[T]here is one insular, loose tradition of science fiction that has been developing over the past few decades which I think is a genuinely interesting new movement. It’s science fiction written by programmers in their spare time, scattered across dozens of blogs and websites and mostly self-published.

The catch is, like everything I’ve just covered, it’s focused on its own niche. It still might end up having an outsized influence on the future of genre fiction anyway; the mainstream has turned away, for short-sighted reasons, from any exploration of the literal language creatures with glimmers of general intelligence we are incubating in data centres right now. The field is wide open.