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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Cyberpunk

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Regrettable Juvenilia

19:37 / 27.08.02

I think in terms of the quality of large passages of the writing, Idoru may be my favourite Gibson. The whole Laney-jetlagged-in-Tokyo bit... 'Keithy'... The Western World... Yeah!

19:53 / 27.08.02

I was a little baffled by this:
It wasn't just a "backlash" against the Reagan Years - it was a related syndrome, where the hope & prosperity of the 70s got drowned in inflation & depression.

I thought the 70's were drowned by the failure of 60's hope and prosperity.

Anyway, cyberpunk is pretty flimsy if you try to make a standalone genre out of it, and I don't think the guys who wrote it ever really intended it that way. It's more marketing slogan than genre, and the closer you look, the more you'll find this or that component of any definition you tried to make appearing outside cyberpunk. Dick was just as obsessed with the ontological implications of AI as Gibson, for instance. Cyberpunk was part of a continuum of techno-thinking going back to the thirties, and I'll bet if you'd said science fiction wasn't literary before cyperpunk, you'd get a smack in the mouth -- depending on who you said it to, of course. The biggest difference, I think, was that there were fewer space ships and laser pistols, but only because lasers and rockets weren't that interesting -- hence marketable -- any more.

I think all this was part of the message of Snow Crash -- and was certainly impicit in the first chapter of The Diamond Age.

I think Gibson is now, and in some sense has always been, writing about zen, the way events, born out of each other without conscious planning, define our lives but can't be defined themselves. All those gods evolving out of computers...

As opposed to Stephenson, who seems to think people, as the designers, have some say in the matter.

pointless and uncalled for

20:39 / 27.08.02

Controversial as it may be I feel that Iain M. Banks deserves some credit here in the field of cyberpunk. While not your typical solar system bound writings of the cyberpunk genre, I think that the expressed mentalities within the characters is of a similar nature and combined with the technological aspect becomes to cyberpunk what cyberpunk is too us and thus in a linear way cyberpunk.

Alliteration is my good, good friend today.

.

09:48 / 28.08.02

As a male thirteen year old geek, I was a big fan of cyberpunk authors- which says a lot about the genre. There is something inherently adolescent about all the whizz-bang high-tech running-around-shooting-things noir of cyberpunk. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing of course (and the same could probably be said of most sci-fi, comics, or RAW etc).

So needless to say, as a teenager I loved Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, but on reflection I prefer the more subtle "near-future" ambience of the Idoru trilogy. IIRC Gibson didn't refer to these novels as "futuristic", calling them instead "The present with the volume turned up".

Which leads me onto an interesting concept that I've been toying with- the idea that society's dream of the future has been regressing closer and closer towards the present time/space. Some details need pencilling in, but the model looks like this...
1950's sci-fi: Asimov's Foundation series, epic timescales, deep deep future, galatic setting.
1960's: Clarke, PKD et al, still thousands of years timescales, interplanetary scale.
1970's: 2001-style sci-fi (OK I know it comes earlier), hundreds of years timescales, colonisation of our solar system etc.
1980's: Cyberpunk, century timescales, the future of earth.
1990's: "Post-cyberpunk", Noon, Idoru etc. very near future, contained within one cityspace.

If this model is accurate (I admit that it is wildly speculative), then it means we've hit a wall sci-fi-wise. Sci-fi has regressed so far into the present that it is no longer any different from mainstream fiction. There is no longer a collective dream of the future. And Cyberpunk is the last great (futuristic) sci-fi genre.

Book to avoid-
I don't understand why anyone really liked Snowcrash. The narrative was an utter mess, and the characters were so one-dimensional that if you turned them on their sides, they wouldn't have a profile. If Snowcrash had been my introduction to Cyberpunk, I don't think I would have read any more.

Book to read-
Pat Cadigan's "Fools" is probably one of the very best of the genre. A complex and intriguing meditation on the nature of identity makes it a fantastic post-Bladerunner (PKD's) A Scanner Darkly.

Tryphena Absent

13:11 / 28.08.02

Actually I quite like this

17:30 / 28.08.02

Hmmm read Vurt recently and I loved it, confused me but thats the point I suppose. Sort of cut up writing for sci-fi.
Did Noon also do Automated Alice? Because I was picking up lots of Alice in Wonderland references by the end of Vurt (Might be just me being mad).
Oh iivix where does Iain Banks fit into that timescale, he does books that have the scale of entire universes and intruders from previous ones. Also there's the Hard Sci-fi style of things still going strong, Greg Bear et al, doesn't really float my boat but they're all still going strong.

.

20:00 / 28.08.02

Invisible_al- I was disappointed with Automated Alice, as essentially it is a children's book that somehow has been marketed to adults. Actually I was disappointed with all of the post-Vurt Noon I've read (Pollen, Automated Alice and Nymphomation). It all struck me as being rather pompous in a way that Vurt certainly wasn't. Maybe thats the natural progression that follows having increased confidence as an author.

OK, so I'll admit now that I've never read any Iain Banks, so I don't know where he'd fit into my sci-fi model. But as for Greg Bear and the Hard Sci-fi crowd, well there is something quite archaic about that sort of sci-fi isn't there? It always reminds me of Gernsback-era Amazing Adventures pulp sci-fi, when a large number of people were still genuinely fascinated by the thought of travelling to the moon. So I would put that sort of stuff as belonging way back in the model, a throwback to the 70's at least.

at the scarwash

21:02 / 28.08.02

iivix, i think that your timeline is an interesting model, but it ignores for the sake of convenience a lot of the most important sci fi from the eras concerned. Ferinstance, Corwainer Smith's far far future stuff was published in the 60s, as were some of Ted Sturgeon's greatest works, many of which take place in the present or the past. PKD wrote wuite a few novels that are set in our own time. But I guess that's quibbling.

06:04 / 29.08.02

It's certainly an enticing theory. It'd be nice to buttress it with the notion that science fiction cultures are rapidly and knowingly depleting planetary resources. That way it's not a wall that's hit, but ennui that sets in. We know, as authors and audience, that projecting ourselves even a couple hundred years into the future is just silly.

I'll second Fools.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:44 / 29.08.02

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned KW Jeter here... "Dr Adder" is a seminal cyberpunk work, much loved by PKD so I'm told.

As regards more modern cyberpunk, check out Ken McLeod's "The Star Fraction"- socialist cyberpunk that reads like Banks at his best (except, where all Banks' books have to have a scene in a pub, McLeod's all have to have a scene in a pub with the protagonists arguing left-wing/anarchist politics).

Also Richard Calder's "Dead Girls"/"Dead Boys"/"Dead Things" trilogy. Seriously mad, with the capacity to do my head in equally on subsequent readings. (Be warned, however- read the whole trilogy before you even TRY to figure out where he's coming from with any of it.)

12:35 / 29.08.02

I think there are too many exceptions to iivix's model for it to make a rule. China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, written only a couple of years ago, takes place in no recognizable time or world. Alfred Bester's The Destructed Man (or is it Deconstructed?) is a near-future story about a CEO written in -- what? the early '60s? Philip Jose Farmer worked pretty hard at subverting or mocking this kind of epochal thinking. Speaking of Farmer, what about Edgar Rice Boroughs and Jules Verne? Wasn't 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea the first sf novel? That was at least as psychological and dystopian as Neuromancer, and was about its own period 'with the volume turned up'. Anything you could say about cyberpunk could be said about the above books, except for the fashion sense.

I think there is a metanarrative at work here, designed by publishers to hold your interest and sell books, not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think it stands up very well as anything but a marketing strategy.

at the scarwash

14:11 / 29.08.02

I agree. Most great SF reflects directly upon the time of its author in some sense, more often than not in a very direct sense. The Bros. Sturgatsky, for instance. Their early 60s novels were communist utopian fiction, but they proceeded very quickly to pretty nasty satire in the Tale of the Troika.

.

23:54 / 29.08.02

OK, I admit it was a fairly silly idea... But I still think that there is something in it, namely that there does seem to be a lack of thought about the future at the moment, by society in general (rather than sci-fi authors or futurologists). The dream of the future is always a reflection on the dreamers' present. So this either means that we are happy as a culture, and hence have no need for an escapist futuristic fantasy, or we are simply lacking in the imagination that people once had... But that's a different topic altogether.

00:42 / 30.08.02

One of the things that categorised the original cyberpunk novels is the fact they placed technology on the street. It wasn't just scientists and the wealthy playing with the "toys" any more but musicians, kids, junkies etc. It wasn't just about new transport or planets any more but new clothes, drugs, music, addictions and games.

For book recommendations I have to include George Alec Effinger's "When Gravity Fails". Great book set in a Moslem city.

As far as looking to the future goes, I think people haven't gotten over the millennial fever "end is nigh" angst. I also think we're seeing a return to a more pastoral time in culture - why things like magick are cropping up more and more in books and movies - and that once we start getting really new sci-fi again it'll offer possible solutions to our current ills, both political and environmental.

10:45 / 31.08.02

This thread seemed like the best place to post this...
Anyone ever read "Life During Wartime" by Lucius Shepherd or anything else by him? I've just finished it, and I thought it was really brilliant until half way through, when it completely lost my attention with an improbable love affair and weird allegorical anecdotes all over tyhe place. Just didn't seem focused or convincing. Any other opinions on him or his work?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:19 / 31.08.02

"Life During Wartime" is one of my all-time fave skiffy novels... starts off all Platoon, then just goes magical realism for the hell of it!

I think as regards the definition of "cyberpunk", except in the case of people deliberately writing for a niche market, it's a term applied AFTER the fact... it's more journalese/readers' shorthand than anything to do with what the author intended. (Look at the blurring of the genre lines in, say, Iain Banks' - not Iain M. Banks, this was marketed as a "straight" novel - "Walking on Glass". Part thriller, part love story, part Borgesian meditation, and part- let's not mince words here- space opera. Yet it wasn't considered by his publishers to even be "sf", though, as a reader, I'd have thought it just as much sf, if not more so, as/than Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", which, as far as I could tell, was about Dresden.)

The thing I find funniest about the "cyberpunk" label, and the idea that went with it of this being social prophecy rather than just science fiction... is that, when Gibson released "Virtual Light", he said in various interviews that his ambition was to write a novel that was pure William Gibson, but that wasn't futuristic. Re-read Virtual Light now, only eight or nine years later. He's not that far off, really. (Probably something to do with the fact that we're all using machines built by people who loved "Neuromancer" in the '80s, though...)

01:53 / 12.09.02

"Would I be out of order in expressing my opinion that 'Vurt' is one of the best fucking books written in the last decade?"

I feel the same way, so I guess we're both on the out-of-order trip. Chaos, man. It's order, I tell you. Total epiphany.

"Actually I was disappointed with all of the post-Vurt Noon I've read (Pollen, Automated Alice and Nymphomation). It all struck me as being rather pompous in a way that Vurt certainly wasn't."

I thought Pollen and Automated Alice were an utter waste of time, though I very much enjoyed Nymphomation. Pixel Juice is tied with VURT as Noon's best work, IMHO. Best book of short stories ever, surpassing even Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House and Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. But that's just my opinion, which is probably going to get slammed. ("Noon surpassing Vonnegut? How dare you?")

I still need to get around to reading Snow Crash. And Neuromancer for the second time, because some of it went over my head when I read it a year ago. I fancy I'd have a better understanding of it this time around.

12:24 / 12.09.02

Pollen was the first Noon book I read, and as such I thought it was top. I suppose if I'd read Vurt first it might have been a bit disappointing..

And I absolutely loved Automated Alice. Even though it's the kind of massively self referential literary in-joke filled thing that I usually can't stand .. but somehow it was so incredibly, mind-bendingly strange, with Noon's way with words given full scope for absolute derangement .. it's great .. I thought it really was like the late 20th equivalent of what Lewis Carrol's originals would have been in the late 19th..

Um, that has absolutely nothing to do with Cyberpunk, does it? Ah, well..

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