Geek critique: Neil Gaiman and Kameron Hurley pick apart pop culture

Two new nonfiction collections – Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats and Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revoluton – present contrasting perspectives on geek culture today. So what’s the state of it?

Geeks were once like Victorian children: seen, but not heard; talked about but mocked, rarely given their own voice. But the newfound popularity of the culture – video games, comics, the mainstream cool of crossover hits such as Game of Thrones or Star Wars – makes geeks some of the loudest voices today. This week, two new nonfiction collections – Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats and Kameron Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revolution – showcase the spectrum of diversity that exists in the culture today.

Gaiman has had a view from the front row seats of sci-fi and geek culture over the last three decades, but the title of his latest collection nods to the sense of being on its fringe, a second-class citizen within the mainstream. But no one epitomises geek culture like Gaiman: his 2.4 million Twitter followers represents a cross-section of the sci-fi readers, comic nerds, cybergoths and other alternative cultures that have been rolled into the geek identity.

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