S. Worthen | Weblog

I had a moment's worry when your two example SF writers were ones that at first thought I'd never heard of! Then I realized that this is because I've been much more tuned in to the UK SF scene lately - and, having looked up Webb and Ringo, at least I recognize a number of their books, even if I haven't read any of them.

GoC has a military setting, even if somewhat in peacetime, but one of its central difficulties is the challenges facing a man wired to be emotionless, who finds himself in love despite the programming and psychological surveillance he regularly undergoes to ensure this. He's cyborg, a source of great power and great paranoia to him. Does that constitute placing the idea in the foreground? It's not the only thing happening in the foreground - there's a great deal of adventure as well.

It's funny you should identify action as being more a modern trait of SF when I loosely associate it with earlier decades. (Doyle's The Lost World; Burrough's Barsoom novels) Not that it can't be both in different ways.

I don't feel I'm very well-read with current SF, so hesitate to make generalizations myself. But I know plenty of people who study it, so, if they don't respond, I may ask them about their thoughts on current trends.