Cyberpunk as a generational definition – what comes next?

Someone wrote in reply to my abbreviated post about the difference between my generation that grew up in the 60s and 70s, vs there’s of the 80s. The reader responded that the 60’s and 70’s were a time of hope and the 80’s and 90’s more a time of disillusionment and growing realisation that we had screwed up.

I agreed, but was still curious as to why we still had hope. Contrary to another reader’s idea that we thought we could survive a nuclear winter, the 80s gen had no such hope, I replied that I think that even back in my childhood, we did the drills, not with a convincing argument that it would do any good, but that we had to do SOMETHING. Somewhere along that timeline, that idea dropped off the radar, and was replaced with the lack of hope you mention. But I’m still curious (curiouser and curiouser, said Alice) as to WHY that hope left. Since those of us who had grown up weren’t as disillusioned, I don’t think we taught it to our kids. Was it more than nuclear winter? Was it a combination of the rising interest rates, stagnant economy, the growing realization that, as was said, we “buggered” it, by “it” I mean our planet?

Were those “kids” really affected by the world their parents had given them? Our (my gen.) parents gave us Vietnam, nuclear war, and a increasingly bad economy, but we still had hope as I recall – that we could make a difference – hence the start of Earth Day back in the early to mid 70s here. I remember staring recycling projects at the HS. We were the first generation to wear backbacks, ride 10 speed bikes (mine was a 19in English Raleigh, sigh…), own Nikes (they were so soft and form fitting back then, with thin soles that moved as you walked – not like today’s platforms) and negative heeled “Earth” shoes, wear recycled clothing, etc. We believed there was still time to save us.

So when or “how” more importantly, did the next gen lose that hope? The same triggers were there, just a different attitude. How much did more TV, more news, more connectivity (I recall the early computers and the simple games they played), and even video games (albeit early ones – no Quake yet) play into the storm of indifference that affected the youth of that era? Did the writers of cyberpunk help to create this vision, and movies like Blade Runner (1982) to artificially create this lack of motivation to DO something about it?

“The word ‘cyberpunk’ was originally a marketing term applied to Science Fiction writings of William Gibson and Douglas Rushkoff, but was soon taken up by many Internet users as a description of a lifestyle, culture or community to which they imagine they belong. So cyberpunk became the way of thinking and attitude for many people in the Net and in so called Real Life.

This is due to the fact that they correctly noticed the seeds of the fictional world of cyberpunk in Western society today. Our world is evolving into a typical ‘cyberpunk-world’: the rising amount of technology in our everyday lives – we thrive and survive on technology, the developement of the cities into huge ’sprawls’, drugs and crime. All these aspects of our culture fit nicely into the world of cyberpunk – the future now.

So, the world from the works of Gibson and “Blade Runner” is becoming a stark reality.” http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/subculture.html (unknown date)

SO! Are SF writers to “blame” for the counterculture that emerged in the 80s? From what I’ve read so far, their impact was huge, esp. as Time picked up the gauntlet and ran with it, making it known to a whole generation who could “find” themselves in it – each generation to me seeks to find itself – I know my 19 yr old is. She keeps saying that the world as she knows it is so bleak for future prospects that THEY have no hope (An Inconvenient Truth, Columbine, 9/11, etc.). Now those threats are real! Compare and contrast that with the perhaps somewhat artificially constructed counterculture of the 80s.

See also:

“Cyberpunk was not so much a literary movement as an extension of postmodern experimentation that reaches back to the first cultural memes generated by radical shifts in perception.”
By John Lebkowsky, originally from bOING-bOING #9.
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/subculture.html

and even better:

“It has long been a truism of American political thought that there is a 30-year cycle of American politics, alternating between conservatism and experimentation. America had just come out of a conservative decade in the 1980s, and everyone was expecting that something like the 1960s would be coming again in the 1990s. To meet this retroexpectation, fashion designers eagerly complied, recycling all kinds of things from earth shoes to Nehru jackets. No one knew what the 90s would bring – people talked about a new fiscal sensibility, a new stay-at-home attitude (cocooning), and maybe a new simplicity. Nothing that really looked like a counterculture; just a cultural retrenchment. And then Time magazine, that great barometer of American life, told us who the counterculture would be: the cyberpunk. A new youth explosion was underway – but this was a Generation Xplosion, which meant taking to the airwaves instead of the streets.

People quickly found out this new counterculture was not quite like the old one. They preferred the rave, with its hyperaccelerated remixed digital music, to simple acoustic folk songs; their drug of choice was Ecstasy, not pot. These were not New Age flower children looking for ‘peace and love;’ instead they were New Edge hiphoppers out for ‘tech and cred.’ Rather than having some kind of ‘back to nature’ romanticism, these folks preferred the urban disorder of the city, and they saw technology as their weapon of choice, not the enemy. Their heroes were not the Hippies of Peoples’ Park – instead they looked to the pioneers of pirate radio as their icons. Not surprisingly, old countercultural types like Timothy Leary, John Perry Barlow, and Robert Anton Wilson quickly joined their ranks, proclaiming cyberpunk was the next wave of struggle against the System and all it stood for.

Their were superficial similarities, of course. The cyberpunks had a curious enthusiasm for neurochemicals, especially ones that they claimed increased energy, intelligence, or memory, although they rejected the idea that drugs might lead to some kind of peace or mystical harmony. They eschewed political activism, civil disobedience, and protest marches. Intead, they preferred a more essential form of the guerilla strike – one that used the phone lines rather than the picket line. There was no point in asking the Man for anything. Simply pick up your keyboard and take what you want from him, ’cause he won’t give it to you.”
“Is Cyberpunk the Counterculture of the 1990’s?” by Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1 (again, undated, but from the text it seems to be wrtitten late 80s, early 90s). http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_as_counterculture.html

and the last part of his essay may be striking at what they SHOULD have done, rather than what they didn’t do:

“Instead of just ‘dropping out’ of society, or just parasitically feeding off of its information monopolies, cyberpunks have the potential to change it. But to do so they’ll have to learn those weary lessons of Movement history. You know what they are. Study up. Think globally, act locally. And most importantly, don’t mourn, organize. Just think what cyberpunks could accomplish if they actually learned to cooperate with, talk to, and trust each other. If instead of pulling pranks on the Man, they actually started to try and take away some of his power. If instead of sabotaging grassroots bulletin-board systems, they jammed the signal of propaganda engines like Voice of America. Then we could say that maybe, at long last, the New Counterculture has come of age… “

Do you think they ended up doing that? Or did they just continue the drop-out path, until a new generation of dot.coms and techs that were commercial took over? And what of today’s disenfranchised youth? Where will they go – Can the 30 year cycle of politicalness continue or has that boat sailed? Where CAN they go? They are too young to make a difference, and will the world (and America or other countries)be strong enough to survive the harsh assaults we are placing on it?

Food for thought?

Cyberpunk continued – what is behind the dystopian view?

A response to a post on my SF book group about cyberpunk and the dystopian future it presented, said it was because of growing up in the 80s with the threat of nuclear holocaust hanging over their heads. That their generation didn’t believe it would last until 1990. So, hence the dystopian view.

But, curious… I was born in 1957, the year Sputnik went up, so I consider myself a child of the space age, but we were also always aware of the “nuclear” holocaust and MAD that lay just around the bend. On the Beach and Alas, Babylon were often required reading. So why did it seem affect his generation more than mine? What changed? When did the more halcyon days of the 60s and 70s (ok, there was that little war), leave for the dystopian 80s? When did Mad Max’s vision of the future appear?

The same sword hung over all of us – we had drills to lay down under our desks (along with the tornado ones), and although the bunkers in the backyards were gone, the fear was still there – the Cuban missile crisis when I was a kid, etc.

So why did they fear not making it to the 1990s? Maybe the difference lies in a little chart I found on Wiki under Nuclear Disarmament: The U.S. stockpile started 1965, and was on the slow downhill until the 80s when it started to fall, but Russia’s stocks, which we so feared as a child, didn’t go up until a peak between 1985-1990. But I was alive and just starting a family about that time, and I don’t recall being particularly concerned with nuclear “war.” SALT II was signed in 1979, so we thought it was going out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_disarmament

According to the page on Gorbachev:

“On October 11, 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met in Reykjavík, Iceland to discuss reducing intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe … the two agreed in principle to removing INF systems from Europe and … they also essentially agreed in principle to eliminate all nuclear weapons in 10 years (by 1996),… this would culminate in the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev

So the nuclear proliferation was already on it’s way to being halted at that time (1985+), and with the continual slide of the Soviet economy, there was a sharp drop in nuclear arms.

The Soviet state fell in 1991, after Glasnost (liberalization, opening up) and perestroika (restructuring) were introduced around 1985.

So, if the Soviet empire was on the brink of collapse by the second half of the 1980s, why the dystopian view?

And on another note (back to the original stuff) how did William Gibson so effectively predict the WWW and the Internet, and it’s importance? Why was he the visionary? I know volumes could be written about it, and have, but I’m curious to hear from those who were young and lived through it, without the encumbrances like jobs and family that can occupy your time and attention so fully.

But more on an SF note, why the sudden infestation of the information networks, and the biocybernetic definition of “wetware,” first found in 1987:

“Vacuum Flowers is a science fiction novel by Michael Swanwick, published in 1987. It could be described as cyberpunk (some critics credit it as one of the progenitor works of that genre), and features one of the earliest uses of the concept wetware.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_Flowers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware

“Johnny Mnenomic” was one of the first and most influential movies to visualize this form of the term.

There is also a “disconnect” I found in Wiki – a contradiction if you will. According to the Vacuum Flowers site, the novel was published in 1987, and as above, was called by some as the progenitor of cyberpunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_Flowers

But the entry for cyberpunk puts it much further back, to the early 80s, and said it was coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story “Cyberpunk,” written in 1980, but not published until 1983, and that Gibson was one of the early writers with “Neuromancer” in 1984. It also states that science-fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as the person who popularized the use of the term “cyberpunk” as a kind of literature, prior to Bethke’s use of it in his title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk.

So, when does cyberpunk really start with earnest? Blade Runner (1982) was considered to be the movie that started the cyberpunk theme for cinema. “The film is credited with prefiguring important concerns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, such as globalization, climate change, and genetic engineering. It remains a leading example of the neo-noir genre.” It is mentioned in most cyberpunk essays and contains the essential ingredients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner

There is also a class that was taught at U of Texas at Austin in 2000, “Rhetoric of the Cyberpunk,” http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~russell/cyberpunk/. The same department (Rhetoric and Writing – Computer Writing and Rhetoric Lab) also participates in the Second Life project at “the Alley Flat Initiative.”

I found a site that answers some of this, the Cyberpunk Project @ 1994, at http://project.cyberpunk.ru/atthe site about the coinage of the term cyber + punk = cyberpunk, the author states:

“The story was titled “Cyberpunk” [1980] from the very first draft. In calling it that, Bethke was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. His reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven.”

“Originally the term ‘cyberpunk’ was meant to be a only character type name, meaning ‘a young, technologically facile, ethically vacuous, computer-assisted vandal or criminal.’ Nowadays the term means much more, it’s the name for whole subculture and movement.

Bethke wanted to include these notions in the term:

1. That children have some undefined wiring which enables them to learn languages far easier than adults do, and this ability is not limited to ‘organic’ languages.
2. That teenagers can be dangerous because they live in a sort of ethically neutral state. They haven’t got the hang of empathy yet, nor have they really grasped the linkage between their causative actions and the resulting effects.
3. That, just as command of a language is power, technological skill is enfranchisement, and in 1980 we were 20 to 30 years away from an explosion of technology that would radically change the distribution of power in society.
4. That parents and other adult authority figures were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up ’speaking computer.’
5. THEREFORE, if you thought punks on motorcycles were a problem, just wait until you meet the— the— Y’know, there isn’t a good word to describe them? “

… So, words ‘cyber’ and ‘punk’ emphasize the two basic aspects of cyberpunk: technology and individualism. Meaning of the word ‘cyberpunk’ could be something like ‘anarchy via machines’ or ‘machine/computer rebel movement’. “

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyber_punk.html

There were some good links at the Cyberpunk Project site about cyberpunk and SF:

A timeline: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/timeline.html

And the history of cyberpunk in Science Fiction: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/scifi_history.html

The link to “Eighties Cyberpunk,” http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/eighties_cyberpunk.htmlby Barbara L. Zavala, is a basic retred (or ‘pretred’?) of what is found on the Wiki cyberpunk site, and lists the top five writers in the sub-genre: William Gibson, the subject of an earlier post, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner. But she adds a new dimension – the declining global environment.

“In Neuromancer, Gibson uses this information in his writing and predicts a futuristic environment with quartz–halogen floods lighting up the docks, and sea gulls flying above shoals of white styro foam in Tokyo, (19). Using the negligence of present global issues to predict the outcome of futuristic environments in cyberpunk, helps establish the form of the society associated with cyberpunk.”

In “Cyberpunk in the 80s and 90s” by Tom Maddox (1992), http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_in_80-90.html he gives his perspective on the information age, the cyber part:

“By 1984, the year of ‘Neuromancer’s’ publication, personal computers were starting to appear on desks all over the country; computerized videogames had become commonplace; networks of larger computers, mainframes and minis, were becoming more extensive and accessible to people in universities and corporations; computer graphics and sound were getting interesting; huge stores of information had gone online; and some hackers were changing from nerds to sinister system crackers. And of course the rate of technological change continued to be rapid – which in the world of computers has meant better and cheaper equipment available all the time. So computers became at once invisible, as they disappeared into carburetors, toasters, televisions, and wrist watches; and ubiquitous, as they became an essential part first of business and the professions, then of personal life.

Meanwhile the global media circus, well underway for decades, continued apace, quite often feeding off the products of the computer revolution, or at least celebrating them. The boundaries between entertainment and politics, or between the simulated and the real, first became more permeable and then – at least according to some theorists of these events – collapsed entirely. Whether we were ready or not, the postmodern age was upon us.

In the literary ghetto known as science fiction, things were not exactly moribund, but sf certainly was ready for some new and interesting trend. Like all forms of popular culture, sf thrives on labels, trends, and combinations of them – labeled trends and trendy labels. Marketers need all these like a vampire needs blood.

This was the context in which ‘Neuromancer’ emerged.”

“Early on in this process, Gardner Dozois committed the fateful act of referring to this group of very loosely -affiliated folk as ‘cyberpunks.’ At the appearance of the word, the media circus and its acolytes, the marketers, went into gear. Cyberpunk became talismanic: within the sf ghetto, some applauded, some booed, some cashed in, some even denied that the word referred to anything; and some applauded or booed or denied that cyberpunk existed AND cashed in at the same time – the quintessentially postmodern response, one might say.

Marketing aside, however, cyberpunk had a genuine spokesman and proselytizer, Bruce Sterling, waiting in the wings. He picked up the label so casually attached by Dozois and used it as the focal point for his own concerns, which at times seem to include the outlandish project of remaking sf from within. In interviews, columns in various magazines and newspapers, and in introductions to Gibson’s collection of short stories, ‘Burning Chrome,’ and ‘Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology,’ Bruce staked out what he saw as cyberpunk and both implicitly and explicitly challenged others to contest it. If Gibson’s success provided the motor, Sterling’s polemical intensity provided the driving wheel.”

In “Cyberpunk in the 90s” by Bruce Sterling, http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/cyberpunk_in_the_nineties.html, he states that the genre took on a life of its own, and that the 5 writers became the genre’s gurus, and that the term, although now bastardized, will not die until they are gone – it will be etched on their tombstones. But he argues for a continuation of the dystopian views:

“In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we already know Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Our grandparents knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.

Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak and mortal, but it’s not the holy will of the gods; it’s just the way things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed, and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end.

This “anti-humanist” conviction in cyberpunk is not simply some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn’t invent this situation; it just reflects it.

Today it is quite common to see tenured scientists espousing horrifically radical ideas: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonic suspension of the dead, downloading the contents of the brain… Hubristic mania is loose in the halls of academe, where everybody and his sister seems to have a plan to set the cosmos on its ear.”

“Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes.

This is cyberpunk.”

“Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia – Bohemia in the 1980’s. The technosocial changes loose in contemporary society were bound to affect its counterculture. Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is still growing. Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of people you might not introduce to your grandma.”

“But science fiction is still alive, still open and developing. And Bohemia will not go away. Bohemia, like SF, is not a passing fad, although it breeds fads; like SF, Bohemia is old; as old as industrial society, of which both SF and Bohemia are integral parts. Cybernetic Bohemia is not some bizarre advent; when cybernetic Bohemians proclaim that what they are doing is completely new, they innocently delude themselves, merely because they are young.”

“There is much bleakness in cyberpunk, but it is an honest bleakness. There is ecstasy, but there is also dread … This generation will have to watch a century of manic waste and carelessness hit home, and we know it. We will be lucky not to suffer greatly from ecological blunders already committed; we will be extremely lucky not to see tens of millions of fellow human beings dying horribly on television as we Westerners sit in our living rooms munching our cheeseburgers. And this is not some wacky Bohemian jeremiad; this is an objective statement about the condition of the world, easily confirmed by anyone with the courage to look at the facts.

These prospects must and should effect our thoughts and expressions and, yes, our actions; and if writers close their eyes to this, they may be entertainers, but they are not fit to call themselves science fiction writers. And cyberpunks are science fiction writers – not a ’subgenre’ or a ‘cult,’ but the thing itself. We deserve this title and we should not be deprived of it.

But the Nineties will not belong to the cyberpunks. We will be there working, but we are not the Movement, we are not even ‘us’ any more. The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties. All power, and the best of luck to the Nineties underground.”

So the question that remains is what of the 21st century – what or who do we belong to – where are we going? Where is Science Fiction heading – what is the hallmark of this time?

Turning the tide – Gibson’s SF in the 80’s – trendy or visionary?

I picked up a copy of “Burning Chrome” by William Gibson, a collection of his short stories published in 1986. It has a preface by Bruce Sterling that is quite interesting, and gives a view into what he felt was Gibson’s impetus to revitalization of a stagnant genre. Gibson is one of the “creators” of the cyberpunk genre.

Examples of cyberpunk in movies includes Blade Runner, The Matrix, A Scanner Darkly, and the anime classic “Ghost in the Shell” which I watched for the first time last night. It was god, but I didn’t see it now as anything revolutionary or visionary as the cover said it to be.

For information on cyberpunk, Gibson, etc, see these Wiki sites. They might help give a background for this post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberpunk_works

And in the Wikipedia article on Gibson comes this:

“Lawrence Person, writing in his ‘Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto’ (1998) identified the novel as ‘the archetypal cyberpunk work,’ and in 2005, Time magazine included it in their list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, claiming that ‘[t]here is no way to overstate how radical [Neuromancer] was when it first appeared.’ According to literary critic Larry McCafferty, the auspiciousness of the novel was in its originality of vision, exhilarating prose, and technological similes and metaphors. He described the concept of the matrix as a place where ‘data dance with human consciousness … human memory is literalized and mechanized … multi-national information systems mutate and breed into startling new structures whose beauty and complexity are unimaginable, mystical, and above all nonhuman.’”

Later, the article brings Gibson up to the 21st century, showing he wasn’t just an eighties phenom:

“After ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ Gibson began to adopt a more realist style of writing, with continuous narratives—’speculative fiction of the very recent past.’ Critic John Clute has interpreted this approach by Gibson as the recognition that traditional science fiction is no longer possible ‘in a world lacking coherent “nows’”to continue from’, characterizing it as ‘SF for the new century.’ Gibson’s novels ‘Pattern Recognition’ (2003), and Spook Country (2007), were both set in the same contemporary universe—’more or less the same one we live in now’—and put Gibson’s work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time…”

His cultural significance is noted as:

“In his early short fiction, Gibson is credited by Rapatzikou in ‘The Literary Encyclopedia’ with effectively renovating Science Fiction, a genre at that time considered widely ‘insignificant,’ influencing by means of the postmodern aesthetic of his writing the development of new perspectives in science fiction studies. In the words of filmmaker Marianne Trench, Gibson’s visions ’struck sparks in the real world’ and ‘determined the way people thought and talked’ to an extent unprecedented in science fiction literature. The publication of ‘Neuromancer’ (1984) hit a cultural nerve, causing Larry McCafferty to credit Gibson with virtually launching the cyberpunk movement, as ‘the one major writer who is original and gifted to make the whole movement seem original and gifted.’”

“His early novels were, according to The Observer, ’seized upon by the emerging slacker and hacker generation as a kind of road map’. Through Gibson’s novels, words like ‘cyberspace,’ ‘netsurfing,’ ‘ICE,’ ‘jacking in,’ and ‘neural implants,’ entered popular usage, as did concepts such as net consciousness, virtual interaction and ‘the matrix.’ In ‘Burning Chrome’ (1982) [of which this post takes much of it's material], ” he coined the term ‘cyberspace’ referring to the “mass consensual hallucination” of computer networks. Through its use in ‘Neuromancer,’ the term gained such recognition that it became the de facto term for the World Wide Web during the 1990s. Artist Dike Blair has commented that Gibson’s ‘terse descriptive phrases capture the moods which surround technologies, rather than their engineering.’”

“In ‘Neuromanceer,’ Gibson first used the term ‘matrix’ to refer to the visualised Internet, two years after the nascent Internet was formed in the early 1980s from the computer networks of the 1970s. In this conception of the ‘matrix,’ he predicted a worldwide communications network eleven years before the origin of the World Wide Web, although related notions had been described elsewhere. At the time of writing ‘Burning Chrome,’ Gibson ‘had a hunch that [the Internet] would change things, in the same way that the ubiquity of the automobile changed things.’ In 1995, he identified the advent, evolution and growth of the Internet as ‘one of the most fascinating and unprecedented human achievements of the century,’ a new kind of civilization that is—in terms of significance—on a par with the birth of cities, and in 2000 predicted it would lead to the death of the nation state. [Something yet to see, but it's early days yet].

Observers contend that Gibson’s influence on the development of the Web reached beyond prediction; he is widely credited with creating an iconography for the information age.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson [cites have been omitted for ease of reading and can be found on the Wiki page cited.]

I’m quoting parts of the Preface to “Burning Chrome” (by Bruce Sterling, another cyberpunk author and who with Gibson, in the “Difference Engine,” created “steampunk.” ) in this post, as I try and look at the state of SF in the 80s, when I wasn’t reading it, and had turned away, and as I nowlook forward into my present journey back to the genre.

The beginning Preface of “Burning Chrome” starts out:

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters…. We can play with Big Ideas, because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

And SF writers have every opportunity to kick up our heels – we have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obligated to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.

Yet the sad truth of the matter is that SF has not been much fun of late. All forms of pop culture go through doldrums; they catch cold when society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved, and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder.

But William Gibson is one of our best harbinger’s of things to come … His amazing first novel, ‘Neuromancer,’ which swept the field’s awards in 1985, showed Gibson’s unparalleled ability to pinpoint social nerves. The effect was galvanic, helping to wake the genre from it’s dogmatic slumbers. Roused from its hibernation, SF is lurching from its cave into the bright sublight of the modern zeitgeist. And we are lean and hungry and not in the best of tempers. From now on things are going to be different.”

Now I quit reading SF, coincidentally (or NOT?) right about the late 70s. I began to feel that the Masters, esp. Heinlein and Clarke, which were about all I read, were going in odd, self-indulgent paths, and I fled the scene, so to speak. Was the late 70s stale, and if so, did Gibson help in refreshing it?

The self-indulgence of those late 70s left me so “bereft,” that I jumped ship, and did not return until a few years ago – a gap of about 25 years. So would Gibson back then have pulled me in? I’m not sure, reading his work now, whether I would have been ready for such a polar shift in reality. Maybe I would have been more ready for the cyberpunk than I am at a stodgy age 50?

“The Gernsback Continuum,” shows him consciously drawing a bead on the shambling figure of the SF tradition. It’s a devastating refutation of ’scientifiction in its guise as narrow technolatry. We see here a writer who knows his roots and is gearing up for a radical reformation.”

Did he do that? Do those of you who recall his work from the ’80s, and those who have consciously, or unconsciously, absorbed the changes, felt that stirring of a paradigm shift in SF?

“Gibson hit his stride with the Sprawl series: ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ [one of my fav SF movies] ‘New Rose Hotel, and the incredible ‘Burning Chrome’ ….[and] showed a level of imagination that effectively upped the ante for the entire genre…

The triumph of these pieces was their brilliant, self-consistent evocation of a credible future. It is hard to estimate the
difficulty of this effort, which is one that many SF writers have been ducking for years. This intellectual failing accounts for the ominous proliferation of postapocalypse stories, sword-and-sorcery fantasies, and those everpresent space operas in which galactic empires slip conveniently back into barbarism [a pet peeve of mine - the fall back]. All these sub-genres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic future.”

How do you feel about this – do you feel that a consistent realistic future IS the way to go – I for one love space operas, but prefer they stay in a nice high-tech future. And I don’t mind the occ. postapocalyptic story, but there was a proliferation back in the late 70s.

“But in the Sprawl stories we see a future that is recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modern condition. It is multi-faceted, sophisticated, global in its view. It derives from a new set of starting points: not from the shop-worn formula of robots, spaceships, and the modern miracle of atomic energy, but from cybernetics, biotech, and the communications web – to name a few.”

So, for those of you (me) who like our spaceships, what do you think? I s the “formula” shopworn? And is his dystopian future what is really wanted/needed?

“Gibson’s extrapolative techniques are those of classic hard SF, but his demonstration of them is pure New Wave. Rather than the usual passionless techies and rock-ribbed Competent Men of hardSF, his characters are a pirate’s crew of losers, hustlers, spin-offs, cast-offs, and lunatics. We see his future from the belly up, as it is lived, not merely dry speculation.”

Now, I for one have read some of his work, Idoru being one of them, and didn’t quite like it, although I haven’t given up on him (obviously – I got this SS set), but I want, as I’ve said before, characters that I can root for, not characters I dislike – that has been a problem for me in many a novel – “Undertow,” which I came to love because of it’s notes of astonishing brilliance, was the first E. Bear book without likable characters, unless you counted the aliens, who were far “better” than their human counterparts. So I’m not sure the underbelly is necessary, or even a preferred method of SF.

…”Big Science in this world is not a source of quaint Mr. Wizard marvels [you may have to be my age to get that bit], but an omnipresent, all-permeating definitive force. It is a sheet of mutating radiation pouring wildly up an exponential slope.

These stories paint an instantly recognizable portrait of the modern predicament. Gibson’s extrapolations show, with exaggerated clarity, the hidden bulk of the iceberg of social change. This iceberg now glides with sinister majesty across the surface of the late twentieth century, but its proportions are vast and dark.

Many SF writers, faced with this lurking monster, have flung up their hands and predicted shipwreck. Though no-one could accuse Gibson of Pollyannaism, he has avoided this easy way out. This is another distinguishing mark of the emergent new school of Eighties SF: its boredom with the Apocalypse. Gibson wastes little time shaking his
finger or wringing his hands. He keeps his eyes unflinchingly open…”

How about it – although growing up with the Apocalypse (drills in school), and “On the Beach” – the seminal work, along with “Alas, Babylon,” there wasn’t much on the horizon except “The Postman,” which I loved (so sue me). But is this/was this, the wave that broke the “slumber” and self-indulgence of the 70s and brought us into the new age of SF? Is Gibson that prominent? Is this merely self- indulgent 80s crap wrapped up in “we are SO out there” commentary? Or has there been a polar shift again with Stross, Vinge, and post-singularity work? I do find that SF does tend to have “trends.”
Right now it’s all sort of post-singularity stuff – they read, they liked, they co-opted, and ran with it. But isn’t there also room for good old fashioned stuff like Karen Traviss’ Wess’har, K.K. Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series, Reynold’s space-operas, E. Bear’s Jenny Casey trilogy – somewhat dystopian in scope, and set in a realistic future, but without the low-life pond-scum that Sterling seems to think is the hallmark of the New Age. Have we moved beyond this New Age? Is Gibson now redundant, less a creative visionary, and more a part of the 80s scene?

“Another sign that shows Gibson as part of a growing new consensus in SF: the ease with which he collaborates with other writers.”

I seem to recall collaborations in earlier works in the 60s and 70s, but is that a thing of rarity, or is Sterling merely commenting on how seamless it now appears?

“In Gibson we hear the sound of a decade that has finally found it’s own voice. He is not a table-pounding revolutionary, but a practical, hands-on retrofitter. He is opening the stale corridors of the genre to the fresh air of new data: eighties culture, with its strange, growing integration of technology and fashion….

SF has survived a long winter on its stored body fat. Gibson, along with a broad wave of inventive, ambitious new writers, has prodded the genre awake and sent it out on recce for a fresh diet. And it’s bound to do us all a power of good.”

End of quotes.

So, what do y’all think? Is this just self-indulgent 80’s “visions,” or is it really a fresh insight: a look at a stale genre, and the influence of one writer (and others) on refitting it for a new generation? What do you younger readers feel? Are the classics so dated? Is Gibson and his cronies the start of something new, or is he merely a “phase” that we went through, as Sterling pointed out that the genre does, periodically going through the doldrums and shaking itself up? Have we reshaken ourselves again, or are we still in the Gibsoneque self-indulgent “underbelly”? Is Vinge and his work an outgrowth/extension of Gibson’s cyberpunk view, or a new world view of the future?

Is there still room in the genre, as I think, for space operas, aliens, and “cool” stuff, or are we doomed to pigeonhole ourselves again, as we did in the 70s, with Vinge style worlds? Have we learned nothing from our growing pains? Are we narrowing our future vision too far – or do you feel that this “style” is the way to open eyes? Having been busy working and starting a family in the late 80s, I can’t really say anything about that decade. I was too self- absorbed in making my personal life work to look to the far future. Now, as I bask on the cusp of senior citizenry, I have time to be self-indulgent and look back, wonder at the changes, and whether they actually mean anything at all, or are they truly effects of
generations passing through.

I am curious as to what others think of the trends of SF, where we are now, where we might be heading. I realize this is a lot of “thought”, but you all are “big boys” (and girls) who can parse out a sentence about it. I think we could all benefit from a deeper look and some insights into the genre we all love. Is HardSF Gibson, or he is merely one facet, either dated, or still relevant? Who IS relevant, if he isn’t?