Some thoughts on Barleypunk

I read with great interest Martin Lewis' excellent review of Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon over at Strange Horizons.

When I linked to the piece this morning I coined the rather silly term "Barleypunk" to refer to the kind of near-future, frequently satirical work that is currently coming out of a lot of Mainstream British publishers.  I chose the term because everything is hyphenpunk these days and also because it sounds like it should apply to yokels in wraparound sunglasses.  Which is pretty much what Nathan Barley is all about.

...and before long I had a longer examination of the phenomenon.

This is partly tongue in cheek as I'm pretty sure that you can't issue a manifesto on someone else's behalf and besides I don't actually think that genre categorisations are anything other than fictional but amusing lenses through which to look at things.