I just finished the ‘Golden Age’ trilogy by John C. Wright. It’s a good exposition on what happens when the ‘data’ that makes up a person evolves. The first book was rather hard to read as every paragraph seemingly contained something I had to add to a view of the future. It’s REALLY well worked out and a good example of, maybe not cyberpunk, but certainly a hard technology view Of The Future {/echo}
Say what you want, but I still want to be able to jack in. This typing and reading shit is for the birds.
I’d like to try steampunk but “The Difference Engine” left a sour taste in my mouth. I realize now that it was Sterling’s fault since I have figured out I can’t stand him.
Sorry, we have to go through the ‘trodes and saline paste’ phase first.
Really? Hunh. What don’t you like about him? He’s one of my favorites. Have you read ‘Heavy Weather’?
About the sentence:
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Jenny Haniver writes:
> This sentence also makes a great epitaph for cyberpunk as a discrete genre.
> It’s a great opening, and in 1984, a great image as well.
>
> …But when was the last time you saw a television that would actually show
> you “snow” when you tuned it to a dead channel? Now all you’re likely to see is
> a bright, summery blue blankness, totally in opposition to the image the
> sentence is intended to summon.
I’ve just skimmed the new introduction that William Gibson wrote to the twentieth anniversary edition of Neuromancer, and Gibson admits that the sentence no longer even made much sense in 1984, let alone today. He says that in writing that sentence he was thinking of the TV’s of his childhood in the late 1950’s, not those when the book came out in 1984. The TV’s he was thinking of were black and white, and already by 1984 the static didn’t look like the image he had in mind as he wrote that sentence. He says further that lots of things don’t make sense from today’s perspective. Where are the cell phones, for instance? He notes that not only did he miss them, but he actually had one scene where the hero walks by a bank of pay phones, where each one rings as he passes it, this being the only way the A.I. knows to try to get hold of the hero.
I really don’t think ‘Anarchy Online’ is very relevant to the topic of cyberpunk. It does have a few elements in common with some cyberpunk - there is a big evil corporation (that the players can work for or against), there is a form of cyberspace that can be used as transportation (which seemed silly as there are plenty of other forms of teleportation readily available that don’t require you to go into a primitive virtual reality to pick where you want to exit), and characters use programming skills when manipulating the nanobots that fill the environment.
There are too many elements that just don’t fit cyberpunk to make up for those three things. It’s set 40,000 years in the future, and the technology is far more advanced than in most cyberpunk fiction - nanotechnology essentially takes the place of magic in other games, instead of casting spells your character is programming these nanites that saturate the environment to cause a spell-like effect, whether it’s flying, shooting a bolt of energy from your hand, or summoning a demon. That reminds me, there’s also a strong mystical element in the game, and I believe they added an expansion pack after I quit where there was another plane of existence inhabited by supernatural beings you could visit.
It’s an interesting game. And I just hijacked the thread too. Sorry. 
I guess not - it’s still a very resonant image for those of us who do remember when TV was black and white, there were only two channels and they shut down at 11 pm, though: if you grew up in that era, you knew exactly the mood he was referencing - that late-night, grainy dead glow with only the unsettling hiss of the static. Anachronistic, when you think about it, but it worked for me on a visceral level: the sad thing is that someone who was born in 1984 would probably need it explained to them, and then find it as quaint as the utopia-through-technology “Amazing Stories” SF that Gibson took a hammer to in The Gernsback Continuum.
Re-reading my copy of Mirrorshades after posting to this thread, I was surprised to realise how reactionary this genre, which once seemed so futuristic, was, especially when it came to music: Mott the Hoople {!} quotes, “true rockers” still stubbornly listening to their Velvet Underground when all around them are selling out - hell, even Gibson has a character quote “Waiting For The Man” in Count Zero. Guess they couldn’t let go of their past as much as they thought they could.
Coincidentally, I picked up and browsed through a copy of a series of essays on The Matrix in the library today, only to discover contributions from such luminaries as Alan Dean Foster - the introduction was by one Bruce Sterling, peddling his usual line of over-hyped messianic bullshit, together with contributions from such cyberpunk stalwarts as Pat Cadigan and Rudy Rucker. Looks like some people are headed towards Star Wars novelisation hell, if all they’re reduced to is finding revolutionary significance in a flash-in-the-pan Keanu Reeves SF actioner.
Axiom: All science fiction is about the present.
Corollary: Science fiction tells you nothing about the future, except what the present thinks about it.
I don’t know if this is necessarily reactionary. Following the theme of the future sucking, the only place they have to look for inspiration from is the past.
Remember Wild Palms? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106175/ Remember when that seemed like the wave of the future in TV SF? Not too long ago, was it? Just 12 years! And already it seems so dated!
Some of the technical themes were resonant, but the story foundered on the excessivley complex (and not particularly futuristic) “I’m your real father, and that woman you thought was your sister? She’s your real mother! And your daughter? You don’t wanna know!” family conspiracies, essentially squishing five seasons of Falcon Crest into three two-hour episodes, with Jim Belushi’s character serving as proxy for a completely bewildered audience.
Second corollary: Nothing dates faster than the present’s view of the future.
Must…assemble…thoughts…stop…consecutive…posting.
Sterling was in a Punk band himself, and Punk only really took off in the US in the early 80’s: it probably did seem radical and cutting-edge in the US when Neuromancer was being written and the Dead Kennedys were getting noticed, albeit as an underground band: Punk was just the thing to accrue some radical chic, and may well have been seen by a few cliquey authors with fond memeories of The Stooges to be the music of the future.
By contrast, in the UK and everywhere else, Punk was just an ephemeral, albeit influential, genre: it was dead by 1979 and an anachronism in 1984, when everyone was listening to Duran Duran - die-hard punks by then were something of a joke, except to die-hard punks and a few science fiction authors in the US.
As for William Gibson, maybe he just likes The Velvet Underground: there’s no other reason for Bobby, a barely literate wannabe with no obvious interest in the past to be quoting “First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait” in Count Zero. After all, Gibson did call a novel All Tomorrow’s Parties.
Punk was already dead in the U.S. too by 1984. People in the U.S. were listening to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson then. Some of them were also listening to groups like Duran Duran. And if you’re going to make a contrast between the U.S. and “the UK and everywhere else,” you’ve got to remember that William Gibson had already lived in Canada for 16 years by that point.
Another thing to remember is that the cyberpunk authors weren’t young punks themselves anymore by 1984. Most people of the age that they were in that year had had their musical tastes fixed for at least a decade, so it’s not surprising that they might be fans of music that was already well past its biggest popularity. William Gibson was born in 1948, so he turned 36 in 1984. Rudy Rucker was born in 1946, so he turned 38 in 1984. Lewis Shiner was born in 1950, so he turned 34 in 1984. Pat Cadigan was born in 1953, so she turned 31 in 1984. Bruce Sterling was born in 1954, so he turned 30 in 1984. John Shirley was born in 1954, so he turned 30 in 1984. Cyperpunk was created by a bunch of thirty-somethings.
Interesting. Now it appears that it was a bunch of kids who were on the periphery (of cool, excepting the former punk Sterling) looking back and trying to reconicile their geekiness and what the cool kids who wouldn’t hang out with them back then did.
I don’t have terribly many memories of 1984, but I can certainly see someone who was in-the-know looking at the sort of death of punk and disco being traded in for postpunk/new wave while everyone’s concerned with fitting in and grabbing as much as they can/a manic materialistic tendency thinking, “you know what? I hate you and everything you stand for. Your culture coopted the things that made me happy when I was a kid and now computers control your life. The only thing I’ve ever been good at was computers and here’s how I’m getting back at you…”
Cyberpunk is starting to seem like a dork’s revenge fantasy. Kind of half-glimpsed fantasies of sitting around in leather all day while moving through ever more complex computer setups. Anonymous, but only because you choose to be.
Except that they were never that much into computers, I think. Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual (or was it an electric?) typewriter. They may have been geeks, but they were literary geeks, not computer geeks (which were a rather small group at the time). Gibson is at least honest enough to admit that he didn’t know much about computers at the time.
I recall it being a 1927 Hermes model (which apparently means something as it’s mentioned quite frequently).
I guess my idea really doesn’t hold up then. Oh well.
The other thing is that Gibson meant his “living in cyberspace” thing to be ironic, but nobody got it.
Actually, I’d argue that it was created by a twenty-something (K.W. Jeter wrote Dr. Adder in 1972). Unfortunately, I don’t think that book was finally published till 1984.
It’s worse than I thought. Pat Cadigan is now reduced to turning out Jason {the Friday the 13th one, not the Argonauts guy} novelisations.
Just about every author jumps at the chance to do novelizations. The pay is fantastic for a short amount of work. Sometimes - though not often - you also get royalties in addition to the advance, which makes it even sweeter.
Everybody from Issac Asimov to Tom Disch to Barry Malzberg and lots of other people whose names wouldn’t leap to mind have done novelizations.
Cyberpunk update: Finished *Idoru *and Snow Crash. I’m not sure if there was even a plot to Idoru and SC seems to be the warm up for Cryptonomicon.
I think that there may be hope for Cpunk in comic form or MMORPGs, but I don’t think that novels are a good fit.