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I Moved
Once upon a time, I was a cyberpunk. Well, sort of. Something
like. I guess maybe you had to be there.
The problem with artistic movements is that they tend to break
up almost as soon as they are discovered.–It’s easy for a group
of like-minded painters or poets or science fiction writers to
exchange theories, flattery, condolences, cheap ethanol, and sexual
favors while they’re young, struggling artists.–It’s not so easy
to maintain ideological rigor and group identity once a Movement has been anointed.–As soon as members acquire book contracts
and mortgages and kids and ex-spouses, keeping them together is
like herding cats.
So it was with the cyberpunks. In the beginning, the core cyberpunks,
William Gibson, Rudy Rucker <http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/>, Lewis Shiner <http://members.aol.com/maryklew/lsdotcom.html>, John Shirley <http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/> and Bruce Sterling <http://lonestar.texas.net/~dub/sterling.html> were writing buddies with compatible, if not necessarily similar,
sensibilities.–(Interestingly enough, while William Gibson does not appear to have an official website at the moment, he
is the only cyberpunk to have his own web ring at <http://www.loibnegger.com/neuromancer/>). As they struggled to sell their stories, the cyberpunks decided
to cast themselves as literary rebels out to topple a right-wing
and decadent sci-fi establishment. To announce their revolution,
they published Cheap Truth, <http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/~erich/cheaptruth/> a little broadside with all the charm of barbed wire. The Cheap Truth archives still smolder with an almost toxic ambition for the
goals of the Movement, as the cyberpunks liked to call themselves.–As
I revisit them now, these screeds read like hyperbolic satire,
but in the early eighties, they drew blood. If not exactly dangerous,
the cyberpunks were flamboyantly reckless, shouting defiance at
an Us v. Them universe. Here’s a 1984 review of Gardner Dozois’s First Annual The Year’s Best Science Fiction, referring to the accomplishments of "the eighties’ generation,"
written by one Vincent Omniaveritas, the pseudonymous perp of
Cheap Truth:
"If these heirs-designate were dropped into a strong magnetic
field,
Gibson, Shiner, Sterling, Cadigan and Bear would immediately drift
to one
pole. Swanwick, Robinson, Kessel, Kelly, Murphy and Willis would
take the
other."
Although I was certainly flattered by the company Cheap Truth had put me in, I thought its rhetoric could use degaussing, so
I committed a few cyberpunk stories just to prove I could. Take that, Vince! Among them was "Solstice," which appeared in these pages in June
of 1985. Meanwhile, Bruce Sterling was of a mind to document the
accomplishments of cyberpunk in a reprint anthology. He approached
David Hartwell <http://www.panix.com/~dgh/>, one of the field’s greatest editors and secret masters, with
a proposal for a collection of the Movement’s greatest hits, to
be called Mirrorshades.–David writes,
"As I recall, he had six writers (two of them collaborators of
the original four) and I said that there had to be twelve to make
a movement, or words to that effect. He said it would be no problem
to include twelve, and so he surprised people such as James Patrick
Kelly, Greg Bear, and Paul DiFilippo by making them part of the
Movement and including them in Mirrorshades."–
Of course, I was thrilled to have "Solstice" in such an important
book. To change my literary image, I spent hours in front of the
mirror with my shades on, working on a world-weary sneer. But
no sooner did Mirrorshades come out than Vincent Omniaveritas killed Cheap Truth. "I hereby declare the revolution over," he wrote in the last
issue. "Long live the provisional government."–Many of the original
cyberpunks declared the Movement was now history.–Some renounced
it, or at least spoke slightingly of "the c-word."–Revisionists
claimed that there never really had been any Movement at all and
that William Gibson was the only true cyberpunk.–Indeed, in his
first flush of fame and fortune, William Gibson himself seemed
much larger than any obscure sci-fi Movement.
Life Imitates Art
But then something strange happened. There was some careless handling
of hazardous cyberpunk materials and liquid sense of wonder sloshed
out of its science fiction containment. The spill of Neuromancer alone coated imaginations from Bayonne to Berkeley.–William Gibson
became an icon of popular culture. He put a cheesy SF neologism,
cyberspace, into the freaking Oxford English Dictionary! You see, the beauty
of this cyberpunk stuff was that it was the first kind of science
fiction you could actually live.–Nobody in his right mind expected
to crew on the Starship Enterprise or jaunt back to the Jurassic,
but for a thousand bucks or so you could stick your head through
the screen of a PC and breath 100 percent pure cyberspace.–And
it just kept getting bigger and better and stranger every minute,
like the mother of all acid trips. Indeed, Timothy Leary <http://www.leary.com/> declared cyberspace the LSD of the eighties and formed alliances
with some of the cyberpunks. A cyberpunk subculture exploded into
hackers and crackers <http://www.2600.com> and cypherpunks <ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/Home.html> and otakus <http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Cyberpunk/otaku.article> and ravers <http://www.hyperreal.org/ > and transhumans <http://www.transhuman.org/> and extropians <http://www.extropy.com/> and zippies <http://www.altculture.com/.index/aentries/z/zippies.html>, to name but a few.–This is not to say all of these groups consciously
trace their cultural ancestry back to science fiction’s cyberpunks–although
many of them do.–But the hardware we were extrapolating in the
eighties is starting to turn up in the Fetish column of Wired <http://www.wired.com>, which has become something like the Popular Science of cyberpunk.–And some of those who helped create the net as
we know it have acknowledged that they reverse engineered it from
William Gibson’ conception of cyberspace.
For a field guide to the real world cyberpunks and their siblings,
try alt.culture <http://www.altculture.com>, an encyclopedia of nineties’ youth culture. You can find more
in-depth analysis at the excellent net culture archives of the
Electronic Freedom Foundation <http://www.eff.org/>.–Perhaps the most comprehensive cyberpunk site on the web is
something called The Cyberpunk Project. Unfortunately I cannot
recommend it to you because, as I write this, it features not
only pirated articles but entire novels by some of the core cyberpunks,
posted without permission. I know, I know–pirating data would
seem to be a very cyberpunk thing to do.–But that’s always been
a contradiction of cyberpunk; it’s a literature with an outlaw
attitude that is nonetheless a captive of its bourgeois infrastructure.
Commodification
Of course, since nobody really owns the word cyberpunk, people feel free to bend it to their own purposes.–Take for
example, Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 <http://www.talsorian.com/cpindex.shtml> which is "The original role-playing game of the dark future;
a world of corporate assassins, heavy-metal heroes, and brain-burning
cyberhackers, packed with cutting-edge technology and intense
urban action."–For a mere $599, Cyberpunk studios <http://www.cyberpunk.ws> will design your website. "Our website packages provide you
with a starting point for your Internet identity." Turnkey web
packages for the Celebrity/Model/Actor are a specialty. CyberPunk
Software will sell you Virtual Woman 2000 <http://www.virtualwoman.net/>, an infinitely customizable cartoon babe with a limited AI that
can parse your best pickup lines. Say just the right words and
VW2000 will disrobe for your viewing pleasure. Cyberpunk Services for the Internet <http://www.cyberpunk.net/> provides "leading edge networking, hosting, programming, and
consulting services and transaction processing systems for the
demanding needs of the business community."
Although not a commercial site, CybRpunk <http://gearheads.wirewd.com/cybrpunk/> attempts to pass ownership of cyberpunk literature to the masses
by explaining the formula for those who aspire to write the stuff.
". . . once you have the rudiments of speculative fiction down,
cyberpunk will be easy for you." All the familiar tropes are here
for the taking: the subcultures, "Drug Culture is going to figure
big," the settings, "The USA is broken up into city-states, ruled
by corporate dictators," the hardware, "Personal tanks will be
popular," and the wetware, "Neural jacks are possible, but difficult."
Webmasters Ken "Wirehead" Wronkiewicz and Marshall Motley have
made a neat and thorough dissection of classic cyberpunk here;
unfortunately, what they have left us with is a corpse.–For by
codifying the cyberpunk formula, they have stripped it of its
ability to surprise. And that, for me at least, was one of its
chief attractions.
The cyberpunks were no revolutionaries; instead what they accomplished
was much-needed reform. There was a staleness to SF in the late
seventies; the genre as a whole was thinking very hard about old
news. The cyberpunks pointed me and lots of other writers at some
troubling issues and bleeding edge technology; I was a better
writer for it. Yes, the their attitude was a bit hard to take
at times, but it was fresh in every sense of the word.–
Nevermore, alas.
The edge
Of course, people have been claiming that cyberpunk is finished,
played out, obsolete, hopelessly compromised and therefore irrelevant–not
to mention stone cold dead–ever since our own Gardner Dozois hung
the "c-word" on the Movement.–And still it persists.–Let me point
you toward a couple of excellent sites that, while they do not
sport mirrorshades, nevertheless share cyberpunk’s take-no-prisoners
approach to extrapolation.
Several years ago, late one night at a party at some science fiction
convention or other, I found myself talking trends in the field
with David Hartwell and a bunch of other writers. David opined
that we needed to rethink robots and made a persuasive case that
there was much new territory for us to explore. I think that he
is right and that there is no better guide to this territory than
Hans Moravec <http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/>. Moravec is Principle Research Scientist at the Robotics Institute
of Carnegie-Mellon University. He is also a visionary. I confess
that I cribbed ideas like crazy from Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) for my last novel. His latest book, Robot, Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (Oxford University Press, 1999) is essential reading for anyone
who aspires to think seriously about the future.–Even if you believe
that he is wrong, you had better know exactly why if you want
to convince anyone that you can imagine much beyond next Tuesday.
If you can’t raise the sixteen bucks to buy the trade paper, a
close reading of his website will do almost as well. He has been
extraordinarily generous here, putting not only much of his scholarly
work online but also many wonderful articles slanted to the general
audience as well.
Cyberpunk’s great polemicist, Bruce Sterling, has grown up some,
raised a lovely family, built a big house and written some of
the best and most important science fiction of the late twentieth
century.–So what does he do for an encore? Just try to save the
world by designing a new art movement, The Viridians <http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/viridian>.–The Viridian Movement, of which Bruce has proclaimed himself
"absolute monarch," is his attempt to bring an aesthetic to bear
on one of the most alarming environmental problems humanity has
ever faced: global warming and the Greenhouse Effect.–I am not going to try to summarize the sprawl of Bruce’s Viridian
thinking, which at first blush seems quirky and quixotic but which
upon reflection proves to be not only relentlessly intelligent
but profoundly moral. Go to the site with an open mind and spend
some time in the archives and, if you see the sense in the Viridian
Movement, sign up for the listserv to receive regular Viridian
Notes.
Exit
Was I ever really a cyberpunk? And if I was, when did I stop being
one?–Many writers find it helpful to write to an audience and
there was a time when I addressed some stories to the cyberpunks.–Science
fiction, like other kinds of creative writing, often takes on
the attributes of a dialog–or perhaps argument is the more descriptive
word in this case.–Once I thought I had made my point, I moved
on. However, if I was never really part of the Movement, I can
certainly say that cyberpunk left its mark on me. It made me a
more adventurous researcher and a more rigorous extrapolator.–You
know, it may be just a coincidence, but as I glance back over
my bibliography, I think it was about the time that the cyberpunks
were in full cry that I relaxed and started having fun writing.
And I still have my mirrorshades. |
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