@Officer Hotpants
We’re never gonna give you up, you know.
@FeatherTrap
Everything ever written by Charles Stross or Peter Watts would be good to examine as a starting point. Then look at Octavia Butler’s work generally and the Parable novel series from the 1990s in particular. Just about all the original 1980s cyberpunk written by the original cyberpunk creators, Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Rucker, and Shiner, was well written stories about horrible people in a horrible ruined world, which induced apathy in the reader. It didn’t age well and it is probably just as well that just about all of it was printed as filler in between ads for car stereos and flying saucer stories in Bob Guccioni’s 1980s gonzo pop-science magazine, Omni.
I read skiffy since childhood and I’ve given up on science fiction as a genre with a future.
The future isn’t what it used to be, I guess. The only skiffy I still read was written before the end of the Cold War. I am repelled by the humorless, didactic, finger-wagging wokeshit, gayshit, and misery porn that I saw in just about everything I picked up and flipped through back when I still frequented brick-and-mortar bookstores. Even Hugo Award winners have all been more of the same for many years now. With each year that passes I find myself drawn to reread more Pournelle, more Niven, more Poul Anderson, more Philip Jose Farmer, more James Blish, more H. Beam Piper, more Harlan Ellison (he was a Leftist, but he wasn’t a humorless turd about it, unlike, say, N. K. Jemisin, or Rachel Swirsky) and more Stanislaw Lem. I am bored with wokeshit. I am bored with sparkly vampires and the Zombie Apocalpse. I am bored by authors lecturing their readers about politics, at least when it’s done with less skill than Heinlein had. I just want to
grill read.