Ainulindale wrote:Many movements are not concious decisions, Gibsons role in the popularity of Cyberpunk makes him the name that comes up most often when reffering to Cyberpunk, whether he likes it or was at all concious of it. He is referred to as the father of 'Cyberpunk' - whether he calls hismelf that is largely not relevant.
The thing is that Cyberpunk
was a conscious decision. There were a couple of groups of writers that spent much of the 1980s issuing manifestos, fighting turf wars in fanzines like
Cheap Truth and
Patchin Review, hyping each other's books in reviews — a bona fide incestuous literary scene. Gibson wasn't really involved in that at all, but it was the claque that really popularized the idea of Cyberpunk as a cohesive subgenre and pushed it as the next wave of SF.
I wouldn't call Michael Swanwick a lesser anything, as far as I'm concerned there probably isn't 25 writers superior to Swanwick in all of current fantasy or Science fiction.
That's definitely true today. But he and his craft have come a long way in the last 20 years. When he was part of the Cyberpunk movement, he wasn't half the writer he is now. Really, I don't think Cyberpunk suited his talents particularly well.
I never considered King one of the elite horror writers, so I don't have much to add here, and will take your word for it.
He is certainly the elite
seller among horror writers. Whether you like his books or not, he had the longest coattails of any writer since Tolkien. A lot of books were bought and hyped because publishers hoped to find the next Stephen King, but none of them made money on anything like that scale. In the end too many bad horror books were published, and the category imploded.
Without the Quest, our lives will be wasted.
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