Today's episode of SIDE QUESTS is more than a little personal. That's right, it's about my favorite inanimate objects: synthesizers! - G
What Are We Talking About?
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument that produces sound waves. The earliest and basic method is called analog subtractive synthesis. An oscillator produces sine, square and/or sawtooth waves with electrical current. A filter and envelope generator then cut into, or subtracts from, the waveform to alter the sound. With the advent of digital synthesis in the late 1970s, new forms of synthesis became possible, including wavetable, FM (frequency modulation) and S&S (sample and synthesis).
The synthesizer has actually been around since the 1930s, but didn't really catch on until Bob Moog's voltage-controlled synthesizers made their way into studios in the late 1960s, and onto albums by Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles and The Monkees. By the mid-1970s, synthesizers were a thing, though it wasn't until the 1980s that they threatened to displace the sainted guitar.
Bob Moog with some of his 1960s and 1970s synths.
Nowadays you hear far more music made with synthesizers--or samples of synthesizers--than with guitars. That's a sad fact if you're the kind of person who yells at clouds and hates Millennials because they love avocado toast and refuse to spend money on Budweiser or Applebees. For someone like me, it's bittersweet. I love the synthesizer, and am proud of its ascendence to the pinnacle of music making; but I love the guitar too.
The Rabbit Hole
So, basically I've been obsessed for as long as I can remember. Why? Because, in their purest form, synthesizers don't sound like anything you make with strings, reeds or stretched out skin. They sound like the future. They still sound like the future, even though now it's more often the future we dreamed of in the past.
I don't know how it started. I certainly didn't get it from my parents: my dad mostly listens to classical music and a smattering of rock and folk, while my mom refers to all music as "noise." But my dad did have the Vangelis album Spiral on vinyl--in retrospect, that was probably ground zero.
Flash-forward to 1983. We were just getting music videos at that time--not on MTV (no cable), but on weekly shows that came on just after the news. If I was lucky enough, I could watch half before my parents shut the TV off and told me to get ready for bed. Those shows played a bit of everything, but the only songs I remember were the ones with killer synth lines, like "Jump" and "The Message."
The school I went to had a really strong music program, and in the music room, they had a Casio CZ-5000 and a Roland Juno 106. Whenever possible, I'd sneak in early and move the knobs and sliders around. I didn't know what I was doing--I was just a dumb kid. Most of the time, I ended up playing the baseline from "Blue Monday" on the Juno, or some Flock of Seagulls chords on the Casio.
In 1991, I finally convinced my parents to go halfsies on a Roland D-50. My keyboard teacher, Carl, assured me it was the "best one in the biz," and that his guy could get me an unbeatable price. I adored Carl, who was an old timer from the northside of town--an area mostly known for red sauce joints and organized crime. So I mowed lawns and shoveled sidewalks until I'd earned half.
Now, $500 in 1991 was a lot, but it wasn't a lot for a new Roland D-50. Looking back, I've often wondered if my synth just fell off the back of the truck, as they used to say. More likely, Carl's guy just wanted to liquidate stock. After all, by 1990 the D-50 was out of production and had been emphatically replaced by the mighty Korg M1.
The Roland D-50 used something called Linear Arithmetic (LA) synthesis, which was proprietary speak for "sample and synthesis" (S&S). What that means is that the D-50 paired the attack transient from 8-bit samples (think the precise moment a trumpet blares or a mallet hits a xylophone) with the decay, sustain and release from a synthetic waveform (think everything that comes after that moment). It sounded otherworldly--and in fact, you'll recognize the D-50 from basically every late '80s New Age cliche ever. Perhaps the most iconic use of the D-50 was on Enya's 1998 song "Orinoco Flow," which used the Pizzicato Strings patch.
Unfortunately for young teenage me, the D-50 was also brutally difficult to program. Unlike the Juno 106 we had at school, you had to go menu diving to make anything happen--there was nary a slider or knob in sight. But I didn't care--I had my first synth.
The Music of Futures Past
By the mid-1990s I'd discovered techno, house and ambient music. This wasn't music featuring some electronic instrumentation; it was all electronic instrumentation. I did like some sample-based house music, but by and large I gravitated towards the stuff that sounded like science fiction expressed musically.
A lot was made with really cheap gear that had been repurposed from its original intention. For example, the Roland TB-303 Bass Line--a cheap-looking plastic box with a single oscillator designed to provide accompaniment for practicing guitarists. It didn't sound much like a bass guitar, and was kind of a pain to program. But it did have this wonderfully squelchy filter and a characterful way of tie-ing notes together. In 1987, a producer from the South Side of Chicago named DJ Pierre discovered that sweeping the filter along short patterns created an irresistible hypnotic effect. Techno producers from Detroit (and, later, New York, Canada and Europe) achieved a similar effect with other synths, including the same ones I'd used from school--the Roland Juno 106 and the Casio CZ-1000. I can think of no better vision of the future, as seen from 1997, than "Organa" by Dutch producer Steve Rachmad:
I started making my own techno in 1996, though I never really finished anything. I had a mental block--a fear of failure, I think. Basically, if I never finished anything, then I never had to experience the pain of rejection. So I'd muck around, make loops and then fuck off for a few months at a time. Looking back, I regret that I wasn't more serious and driven from the get-go.
That changed in 2015, when I discovered synthwave. Actually I already knew Kavinsky and College, who are widely credited with inspiring the genre. But I didn't realize there was this whole scene of people inspired by magenta-tinted '80s retrofuturism.
That changed soon after we began our series Cyberpunk Revisited. I was re-reading Neuromancer, Mindplayers, Software, etc. and I wanted to find something that captured the mood in musical terms. I found a couple cyberpunk playlists on Spotify and immediately got shoved down the rabbit hole. Makeup and Vanity Set, Perturbator, Miami Nights 1984...I couldn't get enough. I was hooked.
Slowly but surely I got back into making music, and found that--with kids and far less free time--I suddenly had the drive and discipline that had been missing during my 20s and early 30s. I started finishing songs, decorating them in lush, lovely synth tones--I even released some of them. And then made an album!
Synthesizers: The Greatest Thing on Earth
But enough about me--let's talk synths. There are many kinds of synthesis, but I'm mainly into subtractive--the studio sound of the late '70s and early '80s, and the underground sound of the late '80s and early '90s. One of my all-time favorites is, of course the Roland Juno 106. Released in 1984, was basically the older Juno 60 only with MIDI (which allows electronic instruments to communicate with one another) but no arpeggiator.
The 106 features a single digitally-controlled analog oscillator (DCF), which means it produces sound via electrical current but also features an electronic pulse that keeps the oscillator in tune. It has a single digitally-controlled filter (DCF), a single envelope generator, which modulates both amplitude and the frequency cutoff on the DCF, and a single low-frequency oscillator (LFO), which can modulate either pitch, pulse width or the filter cutoff. The 106 also has a silky smooth chorus effect that makes everything sound like gold. So while the 106 has a more limited feature set than some of the other synths I'll talk about, it's almost impossible to make a bad sounding patch with it. It has been called, rightly in my view, the ultimate beginner's synth. And boy does it sound lovely...
Next up is the Oberheim OB-8. Released in 1983, the OB-8 replaced the more famous OB-Xa (made famous in "Jump"). For my money, however, the OB-8 is the best of the bunch. It featured two voltage-controlled analog oscillators (VCOs) per voice, with 8 total voices of polyphony, a Curtis ladder-design voltage-controlled filter (VCF), two envelopes and a whole junk ton of LFO modulation capabilities. You can also pan individual voices across the stereo field (i.e. left to right speaker), leading to some seriously out there stuff.
The last hardware synth I'll present for you is brand new, the Korg Prologue. It's not out yet, but I've had the pleasure of playing one in the shop--and let me tell you, it is mighty fine. The Prologue features a pair of VCOs, a VCF and two envelope generators, but also has a digital multi-oscillator that can do simple FM or wavetable synthesis. What that means is that you can do classic analog, '80s digital or more complex patches that blend the two.
Of course, one of the great things about being alive today is how cheap, convenient and good software synthesizers have become. Some are truly excellent, like Diva by Germany's u-He: a synth that lets you mix and match modules emulated from various classic pieces of kit. It can even simulate the character analog synthesizers pick up as they age...bad tuning and oscillator drift! Here are a couple videos made by my favorite sound designer for Diva (and now friend), Swan Audio. The first is a synthwave track using sounds be made for the preset pack Analog Hits, and the second are his OB-8 recreations, which sound amazingly realistic if you ask me.
Well, that about wraps it up! But just for good measure, here are a couple love songs I've written to the synthesizer. Enjoy!
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.
Though our Cyberpunk Revisited series is largely finished, this new release necessitated its revival. After all, it's a: (1) cyberpunk-themed; (2) point-and-click adventure game; that is (3) published by Mi-Clos Studios, who gave us the exquisite space survival game Out There. In some ways, I guess you could say I've been waiting my whole life for this game--or, at least, the thirty-odd years since I first played Manhunter: New York. Could this title possibly live up to my expectations? The answer, as far as Episode One is concerned, is "yes and no."
In Void & Meddler, you star as Fyn--a hardboiled DJ who has lost her memory of the past two years and wants it back. So you search for clues across a city that feels a lot like what New Yorkers might have imagined the future to look like in 1980. In other words, gritty, grimy and bathed in neon rain.
The art design draws inspiration from both the warm, cartoon-like style of Broken Sword and pixelated Sierra and LucasArts classics. But Void & Meddler also features some of the best use of color I've ever seen in a video game--buildings are bathed in the proverbial neon rain, while raindrops pitter and patter on a virtualized camera lens. It is absolutely stunning, and manages to feel nostalgic and progressive at the same time.
Unfortunately, the puzzle design doesn't evoke the same feelings. In the classic point-and-click mold, you basically move Fyn from place to place, picking up and interacting with objects for use in one of the game's many puzzles. Void & Meddler gets extra credit for creating multiple solutions to its puzzles, which means you don't have to spend hours just trying to find that one thing, without which you can't proceed.
On the other hand, there's no narrative momentum--something games like Gemeni Rue, Lost Echo or Stasis all use to great effect. Instead, you just click on anything--in the hopes that you might be able to accomplish something that is, at best, vaguely defined. Simply put, it's never really established why we should care about Fyn getting her memories back, and never all that clear how the things we do in the game relate to that endgoal. That formula might have worked for King's Quest, but it's not 1984 anymore.
Still, the game has enough style to keep my interest. I do, however, hope for more dynamic puzzles and a clearer sense of story from Episode 2.
The Math Baseline Assessment: 7/10
Bonuses: +1 the color; +1 in the neon rain.
Penalties: -1 for retrograde puzzles; -1 for narrative issues.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. "A mostly enjoyable experience."
This is Part 2 of the epic Blogtable: "Cyberpunks on the State of Science Fiction, Then and Now." For those who are just jumping on, please read Part 1 first--it includes an introduction, bios of our four participants, my question on whether SF is in "crisis" today, and whether that crisis mirrors and responses to the question I posed from Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo. Today we feature cyberpunk pioneers Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan, responding to the same question--as well as to the other participants.
The Question Redux
At
the USC symposium on cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker recalled how cyberpunk
emerged in reaction to the prevalent "arena rock" quality of science
fiction in the 1970s--its emphasis on spectacle, elitism and tired,
endlessly-rehashed tropes. Fans of the era, Rucker suggested, were
comfortable "wallowing in their castles and space navy bullshit."
Cyberpunk aimed to transgress, disturb and upend these conventions and
expectations.
Arguably we stand in a similar position today. Bruce Sterling,
speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a
"rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st
that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the
critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a
loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent
retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies"
tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for
cyberpunk).
As Sterling and Kincaid both note, few practitioners seem to be
looking forward and engaging in rigorous speculation on the future. Yet
even in this environment, there are voices within the community loudly
complaining that science fiction is too challenging, too
intellectual--essentially that it is not "arena rock" enough.
So my question is: what would it take, in today's environment, to
restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fueled cyberpunk? What
lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and
what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does
science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of
its current inertia?
Bruce Sterling
I don't think it's "transgressive thinking" that solves your alleged problem there. Actually science fiction doesn't have "inertia" now. It's not stuck in place, it's crumbling, disintegrating, like print media and book retail in general in most parts of the world.
Rigorous speculation isn't in fashion now because science isn't in fashion. You're not gonna get a lot of "science" fiction when science is on the back foot in mass culture. People like product-development now, they don't much like science -- they like "technology," by which they mostly mean commercialized digital technology.
It's like you're asking guys in ham radio circles: how can ham radio be really transgressive and cutting-edge? It sorta can, but who would notice, and why would ham radio be a platform from which you would wanna do that? Science fiction in the days of Gernsback was very closely allied to ham radio. Ham radio is still around as a medium.
This isn't a counsel of despair or anything -- if you look at, say, the Hugo Awards, you can see that the people in science fiction are not old-fashioned people, they're neck deep in echo-chamber social-media flame war, just like everybody else. Plus, there are genre emanations like Game of Thrones that are colossal, just global-scale phenomena. Star Wars is like an international holiday now.
You've got to be in trans-media to do that, it's got to be book plus TV plus movie plus collectibles plus social media fandom, but it's not a dead or inert means of expression, it's just that current media structures are quite weird. Why Harry Potter as a titanic world enterprise when writers can no longer afford to live in London?
It's always better to have novel, intelligent ideas than "transgressive" ideas. If you're "transgressing" all the time, you always have to be getting into somebody's face. You misbehave, sure, but you're letting the straights set the standards for what you can do. That always ends up looking corny in the long run.
A few specific responses to points Rudy made yesterday:
Fast forward to 2015. Has the publishing category of SF become as plastic and bogus as it was in 1979? Time for another revolution! Is the SF industry being run by tiny cartel of greedy multinational corporations and book distributors? Is 99% of the attention and money going to 1% of the writers? Are the Nebulas and the Hugos complete bullshit?
Well, no--the situation's not like 1979 any more than it is like 1959 or 1939. The entire economy's run by tiny cartels now, it's not just publishing that was cornered by ultra-rich elites.
It's true that the mid list has dwindled and more money and attention goes to fewer science-fiction creatives, but that's also true of movies, nonfiction books, acting, pop music, all kinds of pursuits. Even heads of corporations have a one percent of ultra-wealthy moguls towering over them. I dunno why, but it's clearly something broad and systemic, it's not about some personal injustice done to some particular writer somewhere.
I would also argue that popular writing kinda needs a lot of dross available. Popular writing needs room for badness. You don't get great writing without a lot of just, writing. When I look at a bookstore rack and it's all junk I feel a sense of relief: it's like the swimming pool still has water in it.
So where does this leave the ambitious, literary, independently-minded young author of the genre formerly known as SF?
It leaves them messed up and in a global Depression, but I would definitely hang out with young people if I was a young writer now. I'd be spending huge effort looking for my own generational voices and I'd try hard to make them famous. I'd be looking for conspiratorial cliques who understand that the fix is in and aren't willing to pretend otherwise.
Awards aren't much use. They're like placebo pills, really. If you believe they matter then they matter. It might be argued that awards give writers in writers organizations some reason to participate in writers organizations.
Just in passing--[The G] mentioned the rhetorical question of whether the SF publishing niche needs more badly written, middlebrow space operas and thrillers populated by emotional ciphers. Do billionaires need more tax breaks? Does the media run too many articles about art? Is TV news too liberal? Is the right wing being oppressed? Is science taken too seriously by congress? Is global warming a hoax?
Enjoy yourself there, I hope that feels better...
Pat Cadigan
Returning to G's original question:
What would it take, in today's environment, to restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fuelled cyberpunk? What lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of its current inertia?
I was actually supposed to answer this days or weeks ago. But then, I was supposed to be at the conference where Henry Jenkins and Bruce and Rudy and others talked about cyberpunk, except I was still having chemotherapy and couldn't travel. So it goes.
Chemo is a month in the past; it wasn't as hard on me as it is on many other cancer patients and I'm feeling better, but I don't have the energy to write a survey of the genre over the last thirty years. My perspective on science fiction in general and cyberpunk in particular is different. Being a cyberpunk didn't mean my experience was less sexist than it would have been otherwise. I had people trying to pick fights with me over this or that thing they'd read that Bruce Sterling had said somewhere, over whether I actually was good enough to be in the august company of the "real" cyberpunks or had I just been included because I knew them, and even over whether women could write science fiction at all.
It was never as straightforward for me as it was for the guys. Before I could engage in a discussion of cyberpunk's qualities/merits/whatever, I had to deal with the whole gender thing. And not because I wanted to.
The gender thing always got in the way. People would talk to Bruce and Rudy and Paul and the other guys about cyberpunk. Then they'd turn to me and ask what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field. My standard answer became, "Well, for one thing, I have to answer this question all the time."
This is one of the very few times I've been asked a straight question about cyberpunk. However, in order to provide some background to my career/personal history, I have to bring it up. So it goes.
And after that, I'm not sure where to begin.
We're not going to see cyberpunk as everyone remembers it now because we're living in the cyberpunk future we were writing about thirty years ago. In introducing the question, G said:
Bruce Sterling, speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a "rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies" tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for cyberpunk).
Well, of course SF doesn't have a rhetoric of the 22nd century. It hasn't even been a a whole two decades since the 21st century began. And it began with the nasty surprise of 9/11, which affected everyone, not just the US, because it's the cyberpunk future–we're all networked up. It affected airport security everywhere, permanently. How can you have an idea about the 22nd century when you're still trying to figure out the 21st?
Cyberpunk was–to me–the impact of technology on people, who would then have an impact on technology, which would then...you see where I'm going.
Take communications and surveillance. The two have become inextricable. If you use the internet, you open yourself up to surveillance. Tweet about something you're doing and everyone knows where you are. Maybe nobody's actually surveilling you in particular but it doesn't matter. It's like being in the background of a photo. It wasn't intended to be a photo of you in particular...but it is.
I can't think of a more cyberpunk situation. Personally, I'm not done dealing with that kind of thing in my work. I'm still writing what I've always written. Call it cyberpunk or don't call it cyberpunk but I'm writing about it. It doesn't read like stuff written in 1985 because it isn't 1985 any more and I'm twice the age I was back then. How old is too old to be a punk? And what are you after that?
"Transgressive"?
I've been transgressive my whole life, not because I wanted to get in someone's face but because there was always someone objecting to my being who I was in whatever context: e.g., a cyberpunk; a woman in a male-dominated field. Hell, in high school, I was the only girl in my physics class. That was 1970. I spent the first half of the school year just defending myself–and the teacher was the biggest jerk of all.
I don't know. You guys, talking about writing "arena rock" science fiction. Do you have any idea that there's more going on than just "Do I choose arena rock sf or what?" Have you heard of diversity? Does the word just make your eyes glaze over while visions of "political correctness" dance in your head?
That's the thing about cyberpunk. It was transgressive and bolshy and rude and different but the one thing it wasn't: ethnically diverse, at least in terms of the writers. The best we could do was to widen the focus of Ameri-centric sf.
And son of gun, just as more diverse writers have begun to enter the field, a bunch of good old white guys figured out how to game the Hugo Award, in the name of restoring science fiction to its "former glory" as the pulpy stuff for people who want to read about white men in space.
Yeah, yeah, everybody's going to say awards don't mean anything. Maybe not. But when a bunch of xenophobic reactionaries figure out how to steal an award ballot--and not just any award but the one that's most well-known--I think that means something.
If we want to stay alive, we have to stop thinking in terms of imposing labels on this or that from our own perspective and adjust our vision so that we can see what is happening...whether it's happening to us in particular or not.
That was cyberpunk's great strength--it wasn't just concerned with science fiction. It was holistic--it was SFand music and technology and art and cultures other than our own. It wasn't comfort food, it didn't indulge, and it didn't pander–it asked the hard questions and it talked about things that made people uncomfortable––not just for the sake of making people uncomfortable but because these were things we cared about.
I don't know what anyone else is going to do but that's what I'll be doing for whatever time I have left. And somewhere, someone will be taking issue with it.
Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
feather, flock together' founder/administrator.
Welcome to a special edition of Blogtable! Normally, a prompt is issued by a regular contributor to nerds of a feather, flock together, which is then answered by three guest bloggers in turn. However, this time we have four esteemed guests, each of whom was gracious enough to lend their time and energy to this project. And what guests they are! Please join us in welcoming:
Rudy Rucker
Photo by Sylvia Rucker
Rucker's novel Software (1982) is considered by many to be the first cyberpunk novel ever published (as well as the first in which a mind is downloaded into a robot body). Both it and sequel Wetware (1988) won the Philip K. Dick Award. The full Ware Tetralogy is available free via creative commons license, or as a trade paperback
with a nifty introduction by fellow cyberpunk innovator William Gibson. (Get the paperback, though--it's well worth it.) Rucker has published 17 additional novels and 5 short story collections, many of which feature his signature "transrealist" approach to science fiction writing. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction--you can check out his Collected Essays, including "Transrealism" and "What is Cyberpunk," at his website. Rucker's latest book is his hefty Journals: 1990 - 2014, a tome which in some ways anticipates Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle as a transrealist work of self-reinvention.
Paul Di Filippo
Photo by Rudy Rucker
In addition to contributing the excellent short story "Stone Lives" to Mirrorshades (the essential anthology of early cyberpunk), Di Filippo is author or co-author of 13 novels and 15 short story collections, including the highly influential Steampunk Trilogy. He is also a prolific reviewer and essayist--where, this humble blogger suggests, Di Filippo sets an impossibly high bar for the rest of us wannabes. (I mean, come on.)
Bruce Sterling
Photo by Rudy Rucker
Sterling has been called the "unofficial spokesperson" of cyberpunk and "Chairman Bruce" for his role in the emergence of the style. He edited the fanzine, Cheap Truth, that served as the ideological center of the nascent movement, edited Mirrorshades and has authored a number of critically-acclaimed and influential novels (including the excellent Islands in the Net and Schismatrix Plus). Sterling has worked as a journalist, teacher, activist and speaker, and is involved in multiple projects investigating the intersection of art, design, technology and social interaction.
Pat Cadigan
Photo by Christopher J. Fowler
Cadigan is author of the seminalcyberpunk/postcyberpunk novels Mindplayers (1987), Fools (1992) and Tea from an Empty Cup (1998), which are collected in this fantastic omnibus--as well as the equally good Synners (1991) and Dervish Is Digital (2000). She is a two-time winner of the prestigious Clarke Award (for Synners and Fools), and in 2013 won a Hugo for the novelette "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" (Edge of Infinity). Cadigan is also a prolific writer of short fiction, and one of the authors who--many years ago--convinced a certain blogger that science fiction could work as serious literature. [See also: my recent review of Mindplayers.]
Background
This special edition of Blogtable was inspired by a recent symposium hosted by the University of Southern California, which both Vance and I attended. "Visions and Voices: Cyberpunk - Past and Future" was, in a word, fascinating--and featured enough material to build a year's worth of Blogtables (check out the videos to see what I mean). But it was the first panel, featuring cyberpunk pioneers Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, that really blew my mind. So much so that I spent about 10 minutes composing a question about how and to what degree one might compare the state of the field of science fiction today to what the cyberpunks rebelled against.
Unfortunately, time ran out before I could ask it. Thankfully both Rudy and Bruce agreed to answer my question via email--only by that point, the idea had grown in my mind. I needed to turn this into the next episode of Blogtable--the biggest and boldest yet. Enter Paul and Pat, each of whom enthusiastically agreed to participate. Frankly, I'm still amazed that everyone said yes. And humbled, because these are four people whose work I've admired for a long, long time.
Because this Blogtable is so big, however, we're going to split it into two parts. Today we are posting the question and the responses by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo. Tomorrow, we'll repost the question alongside the responses by Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan.
But enough about all that...to the question!
EPISODE V: In which The G attempts to draw a tenuous historical parallel...
At the USC symposium on cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker recalled how cyberpunk emerged in reaction to the prevalent "arena rock" quality of science fiction in the 1970s--its emphasis on spectacle, elitism and tired, endlessly-rehashed tropes. Fans of the era, Rucker suggested, were comfortable "wallowing in their castles and space navy bullshit." Cyberpunk aimed to transgress, disturb and upend these conventions and expectations.
Arguably we stand in a similar position today. Bruce Sterling, speaking on the same panel as Rucker, argued that science fiction lacks a "rhetoric of the 22nd century" analogous to the rhetoric of the 21st that served as the pulse of 20th century science fiction. Similarly, the critic Paul Kincaid has framed the problem as one of "exhaustion"--a loss of faith in the idea that the future is knowable, and consequent retreat to formal explorations, the old "castles and space navies" tropes, and the comforting simplicity of nostalgia (including for cyberpunk).
As Sterling and Kincaid both note, few practitioners seem to be looking forward and engaging in rigorous speculation on the future. Yet even in this environment, there are voices within the community loudly complaining that science fiction is too challenging, too intellectual--essentially that it is not "arena rock" enough.
So my question is: what would it take, in today's environment, to restart the kind of transgressive thinking that fueled cyberpunk? What lessons can writers, critics and fans draw from the 1970s and 1980s, and what should they specifically ignore about that context? What does science fiction need to do, or be, or try to do or be, to break out of its current inertia?
Rudy Rucker
That’s very much a multipart question, G man. So I’ll give a multipart answer, breaking it into sections with italicized headers.
1. Why SF?
When I’m talking aloud I get loose and I say things that I wouldn’t write in an essay. So it’s amusing to hear that on the USC Cyperpunk panel in 2015 I spoke of “castle and space-navy bullshit” as being kinds of SF that I don’t enjoy.
My point was that I prefer to see SF that’s about ordinary kinds of people, as opposed to being about aristocrats, power elites, military officers, or police. To this end, I often use my so-called transreal approach of basing my characters on myself, my friends, or people I casually know. It’s a way of making the SF real, and not veering off into the writing about generic kinds of characters. Above all, I don’t want to base my characters on characters in movies, TV show, or other books I’ve read. I want them to be real people in a SFictionally doctored world. I want them to be transreal.
I like the idea that SF acts as a funhouse mirror to show us what our current lives are really like. And there’s the persistent wishful hope that SF might raise people’s awareness and somehow change the world. Like, during the long years when the US was under the yoke and lash of the Bush-Cheney administration, I made a point of writing novels in which the US President was a stupid and evil man—I had Dick Too Dibbs in Hylozoic, and Joe Doakes in Mathematicians in Love. I was doing my part for political change—as surely as if I’d been handing out leaflets door to door. It almost goes without saying, by the way, that a transreal book is intrinsically antiestablishment. The goals of individuals are forever antithetical to the goals of power elites.
2. The Birth of Cyberpunk.
Jumping back to the birth of cyberpunk—it’s not like it was a considered and well-thought-out campaign. In 1980 my biggest beef with the SF scene was that my books weren’t getting much attention. I’d hoped to find a home in the SF world, and I had a feeling I wasn’t welcome there. And now in 2015, thirty-five books later, I have much the same feeling about SF!
My 1980 malaise about SF mirrored the fact that, in the wider world, the system was bent on grinding me into dust. I’d barely escaped being sent off to die in Viet Nam. I was unable to get a secure academic job. Our nation’s leaders hated me. I’d fled reality for SF, and I wasn’t welcome in SF—so then what? Then I was lucky enough to meet some people who were writing like me.
I’ve sometimes compared cyberpunk to Beat literature. The Beats had Jack Kerouac as their angelic voice and Allen Ginsberg as their agitator. We had William Gibson for our star. He’s a sheerly wonderful writer—a master of language, aphorism, imagery, characterization, and attitude. And we had the manic, motor-mouthed, confrontational Bruce Sterling for our advocate.
I met Allen Ginsberg in person around 1981, and I asked him how it was that the Beats had gotten so much press. His answer: “Fine writing.” We cyberpunks were very focused on being good writers. We wanted to write avant garde, high-lit books that used the tropes of SF, with the added factor that our books had a rebellious, anti-establishment quality—the punk thing. And, of course, we dealt with the uneasy fusion between humans and machines. The cyber thing.
3. Trad SF and Crypto-SF.
Fast forward to 2015. Has the publishing category of SF become as plastic and bogus as it was in 1979? Time for another revolution! Is the SF industry being run by tiny cartel of greedy multinational corporations and book distributors? Is 99% of the attention and money going to 1% of the writers? Are the Nebulas and the Hugos complete bullshit?
Could be, seekers, could be.
Just in passing—you mentioned the rhetorical question of whether the SF publishing niche needs more badly written, middlebrow space operas and thrillers populated by emotional ciphers. Do billionaires need more tax breaks? Does the media run too many articles about art? Is TV news too liberal? Is the right wing being oppressed? Is science taken too seriously by congress? Is global warming a hoax?
No, no, the majority of the books being published under the science fiction label really are quite dull and generic these days. The other day I was looking at the SF rack in an airport shop. Yeecchh. It really is like the late 70s.
But, unlike the old days, that’s not the whole story. If you’re a regular reader of, say, the New York Times Book Review, you will have noticed that a lot of recent mainstream novels have SF elements in their plots. I’d guess that fully a third of all new mainstream novels are crypto-SF.
Of course the tame mainstream critics never use the SF label when enthusing over these new books. The works are visionary, speculative, powerfully imagined, and magical—but they’re not science fiction. Couldn’t possibly be. The New York Times doesn’t review SF.
4. Breaking In and Dropping Out.
So where does this leave the ambitious, literary, independently-minded young author of the genre formerly known as SF? Well, even now, the SF publishing system does grant newer writers with a certain novelty credit. Nobody ever knows what’s going to sell, and they have to hedge their bets. So you do have a possibility of selling a non-traditional, transreal, politically subversive novel. Your novel, launched in the usual blaze of no publicity and no reviews, will probably bomb. Maybe you can sell a second, but not a third. And then what?
Maybe, if you’re enough of a shapeshifter, you can knuckle under, bloat up, and dumb down. Or maybe you can manage a YA book. Or maybe you can sell into the mainstream market—although, if you have a track record as an SF writer, the mainstreamers will be loath to consider you. You’re tainted. Potentially subliterate.
So then you might go hat in hand to a series of small publishers, abasing yourself in the hope of no advance, a shitty cover, an ugly font, no ads, five free author copies, and potentially iffy royalty payments! (Just rhetoric here—I really do love my small press friends.)
Or maybe you get into self-publishing . That’s where I’ve been at for my last two novels. It’s not bad. A little like being under house arrest. If you put in seven or eight painful months of trial and error, you can figure out how to create legit-seeming PDF interiors and covers for print-on-demand paperbacks. Plus you’ll make ebooks for the Kindle and other readers. And you can sell your paperbacks and ebooks via Amazon and maybe via the one or two pipsqueak alternate venues that still happen to exist. If you do all this yourself, it doesn’t cost you anything—although you do need to get access to some software along the lines of InDesign, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Sigil and Calibre.
A plus is that, as a self-pubber, if you’re pushy and high-profile enough, you can run a Kickstarter to score the equivalent of a cash advance for publishing your book. Really when you crowd-source and offer rewards, you’re doing advance sales of a collector’s edition. You’re likely to score more money this way than you’d get from a small press, and maybe even more than you’d get from an SF industry house.
5. Reforming SF.
But these are the perhaps too gloomy musings of an old man. What about the dream of writing a style of SF that changes the genre and gets noticed by the wider world? Okay, that’s possible.
Certainly it helps if you can band together with a couple of other writers. Starting an online ezine is a good way to do this. In my opinion, online ezines should be free—especially if you want a lot of people to read them. Forget about nickel-and-diming your initial readers, if you can get a groundswell of interest going, then you’ll be making money at the back end of the process, that is, when you start selling books or Kindle singles or commercial stories.
I had a little experience with this in publishing and editing my ezine Flurb from 2006 to 2012. You can read all thirteen fab issues free online. It was fun for me to be in touch with other writers. Shout-outs to: Adam Callaway, Brendan Byrne, Eileen Gunn, Cory Doctorow, James Worrad, Kek, Emily Skaftun, Leslie What, A. S. Salinas, Wongoon Cha, Mac Tonnies, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Jane Anders, Madeline Ashby, Bef, Jon Armstrong, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Seth Kallan Deitch, Anna Tambour, Howard Hendrix, Cody Goodfellow, Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Stross, Martin Hayes, Alex Hardison, Ian Watson, Christopher Shay, Charles Platt, Lavie Tidhar, Th. Metzger, Kathe Koja, Carter Scholz, Michael Blumlein, Tamara Vining, Danny Rubin, Annalee Newitz, Marc Laidlaw, Richard Kadrey, Ernest Hogan, Terry Bisson, Doug Lain, Brian Landis and all the other deviants involved.
Flurb did get some notice—we were getting hundreds of thousands of hits. It was art, and it was interesting, but did we change the face of SF? Hard to say. It’s not clear that our lumbering multinational commercial publishers ever look at anything but spreadsheets. A cultural democracy in action, with every consumer-dollar a vote. And just look how wonderfully democracy does in selecting the very cream of the crop to serve as our representatives in the Congress!
Another angle for changing SF from within is to start writing about a set of ideas that haven’t really been touched upon yet. That’s a true and hardcore kind of SF endeavor. It’s not easy. You have to get yourself to look at the present day world with new eyes—as if you’re a Martian. You pretty much want to forget about all the SF plots and futurist-type prognostications. In the same sense that your characters shouldn’t mirror characters in existing works, your ideas shouldn’t mirror futurist ideas that you might read in magazines.
A good rule of thumb here is that if most people believe something—then it’s wrong. Consider: a hundred years ago, the human race pretty much didn’t know jack shit about science or modern technology. A hundred years from now, just about every single bit of tech that we’re using today is going to be gone.What’s going to replace it? Anything you want. Make up the weirdest shit you can think of. Be optimistic. Why not a new force of nature? Why not aliens from the subdimensions? Why not telepathy with every single object that you see?
Pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face. As the immortal David Lee Roth said, “It’s not who wins or loses—it’s how good you look.” If you and your friends can make your books fun and quirky, then maybe the soggy, stodgy SF ship of state will change its course.
6. Abandoning SF.
Or maybe at this point it’s impossible to change the commercial genre known as SF. In 2015, there’s an alternate path. What if you sidestep the SF publishing niche, and shoot for mainstream publishing from the start?
It could be that the whole SF publishing industry is on its way out—or down. There will still be some great science-fiction books, yes, but they’ll be called something else. Transreal, visionary, speculative—like that. And the hidebound old trad SF label might really be fated to descend into subliterature. Maybe in ten years nobody will even consider publishing a good SF novel under the old SF rubric. Maybe the old category has been eaten by parasitic Martian blimps with electric news-crawl letters on their sides, or by institutional politics left and right, or, more simply, by cultural dynamics and the processes of media change.
It’s a bit sad. For me, it’s like I grew up in a nice small town—cue the silo-fulla-corn nostalgia routine—and I go back thirty years later and it’s all strip malls, and the city core is stone cold dead. As the Pretenders put it in My City Was Gone: “Ay, oh, where did you go, Ohio?”
The big loss for us mad-scientist, freakazoid, pinpoint-pupil SF nut-cases is that the mainstream market is harder to break into than SF publishing. Here in the nest it’s kinda okay for us to write funny. Me, back at the very start I was so daunted by the whole Brahmin Mandarin New Yorker vibe that I never tried selling into that market at all. I liked the idea of being an SF writer. I liked the image of being a rock and roll musician instead of an orchestra violinist.
But…if the orchestras are trying playing rock and roll, however ineptly, why not try for a gig with them? If you keep your soul, you’ll still be writing SF. Maybe better than before. Educating the squares. Showing them where it’s at.
Many paths, many futures.
Write on.
7. Further Reading.
In the DIY punk tradition, I self-published my Collected Essays as an ebook in 2012, and in the fuck-it hacker tradition, I also made the essays available for free. Relative to the topics I’ve touched on here, you might check out “What is Cyberpunk,” “Cyberpunk Lives, ” “New Futures in SF,” and/or “The Great Awakening."
Paul Di Filippo
In that video referenced in the introduction to our discussion, Rudy remarks that it's awfully hard to be the speaker who has to follow the jaw-droppingly articulate and idea-overflowing Bruce Sterling. Of course, the same might be said for following Messr. Rucker himself, as I am feeling now. Rudy lays down a brilliant, accurate history of the past thirty years of SF (my God, where did those decades go?!?), and then projects a myriad fascinating future vectors for this narrative and thematic mode to pursue. There is nothing I see to contradict in his presentation, or deficiencies to repair, so I will have to content myself with riffing off certain things he's said, then maybe adding a new slant or two.
First, let me structure my reply this way, in two parts. In my personal life and in my observations about the world, I oscillate between two contradictory viewpoints, whose synthesis might be that both are simultaneously true. So I will look at SF from each of these POVs separately.
First, "'Twas ever thus." (And here I'm going to cite Robert Crumb's great illo of Mr. Natural atop a grinning tractor as he proclaims this truth.)
People and their cultures are eternal. (At least until we start installing permanent changes in the human genome.) The same old ways of being have persisted forever, since hominids emerged. The same set of desires and responses, the same kinds of love and hate, the same issues of art and religion and politics. "They heard the call and they wrote it on the wall, before there was even any Hollywood," as Steely Dan opined about cave art. This moment in time, this fix we are in, has happened before, many times, and will happen again. Nothing to worry about. Hang loose.
Rudy gets at this a little bit by comparing cyberpunks to the Beats. What the Beats faced circa 1948, we faced circa 1984 (nice Orwellian synchronicity with those two dates). So the process of reinvigoration of any genre is perpetual, and nothing special for this moment. This is something of the Buddhist View of Science Fiction.
But another constant to consider is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit. There is no way we can turn a marketing genre around to some kind of utopian state of brilliant perfection. By default, the great bulk of stuff is, has been, and always will be trivial trash. There are indeed Silver and Golden Ages, when the ratio of shit to diamonds shifts a bit in favor of gems. Rudy and I and the other cyberpunks were lucky enough to experience one of those moments, as were the New Wave folks, as were the Campbellian Revolution folks, as were the Gernsbackians, and so forth. Golden Ages are hard or impossible to predict or manufacture.
But I'd like to address Rudy's use of the word "elitist." I know he's using it to mean narratives wherein upper classes receive all the attention of the storyline. But art itself is ineluctably elitist. If art means anything, it means a spectrum of quality, difficulty, impact and performance. The ten percent of genius that Sturgeon's Law alludes to. Unless we have sieves for genius, we will always be swamped with shit.
I guess this observation brings me to my other, antithetical viewpoint that I cherish on alternate days of the week.
This era is unique and full of special challenges and opportunities.
Rudy does a magnificent job of addressing this viewpoint. He speaks of self-publishing, slipping under the radar of mainstream, creating ezines, etc. I would also mention the great resource of the internet allowing writers to research and communicate beyond anything that has gone before. Imagine how the cyberpunk movement was conducted with paper fanzines! But he does not mention a few of the factors that are making the life of the SF writer so difficult. How to tackle these trends and issues is not something I have an easy answer to.
First is the very lack of gatekeepers and healthy elitist attitudes. The internet has "disintermediated" the hell out of a system that worked, in however flawed and biased a way, to produce the incredible canon of SF that we all cherish. It took Frank Herbert over twenty rejections to get Dune published. Would Herbert's career have taken off better if he had self-pubbed it with no hassle? Maybe, maybe not (see below). The self-publishing movement, however valid and worthy in some cases, has also opened up the floodgates to a tsunami of crap. Amateurs ruin everything, I'm sorry. When asked if writing workshops discouraged fledgling writers, Flannery O'Connor said, "Not enough." It's just Gresham's Law as applied to SF: bad fiction drives out the good. When presented by Amazon with a hundred new ebooks, 90% of which are shit, and one of which is Rudy's and nine others of which are good stuff too, guess what the odds are of a random reader buying Rudy's book, or one of the other nine?
Whenever I hear that the field discourages Group X from entering or being heard, my immediate response is to say, "Great! Our work is partly done. Now if we could only discourage Groups A, B, C and Z as well!" (Let Z stand for white male conservative writers if you will.) The barriers to getting published should be high enough to discourage dilettantes and the talentless, regardless of any other classification they belong to. Do you know the story of the fellow who approached the Zen monastery and asked to be enrolled as a student? The Zen Master told him, "No, sorry, full up," then shut the door in his face. The student-to-be then camped bareheaded and without food or water outside the gates for three days, in rain and heat, till he fell over unconscious. Only then did the Master take him in as his acolyte. Why can't this be our template, instead of handing out "participation awards" to every Tom, Dick and Harriet who can string some two-syllable words together into a cliched story?
Another trend we are facing is the fragmentation of the audience into niches, otherwise known as the "There Can Never Be Another Beatles" problem. We could produce another whole cyberpunk-like set of genius writers, and they would go unheard, due to the immense variety of subgenres and entertainment activities available to the audience. Take a figure like George R. R. Martin, famous and best-selling enough to appear in Entertainment Weekly magazine. There are fans who have certainly never sampled him and never will. Same goes for Stephen King. The chances of producing another figure with the stature and influence of a Robert Heinlein are correspondingly reduced.
Another matter is the sheer weight of genre history. If we date SF back to Jules Verne (rather than Mary Shelley, who, while brilliant and a real forerunner, left no real school of imitators), then SF originated in 1851, with Verne's "A Voyage in a Balloon." Consequently, we now have over 150 years of literature on our backs. It's all available too, thanks to digitized books and the internet market for second-hand physical books. There's no excuse for not knowing your chosen past. It would be like trying to be a dancer and never knowing Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham. We can't reinvent the wheel, we have to put new spins on old tropes. Every now and then, a really fresh idea pops up. The Singularity was probably one such, which explains why it was glommed-onto so enthusiastically. But otherwise, every time we want to write about one of Rudy's "Power Chords," the educated, savvy SF writer (as opposed to some unschooled amateur or idiot savant) is forced to face what Hemingway saw as his own major challenge: "to beat some dead man at his own game." It's hard work.
All of these things would be immensely discouraging, save for one ineluctable truth: great SF somehow continues to be written! When I read a new book by Rudy, or Hannu Rajaniemi or Nick Harkaway or M. John Harrison or China Mieville or Karen Joy Fowler, then my faith in our ability to produce relevant, touching, tragic, funny, hip, truly speculative SF is reaffirmed. I study them and try to take direction and excitement from them, and improve my own work. That's the eternal process all true artists throughout time have employed.
It's like the old urban legend about the scientist who proved bumblebees are aerodynamically unable to fly. You just have to point to a bumblebee to disprove him!
Let's all try to be the best bumblebees possible, and sting the asses of complacency, sloth, ineptness and narrow-minded lack of real visions!
[To be continued.]
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and 'nerds of a
feather, flock together' founder/administrator.
Today we present the first guest dossier, which comes to us from Jason McGregor--a longtime science fiction reader whose special interests include first-wave cyberpunk. He doesn't often review novels, though he does review short fiction for Tangent Online.
Dossier: Shirley, John. Eclipse [Questar, 1985], Eclipse Penumbra [Questar, 1988], Eclipse Corona [Questar, 1990]; revised as A Song Called Youth [Prime, 2012].
Filetype: Book(s).
File Under: Cyberpunk.
Executive Summary: In the original version (all that will be discussed here), it is 2020 and the Soviet Union has invaded Europe, but has stalled and been pushed back in a conventional war. In the chaos that follows, a right-wing "police organization," the "Second Alliance" (SA) has risen to power in Europe. This is the story of the opposition of the "New Resistance" (NR) to this new world order.
In a way, the key to the story is given in two passages. In the first, Dr. Rimpler describes the "web of conceptions" people build as they age through which they convince themselves their options are limited. In the second, Hard-Eyes names Rickenharp's song "Youth": the rebellion of the unlimited.
High-Tech: Given that this is partly a (very strange and unusual) form of military SF, there is natually some military tech, ranging from drones to Jaegernauts (giant tank-like vehicles) to gene-specific bioweapons. Given that it's cyberpunk, there is naturally some invasive, paranoia-inducing, and/or computer tech, ranging from memory reading/extraction/erasure (on to full mind control, unsurprisingly) through biometric clothes, full ID database systems, cerebral/cybernetic interfaces, and "the Grid" or a sort of SuperWeb. Given that it's Shirley, the Grid takes on mystical, metaphysical properties (the Entelechy) and there are also new drugs, "dick tinglers," and a remarkably prescient anticipation of FOX News (here called Worldtalk, which exercises some of the available mind control techniques on its employees). Despite it being Shirley and cyberpunk, a significant chunk of it is also set on a space station (FirStep) which many people struggle to control at one time or another.
Low-Life: Virtually everyone in this trilogy is a low-life in one of two ways. Either they are thieves, drug addicts, perverts, and/or killers, or they're the bad guys. Which is to say, those thieves, drug addicts, perverts, and/or killers who are also rich genocidal fascists who try to control the world. Smoke is a sometimes crazy NR recruiter, Hard-Eyes is a sometimes kinky NR recruit who becomes pretty good at killing people, Dr. Rimpler is a kinky guy whose daughter turns out to be pretty omnisexual. Rickenharp enjoys the occasional illicit substance and becomes almost as handy with a gun as with his guitar. Rick Crandall is a neo-nazi preacher and Ellen Mae is his equally wholesome sister while Watson and Sackville-West are spiritual kin to Himmler, Goebbels, et al. And there are the triple-mohawked techniki who speak in their own hyper-compressed dialect and numerous double and triple agents. And those are just a handful from the larger rogues gallery of just the first book.
Dark Times: As mentioned in the Summary, a Soviet invasion has stalled. Europe is controlled by militaristic fascist thugs whose plans for the new world order have only just begun. Groups larger than a couple of people are spied upon with drones, the media brainwashes the masses generally while mind manipulation techniques can brainwash on a more targeted level. Weaponry has advanced on a simple bloodbath-in-the-fields level and weapons of mass-destruction both old-fashioned and around-the-corner are in play. Poverty, hunger, destruction, and death abound.
These are indeed dark times. Every book, after all, includes "eclipse" in the title, which is explained to a child preacher (and us) by our friendly neo-nazi in terms that recall Goebbels explaining how to get the people to do their leaders' bidding: "You see, the war works in our favor merely by being there. It acts as a kind of... a kind of eclipse that blocks out basic values, conventional morality, leaves people open to consider extremes they wouldn't consider any other time..."
Legacy: It is difficult with Shirley in general, and with this sequence in particular, to accurately assess its legacy. Shirley never seems to have had the impact of a Gibson on mass-consciousness but is an influencer of the influencers, so to speak. However well- or little-known, it is probably Shirley's best known work and certainly merits being widely known.
In Retrospect: A Soviet invasion in 2020 may sound incredibly dated but it's not at all. Shirley began this in 1985 and, by the end of the trilogy, the beginnings of perestroika and glasnost had already caught up to the series. Shirley simply projected a hardliner reaction to that movement. History has shown that, while he missed the actual collapse of the "Soviet Union," he also foresaw the rise of the "neo-Soviet" Russia that has invaded and annexed the Crimea and is currently at work in the Ukraine. He accurately describes how war can lead to an eclipse of basic values, such as Americans complacently allowing their fellow citizens to be spied on or executed without trial today. He foresaw (or just saw) the rising profile of the neo-nazi and radical right movements in Europe.
In many ways, this is quintessential cyberpunk but, in many ways, Shirley (as he so often does) blazes his own trail. Unlike the stereotypical image of cyberpunk, he sets this story in Europe rather than Asia; focuses on military more than corporate matters; and has a space presence in addition to a ground-based computer focus. Aficionados of cyberpunk will find much to like while people tired of the "same old same old" will find much that is fresh.
There is also a welcome focus on exercise of state and military power, though the state has essentially abdicated power and authority to the fascistic Second Alliance Security Corporation (SA). This marks the trilogy as unique among first-wave cyberpunk novels, most of which focus on small groups of individuals finding "space" in societies dominated by megacorporations. This trilogy deals instead with individuals banding together to fight back against an oppressive state and the nexus of military and corporate interests that control it.
This is not a story for the sexually uptight, the pacifist, or the fascist, as Shirley revels in sexual kinks, ultraviolence, and freedom. It is a tale of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and mass destruction. (It should be noted that, while this work is drenched in violence, it is never glorified for its own sake and the costs are shown in great detail and with great pathos--but it is also seen as sometimes necessary and is also used for full dramatic purpose.) It is an uncommonly gripping, tangible, and compelling read whose magnificent first book (in which he attempts an ending so daring and bold that it's a miracle he pulls it off) provides enough velocity to carry one through the still good, but increasingly haphazard, final two installments.
Finally, as mentioned, there are two versions of this: the original, which I'm familiar with, and the 2012 version I'm not familiar with. There is much that is "dated" here in a superficial sense but it all still works in a thematic sense so I don't know that the revision was truly necessary but perhaps it preserves all the excellence of the original while updating details. Also note that three (at least) stories (and those among his best) are incorporated into this including, fittingly enough, "The Incorporated" and "Freezone" in Eclipse (though the latter is actually extracted from the book rather than incorporated into it) and "Parakeet" in Eclipse Penumbra.
Analytics
The first book is a 5 both then and now, but the trilogy average is given below.
For its time: 4/5. Read today: 4/5. Cybercoefficient: 8/10.
Executive Summary: Allison Haas is a lost soul, drifting through life and seeking cheap thrills in illegal "madcaps"--cybernetic modules that induce temporary psychosis. But when the psychosis sticks, her friend and dealer, Jerry Wirerammer, drops her off at a "dry cleaner." The Brain Police are alerted, and both Allie and Jerry look headed for identity erasing. But Allie is offered a deal instead: train to be a mindplayer--a person who helps others navigate their psyche on a virtualized plane, as therapy or pastime--and all will be forgiven. So Allie takes the deal and becomes a mindplayer.
After this, the book recounts a series of vignettes--of Allie's training and her various mindplay contracts. High-Tech: Mindplay is facilitated by a device that links into the optic nerve. How the device works, beyond that, isn't explained in much detail, though in essence it separates the mind into a space to be traversed and a traveler to traverse it. Trained mindplayers, moreover, can enter another person's mind-field and help them achieve whatever goals they have set out for themselves.
There are several kinds of mindplayers: pathos finders, who help individuals find their "calling"; fetishizers, who create fantasy trips; neurosis peddlers, who help individuals develop productive neuroses; bell jarers, who impose mind silence and allow individuals to recover from the effects of too much mindplay; and so forth.
There are also artificial intelligences, or virtual personality constructs--it's never quite clear how autonomous or sentient they are. And most people have artificial eyes, because the mindplay interface causes trauma on natural eyes.
Notably, Mindplayers also feels much less dated than the bulk of cyberpunk. Aside from the lack of mobile communication devices, the future feels suitably futuristic--even from 2015. There are no cringey "fax machine" or "8mb of data" moments.
Low-Life: Wirerammer is a futuristic drug dealer, who later keeps one step ahead of the law by making illegal copies of his personality for sale on the black market.
Dark Times: Other than the Brain Police, who are sort of vaguely authoritarian, there isn't really much dystopia to speak of. Mindplayers, generally speaking, isn't really a fountain of political commentary, a la Neuromancer or A Song Called Youth, and in general the book is focused on the psychological as opposed to the sociological. This future even seems pleasant!
Legacy: Mindplayers is either the final major work of cyberpunk or the first major work of postcyberpunk. Cadigan is rightly identified as part of the core of first-wave practitioners, and her short fiction was instrumental in shaping the style. Mindplayers, though, feels like a departure from the precedent set by earlier first-wave novels, and dispenses with the tropes and aesthetics that initially made cyberpunk feel vital and new, but by 1987 had begun to frustrate the style's progenitors. So in that sense, Mindplayers feels like a bridge between the other first-wave works and postcyberpunk classics like Snow Crash and Fools (which Cadigan set in the same future as Mindplayers). In Retrospect: Mindplayers is a difficult book to review because of the way the narrative drifts--much as Allie is said to drift before her training as a mindplayer, and as she clearly continues to do afterwards. In other words, this is a book that isn't so much about something as it is about someone, i.e Allie, and things that happen to her in sequence. It works because Allie is a strong character, the world is fascinating, and the book is elegantly written, engaging and thoughtful.
At times I found myself thinking of Neuromancer, because Mindplayers, like Gibson's masterpiece, both is and transcends genre. Yet they are, in style and approach, strikingly unlike one another. Whereas Neuromancer is all hard surfaces and sharp angles, Mindplayers is elusive--almost ethereal. It is, as noted above, a novel of the mind and what might be possible if you could traverse it. And it's one I think any fan of literary science fiction should read.
Analytics
For its time: 4/5 Read today: 4/5 Cybercoefficient: 8/10
Executive Summary: Accelerando is a generational story, starting with Manfred Macx and following his descendents. Welcome to posthuman Earth. Macx is an idea man who gives it all away to escape his ex-fiancee. He lives half inside his own mind, and half through his computer agents, that are always bringing him fresh information through the internet. He lives on the cutting edge of computing, AI, corporate structure, and law. He’s always connected and he is the future of humanity. However, the future learns that exchanging humanity for efficiency comes at a cost.
High-Tech: From the start, Macx is simply more connected. His computer is wearable, and he receives all his information through a visor not unlike a souped up Google Glass. He’s largely accompanied by his cat, Aineko, which is an artificial cat that becomes increasingly intelligent. However, the story moves quickly into external minds, collective intelligences, wetware implants, artificial intelligences, simulated human existence, living corporate entities, nanoconstruction, planetary terraforming, the singularity and weakly godlike intelligences.
Low-Life: While most of humanity is riding the posthuman train to the singularity, there are some holdouts, largely concentrated in the highly religious populations. They reject implants and genetic manipulation. They prefer to do things the old fashioned way. There aren’t many of them, and their numbers diminish as the decades pass.
Dark Times: Early on, Macx learns that having your memories stored outside your own mind, such as a wearable computer, makes them susceptible to larceny and leaves Macx utterly helpless. However, this is a small problem when compared the challenges of uploading an entire race into the cloud. To say more would give it away, but let’s say that the challenges we face with our computers (not enough hard drive space, internet too slow, hardware out of date before you unpackage it) apply to humanity.
Legacy: Accelerando is a visionary depiction of the future as envisioned by Stross following the dot-com bubble. Reading it today feels as if he wrote it yesterday, and it’s a decade old. It’s a dinosaur in technology time. It won a Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for best novel in the Hugo Awards, an Arthur C. Clarke award, and a BSFA award. His novel, The Rapture of the Nerds, is a not only a phrase that appears in Accelerando more than once, but a continuation on some of the ideas. Though its legacy is shorter than most novels we’ve discussed, it’s clearly a book that will be relevant for quite a while.
In Retrospect: I did this backwards. I read The Rapture of the Nerds a year ago, and Accelerando for the first time this month. Still, Accelerando is dense with jargon and buzzwords. It’s kind of hard to read unless you’re a real dork for computing and information technology. Fortunately, I am a real dork and the ideas don’t escape me even if the descriptions do. Stross has somewhat infamously cancelled a pending novel for being too close to reality after the Snowden files started being published, and I think he would’ve done the same for Accelerando if he wrote it today.
For some perspective, this is the augmented reality future to Neuromancer's virtual reality future. The world Stross builds is instantly recognizable when you read about people who feel like they can't live without their cellphone, or how a smart watch is going to change their life. Most people don't want to stick their head inside a heavy virtual reality visor. They're fine with just having their life generally improved by having information at their fingertips. Don't get me wrong, I love the cyberspace, meta reality future as much as anyone, but Accelerando's future seems much more plausible.
Unlike most novels that would dump someone in an unfamiliar world, there is no reader avatar in Accelerando. This isn’t a problem though, as the near future Macx lives in is so close to our reality that it’s not hard to get on board. As the story progresses, it takes leaps and bounds by decades. We’re filled in, as readers, by a narrator that gives us a timedate stamp and brings us up to speed with the world as a whole. However, when many of the characters can exist in emulated realities, it can be hard to keep track of when, where, or what they are.
And even though the galaxy is on its fast ride to utter consumption, this isn’t the dystopian hellscape that most cyberpunk futures depict. It’s bright and sunny in its own ways. The dark clouds over it are dinosaur legal infrastructures, the economy and your mom. If you can get past the jargon, it’s a story that’s more relatable than some science fiction as it picks you up gently, and throws you into the sun.
Accelerando is available for free in many, many formats under a Creative Commons license.
Analytics
For its time: 4/5 Read/watched/played today: 4/5 Cybercoefficient: 8/10
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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014
with a nifty introduction by fellow cyberpunk innovator William Gibson. (Get the paperback, though--it's well worth it.) Rucker has published 17 additional novels and 5 short story collections, many of which feature his signature "transrealist" approach to science fiction writing. He is also a prolific writer of non-fiction--you can check out his Collected Essays, including "Transrealism" and "What is Cyberpunk," at his website. Rucker's latest book is his hefty 
, a tome which in some ways anticipates Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle as a transrealist work of self-reinvention.
(the essential anthology of early cyberpunk), Di Filippo is author or co-author of 13 novels and 15 short story collections, including the highly influential 
. He is also a prolific reviewer and essayist--where, this humble blogger suggests, Di Filippo sets an impossibly high bar for the rest of us wannabes. (I mean, 
and 
). Sterling has worked as a journalist, teacher, activist and speaker, and is involved in 
--as well as the equally good 
(1991) and 
(2000). She is a two-time winner of the prestigious Clarke Award (for Synners and Fools), and in 2013 won a Hugo for the novelette "The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi" (
). Cadigan is also a prolific writer of short fiction, and one of the authors who--many years ago--convinced a certain blogger that science fiction could work as serious literature. [See also: my recent review of 
, and Joe Doakes in 
. I was doing my part for political change—as surely as if I’d been handing out leaflets door to door. It almost goes without saying, by the way, that a transreal book is intrinsically antiestablishment. The goals of individuals are forever antithetical to the goals of power elites.
published. Would Herbert's career have taken off better if he had self-pubbed it with no hassle? Maybe, maybe not (see below). The self-publishing movement, however valid and worthy in some cases, has also opened up the floodgates to a tsunami of crap. Amateurs ruin everything, I'm sorry. When asked if writing workshops discouraged fledgling writers, Flannery O'Connor said, "Not enough." It's just 
