Fiction_L Archives Future Noir? Dates: 12/21/04,10:05 AM  through  12/21/04,12:20 PM  (5 postings) Search for: Select one or more indexes to search: 2011-current     2009-2010     2004-2008    1995-2003    (Matches from each index will be displayed separately in the results page.) Return to December 2004 thread menu   |   Fiction_L Archives Menu

FROM: Kaite Mediatore <[removed]@yahoo.com>
REC'D: 12/21/04, 10:05 AM

Hey reader-gang,
Has anyone heard of the above as a sub-genre of SF or
Mystery? And if you have, if it exists, how about a
quick run down of characteristics and appeals? One of
my students just used the term to describe "Altered
Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan.

Kaite

=====
Kaite Mediatore, Reader's Services Librarian
KCKPL Main Library
625 Minnesota Ave.
Kansas City, KS 66101
913.279.2067 fx: 913.279.2032
[removed]@kckpl.lib.ks.us


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FROM: David Wright <[removed]@yahoo.com>
REC'D: 12/21/04, 11:13 AM

I'm probably a voice in the wilderness on this,
but I feel that the term 'noir' has become
horribly abused and hyper-bandied lately - it has
become the hip suffix to apply to anything that
is the least bit dark. The standard suffix that
has been used in Science Fiction for dystopic,
dark, marginalized, anti-establishment values is
-punk. That said, whether you call it futuristic
noir or hardboiled Science Fiction or good ol'
Cyberpunk, these bleak dystopic visions are
nothing new. Orwell's '1984' could certainly be
called noir, as could Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' or
Bester's 'The Stars My Destination.' Most of
those Cyberpunk guys were pretty heavily
influenced by Chandler. I've also heard the term
biopunk to refer to the genetic equivalent of
cyberpunk...

"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done
to a human being. We can do just about anything
you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes
and refusing to think about this won't make it go
away. THAT is cyberpunk." —Bruce Sterling

There has been a fair amount of discussion of
hardboiled speculative fiction on RARA AVIS, the
Hardboiled & Noir listserv, eg:
http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/archives/200312/0007.html

You may find a browse of the archives for, say,
'Science Fiction' yields some interesting things.

"Down Those Mean Skies: SF Detectives" at
Thrilling Detective:
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/scifi_intro.html
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv20.html

and

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/harrison/Cyberpunk/cyberpunk.html

http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/tech/71.html

David Wright

=====
David Wright - Seattle Public Library Fiction Dept.

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
-G.K. Chesterton



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FROM: D Herald <[removed]@mac.com>
REC'D: 12/21/04, 11:24 AM

I haven't codified it yet because it just hasn't been quite large enough. But just off the top of my head it is easy enough to identify. Take the elements of noir as it appears in crime fiction mysteries; the cynical loner detective living on the fringes of society, the dismal backdrop of a city gone to seed, the dark, gritty ambiance found in works such as those by Chandler and Hammett and move them into the future.

Lethem's Gun With Occasional Music fits. Joan Vinge's 2000 sf mystery Tangled Up in Blue could also fit. J.D. Robb's Eve Dallas series also has this feel.

The main appeals are character and mood, IMO. The independent loner and the dark, dismal, pessimistic feel. The plot is also very important -- how the outsider triumphs and exposes corruption.

BTW - NYT used "noir" and "25th century" in their review of _Altered Carbon_ if I remember correctly.

Di

Diana Tixier Herald, author of TEEN GENREFLECTING 2nd edition
ISBN: 1563089963
http://www.genrefluent.com [removed]@sff.net
Rosenberg's first law of reading:"Never apologize for your reading tastes.

On Tuesday, December 21, 2004, at 09:02AM, Kaite Mediatore <[removed]@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Hey reader-gang,
>Has anyone heard of the above as a sub-genre of SF or
>Mystery? And if you have, if it exists, how about a
>quick run down of characteristics and appeals? One of
>my students just used the term to describe "Altered
>Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan.
>
>Kaite
>
>=====
>Kaite Mediatore, Reader's Services Librarian
>KCKPL Main Library
>625 Minnesota Ave.
>Kansas City, KS 66101
>913.279.2067 fx: 913.279.2032
[removed]@kckpl.lib.ks.us
>
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard.
>http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>......................................................................
>Need to subscribe, unsubscribe, search the archives?
>Everything Fiction_L: http://fictionl.webrary.org
>
>
>

Diana Tixier Herald, author of TEEN GENREFLECTING 2nd edition
ISBN: 1563089963
http://www.genrefluent.com [removed]@sff.net
Rosenberg's first law of reading:"Never apologize for your reading tastes.

FROM: [removed]@aol.com
REC'D: 12/21/04, 12:15 PM

I suspect that Mike Resnick's upcoming anthology, Down These Dark Spaceways,
might fit into this category of Future Noir. It's an anthology, 6 stories,
one of them by him, another by Catherine Asaro, etc. I think it's future crime
with a twist. The book will be published by Science Fiction Book Club, but I
don't have a pub date or any other useful details. Sorry.

Binnie Syril Braunstein
Romance novelist/former librarian

FROM: "Steve Roman" <[removed]@NILS.LIB.IL.US>
REC'D: 12/21/04, 12:20 PM

Quite a bit of good cyberpunk could be described as future noir, including _Neuromancer_ by William Gibson.

Steven A. Roman
DeKalb Public Library
309 Oak Street
DeKalb, IL 60115
815-756-9568

"This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance."
~Philip K. Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Kaite Mediatore [[removed]@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 9:51 AM
To: Fiction_L
Subject: Future Noir?

Hey reader-gang,
Has anyone heard of the above as a sub-genre of SF or
Mystery? And if you have, if it exists, how about a
quick run down of characteristics and appeals? One of
my students just used the term to describe "Altered
Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan.

Kaite

=====
Kaite Mediatore, Reader's Services Librarian
KCKPL Main Library
625 Minnesota Ave.
Kansas City, KS 66101
913.279.2067 fx: 913.279.2032
[removed]@kckpl.lib.ks.us


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