Alastair Reynolds interviewed by the BBC:
“The common complaint now is that science fiction is already outmoded because we are living in a science fiction universe,” says Mr Reynolds. “I’ve got some sympathy with that. Only the other day I was in Amsterdam airport and I noticed security guards nipping around on Segways with machine guns.
“If you had been transported from 1997 into this year, you would be incredulous and think of it as science fiction.
“But we accept it as part of the fabric of our world.”
Mr Reynolds believes that the pace of change makes science fiction essential reading, now more than ever.
“Society has probably always felt this way. To some extent this is when science fiction should thrive – when the world is changing at a bewildering pace.
[…]
He also draws on the rich heritage of real science in fiction established by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, two of his favourite childhood authors.
“I am playing in a playground that’s already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.”
Francine Prose reviewing The Pesthouse:
Crace can write amazingly well, as he did in “Being Dead.” When he’s on, as he often is here, the results are stellar. But that highway across the ravaged future has been traversed so frequently that keeping us on course requires a level of invention as high as the one that gives the Finger Baptists their eerie fascination. We’ve witnessed too many scenes in which our de-evolved descendants puzzle out the use of some low-tech archaeological relic — here, a pair of binoculars. And we’re too easily distracted by minor plot holes and slight tears in the web of illusion. I stalled each time characters acted counterintuitively in a world where survival depends on instinct, and again when I’d wonder why American primitives should sound like refugees from a Thomas Hardy novel.
My mother-in-law, who was a fountain of folk wisdom, used to say that World War III would be fought with sticks and stones. When she said it, I believed her. But it wasn’t like reading Dante. You can’t help wanting more from art, and from Jim Crace. You can’t help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night. It’s disorienting and a little dispiriting — like some sort of odd déjà vu — to read about the hell of the future and feel that we’ve been there before.
SF is becoming the work of the third artist. The first artist goes out and paints from life. The second artist copies the first artist. The third artist copies the second artist. (I’ve usually seen this analogy applies to fantasy, with Tolkien as the first artist.) The first artist put things in because there were there, or in the case of SF, because they were new cool speculation. The second artist put them in because they were trying to get close to the first. The third artist put them in because heck, that’s what you put in. By the time you get to the third artist, using things like FTL and uploading yourself and aliens isn’t speculating or asking “what if”, it’s playing with furniture in a doll’s house. Going back to where we actually are and starting again, with the techniques but not the tropes of the genre, is trying to become a new first artist.
I’m sure that’s what Geoff Ryman meant, and what that manifesto meant, and it makes sense even if you don’t agree.
There’s nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake. But SF used to be something that made people think, rather than something comforting and familiar. Is SF becoming a genre in the way fantasy and mystery and romance are, where what you’re getting is a variation on a theme? Kathy Morrow says for most people, most reading is comfort reading. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems to me that the first reading of any SF novel isn’t — shouldn’t be — a comfort read. (Re-reading is different.)
vector-bsfa.com 
It’d be nice if Jo Walton’s interpretation of mundane SF were correct, but I find it hard to reconcile with everything else I’ve heard about the movement. Certainly the books she says her son wants more of — Spin, Permutation City, Air — all violate the stated rules of mundane SF.
At first glance, I would agree that her point has very little to do with the Mundanes. But strip out all or most of the sf tropes out of the genre and you’ve stripped away the language we use to communicate with each other — the very sfness of sf. What does/would that mean about the quality/intent of Mundane work?
Ted, I basically agree with you. But I thought it was interesting how she’d found a point of convergence between what mundane sf is saying, and the recurring angst about the self-referentiality of contemporary sf.
strip out all or most of the sf tropes out of the genre and you’ve stripped away the language we use to communicate with each other
But there’s plenty of SF — even classic SF — that doesn’t use the tropes listed in the Interzone annnouncement. At ICFA, Bill Senior wondered if Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll” qualified as Mundane SF. Come to think of it, Space Family Stone seems to meet the criteria too.
At various times I’ve gotten the impression that Mundane SF means non-escapist SF, or SF about climate change and peak oil, or highly scientifically accurate SF. I think all of these are laudable, but avoiding the list of forbidden tropes won’t necessarily produce any of them.
avoiding the list of forbidden tropes won’t necessarily produce any of them.
Indeed. This is why they are always forced to fall back to a semi-mystical position where Mundane SF is not something that can be explained, you just have to embrace it.