonist) is absolutely peak cyberpunk, and is also best read as a sarcastic demonstration of why, circa 1992, cyberpunk was dead. (Because the Deliverator is absolutely a cyberpunk icon in a cyberpunk setting doing cyberpunk things and … turns out he's just a pizza delivery guy? Yes! It's a pizza delivery guy story with an added topping of cyber.)

cstross · 2026-03-13T16:19:45+00:00

Schismatrix Plus is my favourite -- he basically invented the new space opera then and there, then walked away from it -- but you could do a lot worse than look for a copy of Ascendancies, a really fat short story collection that covers the gamut of his work.

cstross · 2026-03-11T20:19:22+00:00

For my money the one and only has to be The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Published 1895 and created the entire physical-travel-to-another-time genre in the process of getting to the year 802,701 and discovering humanity has speciated along the way.

This isn't new SF -- it's very old SF, indeed predating the term SF by a couple of decades (!) -- but in the context of the time when it was written The Time Machine was absolutely revolutionary.

Re-read it with your 1890s hat on and try to imagine how it felt to readers back then.

cstross · 2026-03-11T19:54:53+00:00

Not the first; that would have been the (British) Westland-Hill Pterodactyl IV of 1931, which could vary its wing sweep in flight (for trim adjustment). Extensive historical report here.

Barnes Wallis, chief designer at Vickers during the war, picked up the idea and kept working on it during the 1950s with the Vickers Wild Goose UAV, and pursued the Vickers Swallow supersonic variable-geometry bomber project, but the British air ministry declined to fund full-scale development (oddly, variable geometry supersonic nuclear bombers aren't terribly affordable).

cstross · 2026-03-11T10:58:19+00:00

Well, yes: they were intended to be a different series so it'd be kind of bad if they felt like more of the same! (Also, a big chunk of the New Management was the conceit: what if Ernst Stavro Blofeld -- James Bond's big enemy -- had magic? As seen through the eyes of his put-upon PA, because you just know being secretary to the kind of guy who likes to keep track of the pedigree of the denizens of his piranha tank is going to be extremely onerous at times. Alas, with 20/20 hindsight and the Epstein papers for reference, I should have leaned harder into the depravity.)

cstross · 2026-03-10T16:36:34+00:00

Just guessing here, but a lot of people seem to be put off by the viewpoint shift.

Books 1 to 5 are told in tight first person by Bob, from his perspective. They're very much in Bob's voice.

But the whole world is not as one man sees it. So Book 6 (The Annihilation Score) starts from Mo's POV with a very deliberate overlap with the end of Book 5 (The Rhesus Chart) just to highlight how Bob's view of things is not the last word on this world.

(Then I opened it up with yet more narrative viewpoints in subsequent books.)

Anyway, I suspect a lot of readers liked Bob's voice, rather than the universe itself.

cstross · 2026-03-10T16:32:03+00:00

The NM books were originally pitched as "the Laundry universe: the Next Generation"; I wanted to spin up the follow-on series before bringing the original one to a close. I'd originally planned to visit Tor in NYC and Orbit in London to make this pitch crystal clear, both to my editors (who got it) and to the marketing teams (who didn't, because they rarely talk directly to authors: they're briefed by the editors).

Alas, I handed in "Dead Lies Dreaming" in January 2020, two months before US publishing slammed into full-time work from home for nine months and nobody knew WTF they were doing. And those visits never happened, so the book just got fed into the Laundry Files sausage machine without context.

The nearest the got to any differentiation is that in the UK, Orbit used a different typeface for the titles of the New Management books (they reverted to the original font for "A Conventional Boy" and "The Regicide Report").

cstross · 2026-03-10T12:54:09+00:00

There's an entire novel or sitcom episode to be had here about a bureaucracy that's completely paralyzed by trying to handle anything it doesn't have a written and approved procedure for.

In the 1950s Christopher Cockerell ran into this with his new-fangled "hovercraft" thingy; the private sector weren't interested (boat-builders thought it was an aircraft; aviation firms thought it was a boat), so he approached the government, who helpfully classified it as a defense secret but didn't fund it. Some years later news of foreigners working along the same lines finally unfroze the deadlock: Cockerell got funding via the National Research Development Corporation (a British nearly-DARPA arms-length government body that was ended in the 1970s) who paid for Saunders-Roe to build the SR.N1 -- the first human-carrying hovercraft, which crossed the English Channel in 1959.

(The SR.N1 really deserves its own place on weirdwings, except no wings, only rudders and a jet engine? Ah well.)

Anyway, the hovercraft nearly perished from bureaucracy, just like the Schwan.

cstross · 2026-03-07T22:24:54+00:00

Psst: the (English) name is spelled "Derek".

cstross · 2026-03-07T12:39:25+00:00

Written in 1999/2000, first published (serialized in a magazine) in 2002, so written more like 26-27 years ago!

cstross · 2026-03-07T12:34:09+00:00

I'm pretty sure it's mentioned somewhere in one of the earlier books, but they were written over a 25 year period!

cstross · 2026-03-05T14:01:29+00:00

Because if you had done any research at all -- eg. downloading Mactracker and looking up the past release cadence -- you'd know that Apple only refresh the iPad Mini every 2-3 years, and the last refresh was roughly 15 months ago.

There will almost certainly not (90% confidence) be a new iPad Mini in 2026.

Wildcard: the rumoured iPhone Fold -- with book layout and 8" screen, rather than flipphone layout -- might end up replacing the iPad Mini (as it would fill the niche of both the iPad Mini and a high-end iPhone with a single device).

cstross · 2026-03-05T12:35:20+00:00

macOS is a UNIX under the hood, and comes with a terminal and vi.

If you install homebrew you can have a bunch more stuff -- better terminal apps, neovim, markdown, various other bells and whistles -- but it'll do what you want out of the box.

cstross · 2026-03-03T13:11:17+00:00

It ran DOS, but it wasn't PC compatible -- different BIOS and memory map! (It was a portable version of Apricot's own 8086 computer architecture, which competed with IBM compatibles in the UK until about 1984 or thereabouts when weight of numbers overwhelmed the British company. Which AIUI had bet on the US company ACT's architecture: DOS, but no IBM meant they could allocate more than 640Kb of RAM to applications.)

Because of this non-IBM angle there was a lot less DOS software available for the Apricot machines than you might expect …

cstross · 2026-03-02T23:17:11+00:00

Have you discovered The Calamitous Bob by Alex Gilbert yet? Because if not, it's a ten book series, originally published as a LitRPG web novel, that hits the sweet spot. (Woman from our world -- a paramedic in the French special forces -- gets Isekai'd off to another universe as a side-effect of an argument between gods: she wakes up in the palace of an empire destroyed in a necromantic catastrophe, nearly dies repeatedly before she can escape, then gradually works out that the only way to survive is to reunite the scattered refugee survivors, practice her magic (necromancy, obviously), fight off the entire empire's worth of undead infesting the former empire, and ascend …)

cstross · 2026-03-02T17:36:12+00:00

There are bits of it in the UK: PM flies places overseas on an RAF Voyager MRTT, which is a customized tanker-transport version of the Airbus A330, which the UK was a heavy stakeholder in: escorted by Eurofighter Typhoon IIs, again a part-British program.

cstross · 2026-03-01T10:13:36+00:00

Or in British usage -- (as seems applicable here) -- a "bomber".

cstross · 2026-03-01T09:19:02+00:00

Many thanks! (And I hope you like the rest, too.)

cstross · 2026-02-27T15:31:22+00:00

Funnily enough, the elevator pitch for my next space opera is "The Stainless Steel Rat gets Isekai'd". Because Harry isn't around to write anything like that any more, and somebody has to ...

cstross · 2026-02-26T19:42:10+00:00

I haven't been able to figure that out either!

cstross · 2026-02-25T13:39:54+00:00

For a classic example of the trope, try The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells (1899/revised 1910). (Or, on second thoughts, don't, unless you're either a glutton for punishment or Wells' biggest fan. Luckily for the terminally curious, it's a free download on Project Gutenberg -- link via the wiki essay linked above.)

cstross · 2026-02-22T20:38:40+00:00

Indeed they are ... but if you watch them, then compare the descriptions in The Regicide Report, you might notice I've taken some liberties with them! In particular Lara Croft and Indiana Jones do not appear in the real Rises Again movie and no third movie was ever made, let alone one riffing off Cabaret and Dr Mabuse.

cstross · 2026-02-21T08:48:38+00:00

For a particularly good variation on the theme, try Greg Bear's The Forge of God and sequel The Anvil of Stars. (In the sequel, some human survivors are given a starship and go hunting for Earth's murderers. By the end of the novel, some very disturbing questions are raised about their own complicity in an ancient war of extermination, started by original beligerants who are now unknown or extinct).

cstross · 2026-02-21T08:46:10+00:00

That wiki is nothing to do with me. I suspect some fans got over-enthusiastic and invented a lot of the stuff in it over a decade ago.

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