Both of which amount to different attempts within the genre to accommodate the first-order implications of computers and networking as the defining technology of the near future (as opposed to rockets! for! everyone! a la 'Space Family Stone') - cyberpunk was the sociological/post new wave SF modelling of a future derived from the 1970s and 1980s weltanschauung, and the singularity was the chew-toy of those members of the hard SF brigade who actually understood computers. In fact, in the past 30 years the only truly challenging new concepts to come along were cyberpunk and the singularity. In recent decades SF has been spinning its wheels. If only because when you stop moving you're dead, and reverting to a late palaeolithic lifestyle looks like it would be a drag, and that's the most likely alternative long-term future for our species if we burn all the coal and oil, wreck the climate, and turn our back on the Enlightenment's ideological values. Because, despite my cynical pose, I am more than a little sympathetic to Stephenson's project, because I share his axiomatic belief in the loose constellation of post-Enlightenment values that brought us this idea of progress and constant improvement. Tinned apes don't survive exposure to vacuum and cosmic radiation very well, after all.Д«ut. Whether earnest depictions of young people in space suits wrangling asteroids and bringing home the carbonaceous chondrites actually make sense is another matter entirely I'm inclined to think that it's a rather implausible future, unless the earnest young people are robots. We might equally imagine a similar essay in the context of mid-sixties Soviet fiction, calling for more fiction about tractors and breakthroughs in agricultural genomics.

The big ideas are, if anything, secondary, not to mention exhibiting a tendency to date badly and carry sinister ideological overtones (as William Gibson so brilliantly skewered in his short story 'The Gernsback Continuum').Д¬alls for more big ideas in SF are generally a political cri de coeur.

Certainly fiction with big ideas has found a home within SF, but that's not the same thing at all! For almost all of its history, most SF has been pulp adventure fiction, conceived and written as escapism - lest we forget, Damon Knight's original characterisation of space opera as horse opera (the Western) with blasters instead of six-guns and space ships instead of horses still holds water. I'm not at all sure that this is the case. The second assumption is that science fiction has ever primarily been a genre of big ideas.

The very concept that we are actually discovering how the universe works, and improving our lives, was a revolutionary rupture with the past - and one that took a long time to sprout any kind of literary or artistic shoots. Historically, almost all civilisations prior to the Enlightenment ran on the mythology of a distant golden age in the past, which bequeathed us a bunch of moral precepts and firm knowledge about how the world works which we poor degenerates living in the debased relics of a higher civilisation should turn to for guidance. This, if anything, is the ideological bedrock underlying 'ideas' SF - that Things Can Get Better. The first unquestioned assumption is the post-18th century Enlightenment concept of progress.

This question relies on so many implicit underlying assumptions that I feel some dissection is in order before I can try to answer it.

Barsoom sailbarges