Friday, September 28, 2007

How's That, Again?

I don't want to hear anyone complaining about how technical and incomprehensible "Hard SF" is, when even the literary types come out with explanations like this:
The set-up is this: we are on one of the Beach planets. A generation--perhaps two--after Ed Chianese took his ship The Black Cat off the Beach and into the Kefahuchi Tract, part of the Tract has fallen to earth in a city called Saudade. It's a zone of the unreliable. It's infected with K-code: or maybe it is K-code, the wrong physics loose in the universe.
Um, OK. If you say so...

(From here. Note that the author in question didn't define any of those terms -- or even mention them -- earlier in the interview.)

3 comments:

Blue Tyson said...

Yeah, I saw that, thought it pretty amusing. Not a guy that should be assuming everyone has read his stuff. :)

Or one of those lost in your own head situations and he thought they had done that bit earlier.

Brad Holden said...

At least he admits that Light was a bit sprawling.

Michael Grosberg said...

Ah, but this is M. John Harrison. He's not Hard-SF incomprehensible, he's Postmodern French Philosopher incomprehensible, which is a level of incomprehensibility all to itself.

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