{"id":174,"date":"2008-08-25T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=174"},"modified":"2008-08-25T07:33:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T15:33:00","slug":"speciation-ahoy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Speciation Ahoy!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/\">Strange Horizons<\/a> has just posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/reviews\/2008\/08\/neuropath_by_sc.shtml\">this bipartite piece<\/a> on Scott Bakker&#8217;s <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Neuropath-Scott-Bakker\/dp\/0752891510\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1219678605&amp;sr=8-1\">Neuropath<\/a><\/i> and my own <i>Blindsight<\/i>.  It&#8217;s billed as a review, but it doesn&#8217;t read as one so much as a brief comparative essay on the thematic focii of the two novels.  The reviewer\u2014 one Nader Elhefnawy, visiting professor of Literature out of  U. Miami\u2014 regards the books as exemplars of sf&#8217;s &#8220;new direction&#8221;, a course also being plotted by the likes of Ted Chiang, Greg Egan, and Daryl Gregory as a kind of nihilistic counterpoint to the post-cyberpunk Singularity-huggers.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m looking at this, and I&#8217;m thinking Hmmm\u2026 an academic comparing two related works in a burgeoning thematic niche.  Or, more concisely:  New Subgenre!  All we really need to keep the marketers happy (and to keep the unicorn-huggers out of our shelf space at Barnes &amp; Noble) is a name.<\/p>\n<p>I call dibs on <i>Neuropunk<\/i>. Who&#8217;s with me?<\/p>\n<p><b>Update 26\/08\/08<\/b> (in response to Ray&#8217;s well-taken comment): Ooh!  Ooh!  Even better:<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\">&#8220;NeuroNazi!!!&#8221;<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: left;\">Doesn&#8217;t it just roll off the tongue?  It sounds like some kind of all-natural herbal remedy!<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Strange Horizons has just posted this bipartite piece on Scott Bakker&#8217;s Neuropath and my own Blindsight. It&#8217;s billed as a review, but it doesn&#8217;t read as one so much as a brief comparative essay on the thematic focii of the two novels. The reviewer\u2014 one Nader Elhefnawy, visiting professor of Literature out of U. Miami\u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}