Catherine Asaro wrote,
> I was willing to call it SF in the sense that it was fiction with a
> great deal of math and nifty science concepts in it.
That was the original stated purpose of scientifiction, as Gernsback
envisioned it. But I really can't call Cryptonomicon SF.
I'm not satisfied with pretending that it's alternative history. The
book takes great pains to get the bits of history that matter right.
The places where it takes liberties it's for creative license, or
perhaps for being too lazy to do proper research, not to make the
sort of point that alternative histories make. In fact, most fiction
takes those kinds of liberties in the sense that they create
characters that have never existed, in jobs, working for companies,
all fictional. So that doesn't wash.
Then there's the point that a lot of SF authors are writing stuff that
is very border-line. Kevin Anderson and ? wrote several books that are
essentially set in the present, with essentially plausible
technologies, each actually a mystery or maybe techno-thriller rather
than concentrating on technological and scientific questions. It's
clear that each genre has fuzzy boundaries. I don't believe that
Cryptonomicon belongs in that fuzzy boundary, and that's not just
because it's been four years since the book was written. (In fact,
most of the modern stuff that Stephenson wrote about in 1999 was
already as much as five years old.) No, it's that there's not even so
much as an attempt in any of the book to imagine something new.
There is only one sense in which the book qualifies as SF, in my
estimation, and that is Avi's quest for the HEAP. The conspiracy
stuff that surrounds that particular aspect of the story is SFish,
but just barely. (Actually more cyberpunkish, I guess, which, as I've
argued before, isn't really *science fiction* per se, in spite of its
futuristic trappings. So maybe it's fantasy, after all.) And that is
really a vanishingly small part of the book's 1000+ pages.
--
Helge Moulding
CDO
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