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

Economy

I've found enough time recently to be able to spend a fair amount of it with the book. When I'm there I've been holding it up to the light side by side with something written by better hands and imagined by a better mind. It's hard not to be disappointed when you compare the thing that you have made with the summits of science fiction. I have not written Tiger! Tiger! (The stars my destination), but I have written something else.

This is an unproductive pattern of thought in which to be stuck. I am trying to take something away from the time I spend in this place though. Tiger! Tiger! does something in terms of pure economy of story telling that impressed me when I first read it. It is lean and it is wild. If it were an animal you would look upon it's near skeletal deformation and twisted light bleeding hide and might be mistaken in thinking that it was incapable of surviving the harshness of even the mildest of winters, but year in and year out it would be there again in the spring. Alfred Bester wrote something that is voracious and unnatural and once I became familiar with it I began to question the ability of some of those other creatures around me that had begun to appear obese and domesticated by comparison.

When I read my own book I hope that it might have this same sense of economy. That I too might find the majority of the excess discarded when the book is complete. That is what I aim for, but as I mentioned earlier I have written something else.

The Dark Knight Rises

It's long. It feels long. It's a little over ten minutes longer than The Dark Knight, but it feels so much longer than that. I wouldn't say I got bored while watching it, but there are some pacing choices I had the time to question while watching the movie and a noticeable amount of superfluous dialogue and belaboured setup/payoffs draw the film out unnecessarily.

An explanation for the length of the film is that it loosely adapts a seventy issue story arc into a single film. SEVENTY! That seems like a mistake right there. To their credit there are a great many things from the source material that the Nolans elected not to include, but at times it does feel as though they could've gone further. There is still a lot of padding.

I'd recommend it if you're heading out anyway, but I'm not on board with the acclaim it has been receiving. The most exciting thing about this film is that the next addition to the Batman franchise will be something entirely new.

Unless they make another origin story.

Now Hiring: only pseudonyms need apply

I've been stalking about the Farm lately. I've been trying not to draw attention to myself. I keep my distance. The creatures I see in the fields are stranger these days than they have been, but they are still familiar. I still see my brushstrokes in the their casual gait and in the way that they feed. They are mine, and I long to be among them again.

Looking at them without engaging, I see more clearly the way that they are penned together despite their differences. Allowed to roam amongst each other without restriction.

It is not an alien concept that one might create new farmers, cut from the cloth of the original, to help tend the herds. Iain Banks made himself another farmer. One who would tend to his science fiction, while he tended to the mainstream herd. Stephen King brought one to life to reduce market saturation, only to take its life when his usefulness had passed. Dodgson wrote about mathematics under his own name, and about Wonderland under Carroll's. Asimov wrote as French to accommodate the varied nature of the creatures on his farm.

I've seen my creatures, and I think they might need labeling. Same farm, different product. People know what they're getting. It's not a dissociative identity disorder thing, it's just branding. Such an unfashionable word, but I think people like to know what they are letting into their heads. Don't you?

How varied are my creatures? How many people do I need to be? How many people could I be? Perhaps if I were a dragon and a dentist, as well as a farmer, I could create an army to tend my herds.

Think of all the faces I could have!

Same farm, different product

It is nearly midnight when and where I am at the time of starting. I am listening to Off World Music, which is one of a few bootleg Blade Runner soundtracks that I've acquired over the years. I've spent the day in bed, because my back did something without me while I was sleeping. I'm at that point in the night where after my sixth cup of decaf I realised that I need to label my two coffee jars. Around the same time of this particular epiphany I also realised that sleep may be elusive tonight.

There is a thing that I call The Farm. It is the place that I populate with those things that will become my stories, and those things that already are. It is the place where I keep snippets, outlines, theories, characters and broad concepts. It is also a place where I keep my literary theories to myself.

I enjoy spending time at the Farm. I like the lack of structure that exists there. There are structures in the Farm, but they are still concepts. The Book has no more chapters to be written. It is a whole thing. It is a thing that demands that I make its structure far more real than I think I was ever prepared for. For the time being I have a reprieve. There are other things in my life that demand attention. So much attention that I do not have to engage with the book in a way that will bring the structure it craves from me.

So, for the time being, I only have the time and the head space to visit the Farm.

It is past midnight now, and I can feel that cold pain that sets in when your body catches up and it too comes to the realisation that it will not get something that it needs.