I find it technically fascinating – or, no, mechanically fascinating. Given a particular set of constraints, what design choices do you make, what slop can you get away with and what not, and so on.
As with anything complex, one can learn a lot from the ones that almost work.
Are they mainly forgotten because they’re rubbish?
Sometimes they were rubbish, sometimes they were very good but way too expensive, sometimes they were a known stopgap before main production was available.
So still rubbish but for different reasons! 
Sometimes they are forgotten because of political shenanigans in NATO or some War Department, or because a war ended leaving a market flooded with surplus.
And sometimes they were good, but not as good as the winner of a design competition. During periods of rapid design evolution, there were competitions that got over 50 entrants, several of them fine.
And sometimes, but not often, they were too good for this flawed world.
R.I.P, Owen gun.
At the moment I’m rereading The Legacy of Heorot, by Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes. If you haven’t read it think of it as a little like Aliens but with real biology.
I read that my third year of high school. It was assigned reading in my English class. We also read Beowulf and Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, so there was a theme there.
I liked it, and I think I read the sequel as well, but I don’t remember. I need to see if I still have that book, it has been a long time and worth a re-read.
There’s now a second sequel available on Amazon. In fact that was what made me think of rereading the original novel.
Intriguing. Now I really want to find my old copy (copies). Too bad most of my books are packed up in boxes in the garage. Rotten kids making it untenable to have things like books or bookshelves in the house…
Ian has favorably reviewed some of our books in the past, so I’m pleased with the additional business he’s sent our way.
I needed a break from analysis of British Great War poets so I picked up Neal Stephenson’s The Big U for a re-read.
I enjoy Stephenson quite a bit and I find that I can fit most any work of his in alongside something non-fiction at a 5x page rate. The whimsy in this early piece of his feels less cartoony to me than Snow Crash and I think I like it more for that. It also prefigures the consideration of information technology in Cryptonomicon which I enjoy in that work.
Finished Maus and it’s definitely a great book. Painful to read at times, as it should be. I was really impressed at the balance between the story of the past and the interactions of the author and his father. It controlled the pacing in a way that made sure it wasn’t too overwhelming but the father-son sections were often deeper than you would think. It’s an important book and much easier to get through than I was expecting.
Good god, how have I not read any Vonnegut before? The guy is such a great writer!
Finished Cat’s cradle - which I think I need to read again soon to get everything out of it - and now I’m most of the way through Slaughterhouse Five.
Finished my first book for my summer course (EN-281-Y “Contemporary Science Fiction”).
Burning Chrome by William Gibson. A collection of short stories, all written by Gibson (some with co-authors). The big one is “Johnny Mnemonic”, which is nothing like the movie, but is okay in a kinda weird way, and “Burning Chrome”, which is very “Pre-Neuromancer-Neuromancer” but again, is okay.
I do love Gibson’s first halting steps into a genre he was accidentally (or intentionally, I suppose) creating. I love cyberpunk, and it’s nice to see it in all of its gritty, xenophobic, misogynistic foundations before it became better.
And it does become better. These stories struggle from a lot of issues, but they’re still a pretty quick (if depressing) read, and some of them are really interesting.
Gibson’s Neuromancer was the story that made cyberpunk a recognized genre with its own name. But I’ve long thought that Vinge’s “True Names” was cyberpunk avant la lettre. It has the concepts of cyberspace and jacking in, and the metaphor of software as magic, and the hacker as outlaw/rebel hero, though Mr. Slippery’s Great Enemy is the Internal Revenue Service rather than some megacorporation. I’m not sure why it didn’t inspire a wave of imitators the way Gibson did.
I pretty much love all of the stories in the Burning Chrome collection, and if they have any issues then time and memory have done a good job in erasing them (well maybe except ‘The Belonging Kind’ which is kinda stupid)
"The Gernsback Continuum’ made me yearn for a world of ‘Raygun Gothic’ with Ming the Merciless designing Gas Stations up and down the Californian coast. And ‘Hinterland’ seemed like a prologue to a much longer story.
Of course none of these stories are a patch on the Sprawl Trilogy…
OK it’s probably bad form to reply to your own post but I think it’s a fascinating question as to why William Gibson eclipsed Vernor Vinge. If I had to give an over simplistic answer it would be that while Vinge has written at least two of my top 10 sf books (Marooned in Realtime and A Fire Upon the Deep) he never started one with a sentence like ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel…’
And you tell that to kids these days, they think you mean deep blue.