The British Boom: What Boom? Whose Boom?
The British Boom: What boom? Whose boom? Thirteen ways of looking at the British Boom Andrew M. Butler Andrew Butler, ‘the greatest SF critic [First published in Science Fiction what, with the clarity of hindsight and the galaxy has ever known’ (Cheryl Studies, No 91, November 2003. the demand for narrative convenience, Morgan, Emerald City) is ‘a pipe- Reprinted by permission of the author we do with Romanticism and Modern- and Dr Arthur Evans, editor of SFS. ism. What this article sets out to do is to smoking, vaguely sarcastic Andrew and the SET editors have survey the terrain from a variety of per- academic’ who has a PhD in the attempted to preserve the style of the spectives, in the hope that this will help works of Philip K. Dick, and has pub- original as far as possible, including the to give some indication of the phenome- lished books on Philip K. Dick, use of American spelling.] non’s scope and characteristics. The Cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, Film Boom contains cyberpunk, post- Studies, and Postmodernism, co- 1. ‘There certainly seems to be something cyberpunk, cyberpunk-flavored fiction, edited books on Terry Pratchett and of a boom. To a certain extent these things steampunk, splatterpunk, space opera, hard sf, soft sf, feminist sf, utopias, Ken MacLeod, and has been fea- are always artefacts — there’s no objec- dystopias, anti-utopias, apocalypses, tures editor on Vector since 1995. tive criteria by which one can judge “boom-ness” (boomitude? Boomosity?) cosy catastrophes, uncomfortable catas- The following article on the British — so the fact that everyone’s talking trophes, Bildungsromans, New Wave- Boom, described by the leading Brit- about it is to a certain extent definitional style writing, planetary romances, ish SF magazine Interzone as ‘a of the fact that something’s going on’ alternate histories, big dumb objects, farrago’, won the 2004 Pioneer (China Miéville in Butler, ‘Beyond’ 7).
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