The Days Ahead

To some degree, I find myself thinking about the work of William Gibson more frequently due to the work that I do and the way that I live. Not that I am a writer like he is, though I do and have written web copy, which is a kind of corporate, wired up sort of writing that lives in the worlds hewn with his own, but the vast majority of my professional life has been as a freelance ICT professional. Not that I ever call it that. That doesn't happen. There are other words that are often more specific. The technology bases covered are diverse and far reaching. I often think of the work that I have done, and the work that I do, and there is a relationship to the organisms that populate cyberpunk. I'm one of those. That's what I think.

I've had the speak wheeled at me in a variety of fashions, I've lied to printers to make them distribute ink in the manner for which they were originally designed, trawled through archaic data on dying systems at the behest of its owners, and coded towards functional artificial intelligence. That's not all of it, but it is some of it. I may not be the neuromancer, but I'm playing in the same parks. This is the world I live in. I'm pretty sure I've eaten synth-spaghetti, and probably slept on it. In reality it is the world we all live in, though your eating habits are your own.

The synth-spaghetti stained days of keyboard-for-hire are a part of something else. The journeyman years. They have a function. They built who I am, and the way that I learn.

These are important days.

The Prophets of Cyberspace: A Rough Guide to Cyberpunk v1.0.3

originally posted on 2010-04-26-0223
at Ray-guns and Spandex
migrated to Sci-Fi Snot Rash

In the late seventies a new flavour of science fiction began to take shape. It's earliest visible family characteristics had first appeared in both 'new age' sci-fi and the authors of the beat generation. In the intervening time it had slowely formed a new definition for itself through the works of J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, until reaching a point in the early eighties when the cultural obsession with excess and mass media provided the perfect literary genesis pool for the emerging counter culture prophets of cyberpunk.

Abandoning galaxy spanning empires and laser toting aliens in favour of more familiar settings. Abandoned territories and near future cities became neon wombs breeding cybernetic street gangs, corporate warriors, and digital pop-stars. Cyberpunk takes us into worlds not that far beyond the horizon. Deeply entrenched in the mundane with elements just alien enough that they might be happening in another city, in another country somewhere, instead of on the other side of tomorrow. In the three decades since its first oredictions we can clearly see that the anticipation of the popularity of reality television and the total pervasion of the internet happened somewhere between Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid and William Gibson's Cyber Space Trilogy.

With much of the origianlly fictitious elements of cyberpunk having become parts of our everyday lives it comes as no surprise that many other brands of modern science fiction carry these same elements that were at one stage the calling cards of cyberpunk without fully submersing themselves into the stream. The Matrix is more thematically in sync with post-apocalyptic or machine war SF than it is with cyberpunk. Link all mimics of any punk movement, they wear the colours, but run in different circles.

It was never just a collection of hacker stories set in glass walled mega-cities and the suburban wastelands that surrounded them. It's a voice and an ethos defined by the very culture that birthed, where the corporate world has adopted the methods and tactics of the street, wrapped in a setting that is thrown at us. Chapters barely clock in at a page, and read more like scenes from a film. And the pacing of the books are measured in frames per second, with the charging mbps of the prose consisting predominantly of artificial street speak, and stream of consciousness.

If you are interested in running deep in the pure flavour, books like Snow Crash and Blood Music deliver in spades, but if you are a sci-fi film junkie, Cypher, New Rose Hotel, and Natural City are uncut, and measured from the source.

For me and my money, nothing sits closer to the heart of cyberpunk than the literary link hopping of Mirrorshades, Burning Chrome and the erroneously named Rewired: The Post Cyberpunk Collection. Short story compilations straight from the aforementioned neon womb in portions that have been coded and optimised for the short attention span generation that shared its childhood.

"The best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012"

The quote is mine. I wrote that. I wrote it is a jab at the way 'genres' and 'categories' are listed on Steam. I like Steam, but their publisher assigned genres and categories are basically nonsense now. Some people seem to just tick every box on the back of "Yeah, it's got some of that".

As I have previously mentioned, I do understand the need to make these distinctions, but there are times when it gets a bit out of control. My rule of thumb: if your 'genre' reads like the response to "give a description in twenty-five words or less", then you need an editor. When it comes down to it, do you need all of those words? Are they all required to get players into what your pimping? Historically, I have played a lot of fighting games, and when a new fighter comes out I give it a look-see. The term 'fighter' is enough in that regard. I have a look and I read some reviews and I then start to think about the expanded terminology. Is it a technical fighter? Is it a team-based fighter? Is it a true 3D fighter, or is it 2.5D? While these terms are useful for fighter community discussions, I don't want to see the next King of Fighters referred to as a 2D, team-based, technical-franchise-fighter every time anyone talks about it. Apart from the fact the entire King of Fighters series can be described in this way (except the first where you would switch out 'franchise' for 'cross-over'), it isn't really a super useful genre, because it is a very small party.

As it happens the English language, out of habit more than anything else, will usually find a term for something when the party gets large enough. It is a linguistic blob, amorphously digesting anything it comes into contact with, press-ganging the required vocabularic DNA into sometimes bold and unexplored usage. When it's stretched it will even mutate new words from what ever it can find. It'll take a noun and make it an adjective, or a noun and verb it. Sometimes stick words together (compound words), and sometimes jam them together so hard that some of the letters pop out (portmanteau, which is itself a metalanguage term that is a loan word from French that originally referred to luggage, and was itself a portmanteau before we had a good word for it).

Video games are a relatively recent thing (when compared to art and literature), and we are filling out our glossary nicely. We have terms like metroidvania (portmanteau), tower defense, roguelike (compound word) and mmorpg (acronym) which my friends pronounce as 'more-pigger'. When the time comes that we absolutely need a term for games like Morrow Wind or Skyrim that aren't acctually part of the Elder Scrolls series, we will more than likely use a term like 'scrolls' (plural), and not first-person-hacktion-adventure-fantasy-RPGs. As a species, we're too lazy for that kind of tongue-twisting tomfoolery.

The title was in reference to Orcs Must Die! 2, which is hands-down the best co-op, 3rd-person, fantasy, puzzle-strategy-defense-shooter of 2012. No competition. It is also a fantastic game.

Anti-post-utopian feminist bio-punk in a neo-noir-western setting, where all the cowboys wear blindfolds and ride dinosaurs

Label makers and delirium

While obsessing over my views on Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology I managed to identify the culprit as being one Lawrence Person, who in his "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto" laid out an early definition of the sub-sub-genre. Person prefaces his manifesto with an admission of recklessness: "Critics, myself included, persist in label-mongering, despite all warnings; we must, because it's a valid source of insight-as well as great fun." Fun it may be, but we need a line. At this stage anyone looking in is staring unprotected into a whirling cluster-fuck of loose definitions and shifting criteria.

Someone opined at me the other day (some weeks ago) that "it is all about marketing", but more often than not anyone trying to sell you media runs around checking family trees and filing DNA tests to establish even the slightest genealogical relationship between their product and that popular, successful, good looking one you spent money on last year. Sucker Punch was advertised as the slutty cousin of Inception and Alice in Wonderland, successful films from the previous year. They didn't want to tell you that it was in reality probably not going to appeal to the same audience. Marketing just gets complicated if they start talking about too many different flavours, they want you to buy all the chocolate ice cream they have to sell you. Fractal genres comes later, and is perpetrated by consumers and academics with label makers and fever sweats.

In the days of my more brazen youth I too was prone to a sort of footloose participation in fractal genres that allowed me to appreciate terms like non-pro-Judaic existentialist vampire fiction and faux-feminist urban fantasy, but this behaviour is the symptom of a sickness of sub-division that drives people to read 'genre' as 'brief description in twenty-five words or less'. Person wakes briefly from his category induced delirium just long enough to point out that he does not consider postcyberpunk a genre in its own right, but merely an observation of a trend. I can buy into this, but the damage has been done. In the height of his fever he cast a new body out into the increasingly amorphous label-palooza and regardless of his intentions it is gathering mass.

Bill's Adventures in Interzone

Cyberpunk was a move into something new, but at the same time there was a lot that wasn't new. In the same way that proto-punk existed before anything that was clearly defined as punk, there was a sort of proto-cyberpunk lashing about half-formed, eyed off by the alphas of science fiction who were at once sure that this thing would not take from them their pride, but certain that it would be able to. Proto-cyberpunk is not a genre, it is an acknowledgement of the direction in which things began to move.

When it came into its own, early cyberpunk was a caricature, prophesising in distended chins and elongated ears. It was to more traditional speculative fiction what Naked Lunch had been to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. You can still see the old moves, but Wonderland is now Interzone and the people involved are broken, drug addled perpetual fuck-ups who are more likely to trade a lover for a typewriter than have tea with a bunny. It was Middle Earth built in neon and concrete where the wizards needed internet access, the elves wore black leather, and Sauron ran a Zaibatsu from an office in Tokyo.

Later cyberpunk is less overt, its features are cleaner. You aren't really seeing the emergence of something new. You're seeing refinement. To draw on the same reference cards that Person does, Cyberpunk depicts a traffic jam in front of a video-billboard, tricking us into thinking we're at a drive-in waiting for the feature to start. The ads are never going to end. Postcyberpunk is still showing us that same situation, but the illusion is more convincing. We're still waiting for the ads to end but this time there's free wi-fi.

Further Reading

Interested in some of the material that inspired cyberpunk? Here is a selection of proto-cyberpunk from a couple of different genres:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise by J. G. Ballard

Getting yo' mirrorshades rewired

I've recently taken the time to meander through the thoughtfully compiled Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, which is meant to chronicle those steps being taken to move us away from the near future menagerie of zaibatsu assassins and keyboard cowboys that cyberpunk established in the early eighties.

Though its editors previously rolled out the Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology this book emerged from and stills stands ass deep in the reproductive juices of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, which was seminal in shaping the man who writes this blog.

Cyberpunk, as the name implies, is a species of postmodern science fiction that started to appear in the late seventies and began to find its feet in the early eighties. Like postmodernism it was a thing that was always going to happen. Its DNA was shaped and prepared in the opening salvos of the industrial revolution, and by the same token it was always going to produce its own progeny that carried with them the family resemblance in their tropes and the way that they swaggered.

There is a problem with what they are trying to establish here. While at its most axiomatic cyberpunk is about the keyboard rebellion, the traits and tropes that it has laid exclusive claim to can be found in less trendy science fiction as far back as the twenties, and in usage is a much broader term with a similar policy for rigidly acknowledging its borders as the People's Republic of China. There is no room for post-cyberpunk to lurk in its wake. The stories in Rewired are standing too close.

Kelly and Kessel are participating in an increasingly obsessive trend towards a fractal model when talking about genres and sub-genres in a fool's errand to hit the nail on the head. This is part of a bigger conversation about how and why we engage with all mediums of media and the degrees of meaningfulness of the categories we use to keep them separated. It is also part of a conversation about the contemporaneous use of categories that are defined by what they are not.

As a compilation of reasonably contemporary postmodern science fiction highlights covering a decade from 1996 to 2005 Rewired rolls with the big boys. It concisely packages the major tropes in chronological order, explored by only the most talented pens. It is especially interesting if you can get your hands on a copy of Mirrorshades.

"RE" THIS!: Episode 1 - The Great Tradition

Contrary to things I may have said or are yet to say I'm not totally against reboots, relaunches and re-imaginings. It is a thing that happens. Not sometimes either. It is a constant thing happening and moving and changing and trending. Some people get traumatically bent out of shape about this. There little fanboy rage gets all up in their nasty little fists and they start screaming about how someone (original creator) or another (IP holder) has just jossed their entire fanfic catalogue. To such folk I shout, "Welcome to the history of storytelling". It is part of the Great Tradition.

I don't think that there is a single myth that hasn't been reworked, transposed, recast, updated, exaggerated, expanded, combined, retconned, appropriated, romanised, stolen, assimilated, reinterpreted or misinterpreted. This is just how we roll as a species. Everyone agrees that Heracles got him some labours that numbered twelve, but if you get your research on (not Wikipedia) there is a much longer list of labours apparently accomplished under the "Twelve Labours" (c)(TM) brand. This is because everyone town wanted a piece of the action. They wanted to point at a rusting '89 Magna and say "Heracles pushed that car to the side of the road when it ran out of petrol by himself, and Iolas had all his kids in it. Including the three fat ones."

This isn't a behaviour that has been confined to the ancient world either. Let's do an easy one.

Once upon a time there was a man named Vlad Tepes who was Prince of Wallachia. He earned a bit of a reputation for being an impaler. Same say this made him a horrible tyrant, others suggest he just liked knowing that people he didn't trust stayed where he left them.

During his lifetime he had a disagreement with some folk (mainly of the Ottoman Empire). Folk to whom he later lost. It was also these folk who we rely on for our account of his cruelty. Considering that the tales of hiss cruelty continued to grow for nearly a century after his death from these same sources is it fair to suppose that they were not entirely accurate? I think so. It is also important to note that during his lifetime and in the centuries that followed the people of his own country saw him as a hero.

A couple of centuries roll on and we get to the closing years of the 19th C. when an Irishman knocks out a novel about the vampire count of Transylvania, Dracula. This book combines the figures of Vlad Tepes (Vlad III) and Vlad Dracul (Vlad II) into a single character, who is actually a vampire hell bent on becoming a London real-estate mogul.

Twenty-five years later Team Germany bust out the classic Nosferatu starring Max Schrek. Dracula is called Orlok and he travels to Germany instead of England. The Author's estate tried to have all prints of the film destroyed, but their lack of thoroughness is our boon. As the twentieth century continued Dracula would be retold and the character reused hundreds of times, amounting to dozens of reinterpretations of both the historical figures and fictional characters.

That's not all folks. If you call now Bram Stoker's Dracula is a hydra of the Great Tradition. He adopted a traditional European mythological creature, and changed its "rules" just enough to suit his tale, thus creating the basis for the modern vampire.

Popular culture over the next one-hundred plus years would jump in to adjust and reconfigure the concept of a vampire to suit trends and limitations in special effects. Enter Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire (not the film, the book) that recasts vampires as lonely lovelorn creatures of the night. Then Buffy comes along and they start dating teenagers. By the time Stephanie Meyer throws her hat into the ring what is there left to do, but make them sparkle in the sunshine.

I've been guilty in the past of complaining about the "death of the classical vampire", but in all fairness Anne Rice, Joss Whedon and Stephanie Meyer are only participating in the Great Tradition. My definition was an arbitrary line drawn by myself (and others), where a better term would be 'pre-Varney vampires'. I do think it is important to make distinctions, because although they are all vampires, Edward Cullen (MeyerPire or Glampire) is a very different creature to Angel, or Lestat, or Orlok, or Dracula, or Varney. I think there is room for all.