With that quote above, though, it’s worth mentioning that the hand-wringers now aren’t the Church but the humanities, which doesn’t necessarily have a vested interest in controlling the means of production—though it’s equally worth pointing out that it is kind of acting like the Church—wanting to control who gets to read what, what counts as literature, &c.—in which case the humanities is in for a nasty surprise. Because they can’t maintain this kind of control any more than the Church could. And if the humanities becomes the same kind of sinking ship, the smart, creative people—who could do the integrative work between the humanities (which does, I think, have a lot to offer) & tech—are simply going to jump ship & pursue something more innovative.

“It’s worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women.”

and here in general:
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/
http://www.shirky.com/

Cognitively it is everywhere—things that we’re simply inclined to accept as fact were just about unthinkable a generation ago.

But it’s weird, right? I don’t know about Down & Out, but Someone Comes to Town didn’t strike me as all that, well, weird, in the ways that you’re talking about, the specifically linguistic ways. I’d love to see concrete examples of what you’re talking about (this is the pedagogical weirdo in me). From the other side, Jeff Noon’s Vurt-cycle works—begun in the midnineties—feel like they possess the kind of syntax you’re talking about. That’s part of why he’s so seductive; netspeak, netsyntax, become in his hands startlingly lyrical.

Heinlein, Asimov, et al. are definitely from another era entirely. I think it might be more helpful to compare these writers you sense are new with some of the classic cyberpunk writers, old Gibson, Sterling, &c. Across their own oeuvres, even, since they’re still writing. How have they changed? Can we loosely quantify what’s different? Is it simply that they imagined this future, but we live in it?

(Full disclosure: I’m also using you as a soundingboard because this language stuff—especially as it pertains to sf—is really interesting.)

I don’t know if it’s necessarily just SF. Lots of younger authors write ‘weirdly’ (because their words sound weird in my head. I know it’s not a very descriptive word). It might be post-post-modernist, but I don’t know what post-modernism is (and I don’t think I like it), so who knows?!

I think it is worth some amount of scrutiny though. When Doctorow and Scalzi and Bear write, it sounds nothing like Heinlein, Asimov, Le Guin, or the others of those generations. I don’t know why, but they have a different way of writing.