Microreview: In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

After robots have learned from humanity to love, can a lone human then learn it from robots?

With the word robot coming from the Czech for "servitude," it seems inevitable that stories about artificial intelligence will continue to deal with questions of control and freedom. The genre has oscillated between the moods of Frankenstein and Pinocchio: one day we dread that a being we can't control will want to control us, and the next day we cheer for a being that has cut its strings. In these periodic oscillations, retreads are inevitable. One day we meet the Terminator; the next we meet Astro Boy. And there's Megatron and there's Baymax. M3GAN and CHAPPIE. Lore and Data.

OK, but what happens when Pinocchio falls in love with the Terminator?

TJ Klune's new novel In the Lives of Puppets retells Pinocchio with the twist that its protagonist is a human boy with an artificial father. Victor, the human, lives in a forest paradise like those of fairy tales. The days go by in a placid bliss of fresh air, fresh food, gentle company and no worries. Giovanni, the robot, has taken care of Victor with selfless devotion since he was a baby. The shelter they've built among the trees is all they need to be happy. Until the killer robots come looking for trouble.

The journey that Victor then begins is a good illustration of the plot device that pairs world discovery with self-discovery. He didn't have a human to learn to be human from, and yet there's something in him that no killer robot can destroy. The love that he's received from his robotic father and his robotic friends is as real as the love that a tall, dark, handsome strangler sparks in him. As he investigates the true history of the world outside the forest, he also learns to assert where he fits in the posthuman order and who he wants to be.

It's a difficult needle that the author threads here. Learning to mature as a person is challenging enough; doing so when everyone you meet in your journey is a static thing incapable of growth raises the difficulty to epic. And yet, in his interactions with robotic culture, Victor manages to gain a clearer perspective of his identity, his hopes, his desires, and his limitations. It's a very indirect way to form a sense of humanity by contrasting it with everything it's not. The robots share with Victor their second-hand impressions of what humans are like, but it's up to Victor to try and guess how accurately those interpretations may reflect real humanity and how much of that information feels right for him.

It's not like Victor is fully disconnected from human culture: robots are, after all, a human product, inevitably shaped by all our biases and weaknesses. Robots also form personal bonds and ask themselves about their future. But without a human heart (and here's where the novel veers into science fantasy territory), none of the answers has meaning. The plot makes much of the importance of a human heart in the development of an authentic self, and your mileage may vary depending on how comfortable you are with the whole notion of genetic memory.

Questions of scientific rigor aside, In the Lives of Puppets does a stellar job of characterization. You watch Victor evolve and acquire a deeper, richer personality with each big moment of his quest. And his companions are a delight to read. Ratched is a cuttingly sarcastic robot nurse who may or may not actually have an empathy protocol, but who clearly does have an alarming predilection for drilling, while Rambo is an adorable refurbished Roomba who is too pure for this world.

And then there's Hap, the mysterious decommissioned robot that Victor finds, repairs, and teaches to love. This romance subplot suffers from monumentally gnarled power dynamics that are never acknowledged or addressed, which, on top of the novel's tendency to make too many lewd jokes at the expense of its asexual protagonist, makes the reading experience a lot less enjoyable than it had the potential to be. In the Lives of Puppets is a rough gem, full of hidden value obscured by uneven facets that needed more aggressive polishing.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Klune, TJ. In the Lives of Puppets [Tor, 2023].

Altered Carbon, Episodes 1-3

Netflix's new science fiction show, Altered Carbon, is based on a novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan. It's basically a mashup of neo-cyberpunk, detective noir, milSF and techno thriller. Since I have particular interests in the first two parts of that equation, Altered Carbon looked to be right up my alley. So I decided to commit to 3 episodes, after which point I'd take stock. Three episodes in and I like it enough to continue. It's not quite as good as I'd hoped, however.

Takeshi Kovacs is, or rather was, a kind of super soldier known as an envoy. Envoys were part of an insurrection against the hegemonic polity, the Protectorate. The insurrection failed and the envoys were "put in ice." However, in the future your mind, memories and soul are stored on a "stack"--a kind of hard drive that is surgically inserted into your body. As long as the stack isn't damaged, it can be taken out of a dead body and inserted into a new "sleeve" (i.e. a body). Religious types refuse to be re-sleeved, believing that it prevents the soul from ascending to heaven. Pretty much everyone else who can afford to do it, does.

So Kovacs is re-sleeved into the massive, jacked body of Swedish actor Joel Kinneman. This is done at the behest of ultra-rich "meth" (i.e. meta-human) Laurens Bancroft, who wants Kovacs to investigate the "murder" of his previous sleeve. Unlike the plebs, Bancroft doesn't need a stack to resleeve, nor does he even need a sleeve. His mind, memories and soul are uploaded every 48 hours to a satellite, which can then beam it back into a cloned body. But he was "murdered" just before the periodic upload, which means Bancroft has no memory of the event or the events leading up to it. Oh the humanity. In any event, most people think Bancroft committed suicide; Bancroft is convinced he was murdered. His femme fatale wife, Miriam Bancroft, takes an immediate interest in Kovacs, as does Bay City detective Kristin Ortega. A mystery ensues.

First, the things I like. It's a very pretty show--especially the sweeping vistas like the one above, but also some of the interiors, like Bancroft's mansion in the clouds and The Raven, which is the hotel where Kovacs lives. I also really like some of the supporting characters, like Poe (the AI who runs The Raven) and Ortega. And the show is commendably diverse. Kovacs is supposed to be half Japanese and half Hungarian (judging by the name), and his partner is black. Ortega is Mexican; her partner Aboud is an Arab Muslims; their captain is Japanese. I like to see futures where everyone is mixed up and the social categories of today don't have quite the same meaning several hundred years into the future.

I also liked how the immortal lives of the wealthy, in secluded compounds at cloud level, serves as a literalized metaphor for the inequality that increasingly defines most societies. In fiction, I often grow weary of literalized metaphors, but they work on TV. And of course, the existence of stacks and sleeves brings up interesting questions of how we'd act if death were not a guarantee. And finally, the show features good acting, pace and atmosphere.

But there are a few things that keep me from really loving the show. Kinneman grows on you as the series progresses, but there are moments where he comes off like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and Kevin Sorbo. The super soldier also doesn't quite fit the noir mold. Not that anyone is required to stick the old formula, but the genius of Philip Marlowe is that he can take a punch as well as dish one out, and that he's always outgunned and so has to use his wits to stay alive. Kovacs, on the other hand, can destroy anyone and everyone. Others might like this setup, but for I prefer the Marlowe style of detective.

Then there's the violence and nudity. Actually I don't really mind the nudity--it's just the human body,  after all. And I can handle the show's level of gore and splatter too. It's the intersection of the two that bothers me. So much "prestige TV" centers violence against women--Game of Thrones, Westworld and so forth and so on. Altered Carbon does as well. There's an awful lot of naked women being hurt by men. Yes, it happens in the real world and yes, there is violence against men too. But the brutalized are almost exclusively all women, at least 3 episodes in.

I'd stop short of calling the show misogynistic. There are plenty of well crafted, three dimensional female characters; and I *think* the show is trying to say that violence against women is bad. At some point, though, enough is enough. And there's a cumulative effect of all these shows using violence against women to illustrate just how dark and depraved these fictional worlds are. It would be nice if, for a change, it weren't centered.

While not perfect, I did like Altered Carbon enough to continue watching. So that's something.

***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator, since 2012. 

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Mindplayers by Pat Cadigan

Dossier: Cadigan, Pat. Mindplayers (Bantam Spectra, 1987)

Filetype: Book

File Under: Cyberpunk/postcyberpunk

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

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Dossier: Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash (Bantam, 1992)

Filetype: Book

File Under: Postcyberpunk

Executive Summary: Hiro Protagonist loses his job as a delivery driver working for the Mafia-controlled Uncle Enzo's Pizza, and nearly loses more than that as punishment for delivering a pizza late, but 15-year-old skateboard Kourier Y.T. takes pity on him and gets the delivery there on time. This begins the unlikely partnership in an alt-future Los Angeles dominated by corporate city-states and "burbclaves" between Hiro and Y.T. Hiro is a world-class programmer and was one of the architects of the Metaverse, a networked, virtual reality simulation that millions around the world log into daily, but now he's a freelance hacker and intelligence stringer for the Feds, who are still on the scene but only just. He also happens to be the world's greatest swordsman -- both within the Metaverse and without. Y.T. lives in a burbclave with her mother, who works for the Feds and, Y.T. thinks, is in the dark about Y.T.'s job as a Kourier. When Hiro's other (and materially more successful) Metaverse co-creator Da5id succumbs to a computer virus called Snow Crash that not only destroys the operator's system but also the operator's brain, Hiro begins investigating inside the Metaverse with the help of his ex-lover and Da5id's ex-wife Juanita, and enlists Y.T. to help out in the real world. Juanita clues Hiro into a connection between ancient Sumerian linguistics, the Tower of Babel, and a bizarre religious sect backed by mega-industrialist L. Bob Rife that lives on a sprawling offshore colony called The Raft. A gigantic Aleutian hitman named Raven fits in somehow with both Snow Crash and The Raft, and if Hiro can't figure out how, then he, Y.T., and Juanita will all wind up dead, and human technological culture blasted back to the stone age.

High-Tech: While there are some cool future-tech devices in Snow Crash, like the magnetic harpoons the Kouriers use, and the rat-things that act as security in all Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong franchulates, the chief piece of technology that defines the book is the Metaverse. Think a planet-sized VR Sunset Strip where you have to pay real money for virtual real estate, and if you can afford them, virtual Googlebots called Librarians will dig up any information you can desire just by speaking. Until the Snow Crash drug comes along, the Metaverse and the real world are separate, and dying in the Metaverse is a minor inconvenience. After? Well...

Low-Life: Hiro lives in a U-Stor-It storage unit with a roommate, a noise-rocker named Vitaly Chernobyl. Real estate has become so expensive in LA that families with 'roided-up teenage sons and regular jobs live in burbclaves in the Valley, the rich, as ever, live where they please, and the rest -- like Hiro -- scrape by where they can and carefully step around used syringes and the like when exiting their front doors. Along with the disaffected youth and would-be scenesters that circle Vitaly's band, Hiro has an easy relationship with drug dealers and others who dominate an environment where crime is more of a nebulous concept, depending on what kind of franchise you happen to find yourself in.

Dark Times: Snow Crash chiefly concerns itself with a small cast of characters who are plugged in and savvy to at least the potential of something nefarious going down behind the curtain. The majority of humanity beyond, though, are left largely uncommented-upon. Places outside of the franchulates have become lawless warzones, as witnessed through Y.T.'s trip to Compton, but for most middle-class people, life is probably pretty great. They're all self-medicating, driving big cars, living in cookie-cutter neighborhoods and following the paths expected of them. Hiro, et al., though, are onto the fact that there is a dark undercurrent beneath it all, mostly stemming from L. Bob Rife's having franchised out religion to The Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates, which is helping to funnel people to The Raft, and potentially doing much worse.

Legacy: There are some influential books, and then there are influential cultural events. Snow Crash is the latter. Where Neuromancer radically re-defined the books that came after it and started a trend that grew larger, that movement reached something of an apotheosis in Snow Crash, a book that literally defined aspects of the culture itself. Ever wonder why icons that represent you on the internet are called "avatars"? While not the first person to use the word in that context, Snow Crash is why it stuck. Stephenson's envisioning of the Metaverse came to shape gaming, with Michael Abrash, the creator of the game Quake, and others freely admitting the debt they owe the book in how they came to think of networked 3D computing. Google Earth? That's pretty much how Hiro's Librarian shows him around. Like Neuromancer, Stephenson's book landed on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the 20th century, alongside authors like Fitzgerald, Nabokov, and Pynchon, and genre luminaries like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Gibson, and Philip K. Dick. Nice company.

In Retrospect: Neal Stephenson writes virtuosic prose. Humor, attitude, clarion insights, and all around verve leap off the pages of Snow Crash, making it a tremendous amount of fun to read. Hiro and Y.T. are both intelligent and resourceful, and enjoyable people to spend a book with. It is also refreshing, even today, to read a science fiction novel where female characters give as good as they get, and -- while they may be regarded as sexual objects by other characters in the book -- are not treated like sexual objects by the book, itself. Hiro and Juanita, for instance, despite a past relationship never hit the sheets in the course of the book.

Stephenson also allows us to have fun inside the world he's created, apart from the main narrative of the book. Brief chapters will introduce a new character, follow him, her, or it through an adventure that somehow touches on the main action, and opens a wider window onto the world of the story. Mafia head Uncle Enzo's unexpected interactions with Y.T. are particularly fun, and walking around inside the mind of a Rat Thing is unexpectedly rewarding and touching. The ways in which elements of the world that at first appear structural -- such as the abundance of Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchises -- but eventually become central to the plot are examples of first-rate literary craftsmanship.

The only place where the book falls down a little bit is in the massive info-dump regarding ancient Sumerian and the idea of a language as ones-and-zeros for human beings. The long stretches of the Librarian filling Hiro in on Sumerian mythology are tremendously evocative of, say, the section of the Mythology text book your teacher skipped over or the liner notes to a Morbid Angel album, so while interesting, they slow down the book's momentum. It feels like Stephenson understood this, however, and there's a lot of pinging back-and-forth between Hiro's conversations with the Librarian and Y.T.'s real-life escapades, which become increasingly perilous. And as Zhaoyun remarked in his review of Stephenson's The Diamond Age, this book also ends rather perfunctorily, with almost literally zero "falling action." That is to say, it happens real quick.

Nevertheless, this is a book that lives up to the hype. And for a 20-plus-year-old book concerning network technology to still make a modern reader think "Wow, it'd be cool if we could do that," that's a helluva neat trick to pull.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 4/5
Cybercoefficient: 9/10

Posted by Vance K — who once roomed with a guy who thought Snow Crash was the best book ever written, and, on a separate occasion, boxed that roommate in the backyard while nerds of a feather comics & board game correspondent Mikey kept the ring clock. True story.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

Dossier – Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age, Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam, 1995).

Filetype – book (or "primer", perhaps?)

File under – postcyberpunk

Summary – A girl gets a remarkable(/ly) immersive book that lifts her out of one trajectory and into greatness, while a nanotech-engineer, having invented said book, finds himself in Hot Water and almost destroys the foundations of society.

High-tech – While not so temporally distant from the present, we're further away than in Snow Crash, with the invention of matter compilers (nanotech that, nonetheless, already exists in primitive form today: 3D printing!) a truly revolutionary development since now anyone can just ask the magic box for, like, some tasteless food, or a mattress, or a knife with a monofilament blade and presto! The implications for matter compiling are almost endless, and threaten to render the world Stephenson crafted almost unrecognizably different from our own, however. There are cyberpunk-esque skull guns, "hoplite" armor and bullet-proof dusters, as well as nanosites (really really small artificial parasites) that can invade the human body and do a) nothing much, b) good stuff, or c) make you explode.

The most alien (and, I might add, least plausible, especially the idea of a resurgence of Victorian ethics/fashion!) technologies are actually the social ones, the idea that the world will soon descend into the managed chaos of "phyles" and say adieu to nation-states. Writing in the early 1990s, Stephenson can be forgiven for having gotten caught up in the wave of optimism about the end of history and prophecies of a paradigm shift in the reorganization of society away from nation-states. The Primer is probably the most realistic fusion of existing with speculative yet believable future technologies, as already we have movies and games (and perhaps one day soon books) blending together in new and interesting ways, and the media available for use in education radically expanding...

 

Low-life – Stephenson was wise to note that the radical implications of the matter compiler do not affect the fundamental inequalities of human society, which for brevity's sake I will call the 80/20 idea. The powerful might live in a New Atlantan or Nipponese enclave, but it's an elite club (determined by birth, mainly) that only the most exceptional outsiders are invited to join; there are plenty of hoi polloi left behind by the changes, who remain trapped in a life, with few prospects, that is nasty, brutish and short. Nell is one such, who is rescued from a doubtless grim fate via the power of Education, in the form of the Primer. Several hundred thousand girls are likewise saved from oblivion by lesser versions of the same powerful book (though Stephenson utterly fails to render the consequences of this individually tailored educational regimen, since the 330k girls end up functioning without a trace of individuality, as a hive mind in fact; perhaps for him, the fact of them having been rescued from abortion/infanticide, and given magic books, is Good Deed enough?)

Dark times – Run afoul of the law, like Nell's idiot father? Enjoy your last minutes of life, as cookie-cutter nanosites invade your body and prepare to detonate from within...ouch. This is a world that is based upon hierarchy and order, and you had better hope to be born into a good tribe/phyle because if not, you're in deep doo-doo. It's also a world threatened by a massive awakening of xenophobic sentiment in what was once the nation-state of China. The 'Fists' (as in 'Fists of Righteous Harmony', i.e. the Boxers) have risen again, and are determined to win back their country and drive out/murder all foreigners. Scary (but also patently ridiculous, as is the mysterious Seed technology with which they intend to remake the world).

Legacy – Not as well received as Snow Crash, this intricate and generally well-crafted book nonetheless reached millions, and certain aspects of the book continue to resonate today, especially the Book itself, the Primer and its promise of emancipation through education.

In retrospect – Because the future it depicts is even more outlandish than that we see in Snow Crash, and because The Diamond Age combines in one package the same key stylistic/pacing weakness (a shocking lack of falling action after the climax, which in this case occurs literally on the last page!) that mars Snow Crash with the astonishingly excessive detail in world-building and exposition plaguing his post Diamond Age work (Baroque Cycle in particular), this book sits at a weird transitional point in Stephenson's career. The mid-90s were a giddy-with-hope-but-also-terrified kind of time, with the collapse of the USSR and so forth, but the more apocalyptic aspects of Stephenson's speculations on our (societies') future seem fairly outlandish to us today. The rapid progress in 3D printing notwithstanding, in the twenty years since the book was first published, the nation-state has yet to shuffle off its mortal coil, and shows no signs at all of doing so; even if some of the nanotechnological breakthroughs as must have occurred in Nell's world happened right away, one doubts whether much would actually change in the nature of society formation.

Stephenson's vision of the future rests on several underlying premises/ethical positions, some plausible enough, some pretty goofy. In the former category there is the transformative power of education; in the latter, the idea that not only fashion but ethics are cyclical; sorry Neal, a return to Victorian morals is not in the cards, and would carry none of the benefits you whimsically ascribe to such morals anyway. And as the scattered nature of this review/re-visitation should make clear, the book is so complicated (I would argue, needlessly so) that it is very difficult to sum up with any pith, or retain in one's mind for any length of time.

The only thing I remember from my first reading, all those years ago, was that there was a long section on Turing machines that was impossible for me to visualize and boring, but mostly it was about a girl who stumbled on an awesome, super-expensive book that sounded fun—a lot more fun than The Diamond Age, in fact, with its interminable discussions of Turing machines and occasionally clumsy exposition (the worst is between Miranda and Carl, who have several conversations (pp. 270-271, 284, etc.) that explain the fundamental workings of some of the key technologies in the book but might as well have a "Forced Exposition!" banner slapped on them, so ill-fitting are they in terms of narrative flow).

On the other hand, Stephenson did an absolutely masterful job of crafting morally complex characters, with no clear antagonist (even the shadowy Mr. X is obviously not a "bad guy" inasmuch as it was he, almost single-handedly, who saved the 330k girls from their fates) and plenty of hard choices for the protagonists as well.

But if even back in the 90s I was nonplussed with the ending, judging it to have ended not with a bang but a whimper, my disappointment was even stronger upon this re-reading. If only Stephenson had been able to come up with a more emotionally (and narratologically) satisfying ending! (For one thing, why the crap is the Alchemist still working on the Seed at the end, after saying, in so many words, that he didn't want to do so and would actively try to prevent its development?!?!) Just think how great this book could have been...

Analytics

For its time: 4/5.
Viewed today: 3/5.
Cybercoefficient: 7/10.

Zhaoyun, while a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson in general, is not afraid to say to Stephenson, "Hey, man, think of a less anticlimactic/abrupt way of ending your books, will you? You're killing me, here!". and has been issuing this and other gauntlet-in-your-face challenges at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Ghost in the Shell

Dossier: Ghost in the Shell (1995).

File Type: Film.

File Under: Postcyberpunk. 

Executive Summary: It is the year 2029. Japanese Major Kusanagi Motoko of Public Security Section 9 is assigned a near impossible task: her group is seeking to track down the so-called Puppet Master, one of the most dangerous cybercriminals the world has produced. Kusanagi's quest brings Section 9 into contact with another governmental group, Section 6, which is also tracking down the Puppet Master, to unknown ends. As they pursue the Puppet Master, Kusanagi's group uncovers the mysterious Project 2501, which Section 6 claims was created to catch the Puppet Master... but the project had begun one year before the Puppet Master's appearance. The trail gradually leads Kusanagi toward an important choice, one that could have grave implications for herself, humanity, and the future of the net.   

High-Tech: The most important technologies in Ghost in the Shell are cybernetic. Of them, the central technology is the cybernetic brain (or cyberbrain), which both contains an artificially enhanced brain and allows it to interface with a wide variety of technologies on the net. Implants within the cyberbrain allow the brain to maintain a connection with computer networks or even other individuals (think of this as a precursor to The Matrix). Moreover, the protective casing of the cyberbrain can even be physically transferred to another body in times of emergency. 

A host of technologies complement the cyberbrain, and allow people to engage in a wide variety of enhancements. At the most minimal level, the brain is retrofitted with a plug-based interface, allowing for external memory and wireless communication. At the most extreme level, full cyberization is available as well. Yet these technologies have a significant drawback: they create the possibility of "ghost hacking," where someone's cyberbrain can be wiped and replaced with new memories. This is the primary weapon of the Puppet Master, who ghost hacks unknowing victims.

Other technologies include thermal-optic camouflage and AI. Thermal-optic camouflage enables Section 9 troops to blend in with the surrounding environment. They become for all practical purposes invisible, even to thermal imaging. Robotic weapons make use of this thermal-optic camouflage and artificial intelligence to stunning effect.

Low-Life: Japan has emerged as one of the world's foremost societies, and its people have a higher standard of living than the rest of the world. That said, there is still a dark and grimy aspect to society, with a harsh difference between the consumerist upper class and the dark and poor underbelly of city life. The lower-rungs of society in this movie exist solely as objects of the Puppet Master's ghost hacks. 

Dark Times: Technological advancements have led to problematic developments. Reliance on jacking into the net means that people can have their memories wiped with impunity, and nations and races will fight for programmers who can create or wield these devastating technologies. 

Legacy: Ghost in the Shell is undoubtedly the most important postcyberpunk film created in the 1990s. It created a visual identity for cyberpunk itself. And the technologies from the world of Ghost in the Shell have proven hugely influential, inspiring the Wachowski brothers to make their hit series, The Matrix. The Wachowski brothers reportedly showed producer Joel Silver Ghost in the Shell in the mid-1990s, and told him, "We wanna do that for real." It also influenced such Steven Spielberg movies as AI: Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report. 

In Retrospect: I had expected, when re-watching Ghost in the Shell, to find a charming yet deeply flawed movie that had captivated me nearly 20 years ago. Boy was I wrong. Although the animation is hopelessly outdated and at times the language feels a bit stilted, this movie was hugely influential for a reason. It is a true gem, in multiple ways. It de-centers notions of static gender roles, and provides a more interesting take on gender than most movies do today. And it asks the all-important questions of "what does it mean to be human?" and "what does it mean to have a soul?" That's a heavy role for a relatively short (82-minute) animated movie.

For its time: 5/5

Viewed today: 5/5

Cybercoefficient: 10/10

POSTED BY: Jemmy, a SF/F fanatic, a failed wall gazer, and a Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Introducing...CYBERPUNK REVISITED

I'm highly susceptible to nostalgia, especially if that nostalgia references the formative decade of my life--the 1980s. Sure, '80s nostalgia has been done. And redone. And then done again. But let's be frank--the decade is like a golden goose for the nostalgia-inclined. I mean...

So it was with some glee that I grokked a budding nostalgia movement for cyberpunk, the path-breaking science fictional literature of the 1980s--the one that gave us terms like "cyberspace" and predicted the rise of hacker collectives and online corporate espionage. The one that envisioned a future marked by endless, inescapable urban sprawl, in which transhumanism and cybernetic enhancement would become commonplace, multinational corporations would grow autonomous from the control of national states while the states themselves withered away. And the one that birthed a million tropes, from "jacking in" to virtualized data fields via a physical plug to the head (typically located on one side of the requisite mohawk) to the ubiquity of...er..."street samurai."

Clearly while some elements of cyberpunk are as plausibly futuristic now as they were thirty years ago, and other things have already happened, certain visions of the future feel, well, a bit silly from our 2015 perch. So what is it like to (re) read Neuromancer or Mindplayers in 2015? What are the enduring legacies of cyberpunk--in literature, film, music or popular culture? This series, which will unfold over the course of an as-of-yet-undetermined period of time will explore these and other questions. It will envelope many of our bread-and-butter post series: reviews, We Rank 'Ems and an episode each of Blogtable and Perspectives.


An Abridged History of Cyberpunk

Though William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer is often credited with launching cyberpunk, it is perhaps more accurately described as the first novel to capture the attention of science fiction writ large. As such, it is arguably the most important work of cyberpunk. But it was not the first--either Rudy Rucker's Software (1982) or John M. Ford's Web of Angels (1980) has that distinction, depending on what you count as cyberpunk. And the term "cyberpunk" was actually coined by Bruce Bethke--the title of a short story about hackers, written in 1980 and eventually published three years later within the pages of Amazing Stories. In Bethke's words:

[In 1980] I was living in River Falls, Wisconsin (population 7,000), selling Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1's, taking courses at the local college, and hanging out on the very distant periphery of the Minneapolis music scene. I thought I was doing okay; after all, I'd gotten the sales job by a dazzling display of computer prowess (I'd shown the Radio Shack store manager how to load and run the BASIC demo program for his display model), and I was making as much money each month as I'd made in the previous year as a musician. (Which mostly speaks to how badly the music business sucks if you're not doing Top 40 covers.) 

Then one day a trio of kids, the oldest maybe 14, came into the store and started puttering with the demo computer. I turned my back on them for about two minutes. When I looked again the kids were gone, the demo program was trashed, and in its place they'd left me with something that had the Model 1 jumping through hoops. I took a few minutes to admire their ingenuity, then broke out of the program and looked over the code. Damned if I could figure out what it was doing. Okay, no problem. The Model 1 had this big orange RESET button on the front panel. I hit the button, reloaded my only copy of the demo program (can you tell where this is leading?), keyed in RUN -- And that's when I discovered their other little surprise.

That got Bethke thinking: kids and teenagers were wired for language acquisition in way adults never would be, yet were also, when left to their own devices, loose cannons. So what would the next generation of kids be like, particularly if they were living in a social environment in which power was a function of your ability to manipulate computer systems? He continues:

The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly "speaking computer." THEREFORE, if you thought that punks on motorcycles were a problem, just wait until you meet the -- the -- You know, there isn't a good word to describe them?

The term stuck--mostly due to the influence of editor Gardner Dozois, who felt "cyberpunk" captured the essence of an emerging style of science fiction that matched an abiding interest in cybernetics to visions of the near-future marked by urban sprawl, the rise of megacorporations accountable to no one but shareholders and a concomitant decline of the social and political institutions that would otherwise provide the checks and balances.

Though styling themselves a movement, the early practitioners of this style were, in reality, a small and close-knit group of writers developing the "meta-world" of cyberpunk. Writing in the New York Review of Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly describes the "movement" thusly:

...the first Cyberpunks were less a “self-willed aesthetic school” and more a group of ambitious, like-minded, American late baby-boomers who read and liked each other’s work. Mostly writers at the beginning of their careers, their influence on one other grew until they coalesced into a self-styled Movement. They included William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, and Lewis Shiner. As their stories hit home, their ideas about science fiction began to gain traction, in part due to the withering attacks on the status quo that appeared in their fanzine-cum-propaganda organ, Cheap Truth.

Cyberpunk, then, was to be a vanguard literature--a self-styled revolutionary literature, and one its progenitors framed as a total break from the past. In truth, though, like all other things cyberpunk had its antecedents--many of which have been explicitly acknowledged by Sterling, Bethke, Gibson and others. Among the most significant and influential works of "protocyberpunk" are:

John Brunner's futureshock novels Stand on Zanzibar, Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up; the films Blade Runner and Videodrome; James Tiptree Jr.’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In; Alfred Bester's The Stars, My Destination and The Demolished Man; Nova by Samuel R. Delaney; Through a Scanner, Darkly by Philip K. Dick; and the non-fiction futurism of sociologist Alvin Tofler--all of which laid groundwork for cyberpunk in significant ways. Some, like Shockwave Rider, are as close to cyberpunk as Kraftwerk is to techno.

It is, however, undeniable that cyberpunk captured genre's collective imagination, with a cultural influence that has reached far beyond the relatively small confines of science fiction fandom. Cyberpunk ideas not only appeared to describe an emerging future, but began to shape it as well. And its main themes have been revisited and repackaged again and again--in films like The Matrix, video games like Deus Ex, in music, fashion and even farther afield. Whether one cares for it or not, cyberpunk is, without question, one of the most culturally impactful styles of science fiction to emerge in the past half-century--perhaps second only to the New Wave.


Themes and Tropes

Cyberpunk's central thematic concern is with the integration of "high-tech" and "low-life." As Sterling notes in his introduction to the influential Mirrorshades anthology:

Thus, "cyberpunk"...captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.

In another era this combination might have seemed far-fetched and artificial...But the gap is crumbling in unexpected fashion. Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.

And suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident: an integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent - the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy.

Cyberpunk writers self-consciously rejected the elite heroes of classic SF--the brilliant scientists, the wealthy industrialists, the space-faring starship captains and other "leaders of men"--in favor of antiheroes living on the margins of society--hackers, mercenaries, anarchists, criminals and streetwise punks. It is, in essence, technonoir, a conscious inversion of the social and moral order situated at science fiction's institutional center. Sterling again:

Science fiction - at least according to its official dogma - has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined - and confined - in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.

This was an explicitly political stance. Rucker sums it up thusly:

All of us had, and still have, an implacable and unrelenting desire to shatter the limits of consensus reality....We started writing cyberpunk because we had a really strong discontent with the status quo in science fiction, and with the state of human society at large.

 Or as Gibson put it to David Wallace-Wells:

It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

These antiheroes were positioned within clearly dystopian futures--marked, in varying degrees, by: unchecked globalization; urban sprawl; the accumulation of power by autonomous multinational corporations; the privatization of violence; rising crime; the decline of democracy, social welfare and the nation-state; and rapidly scaling inequality. Yet there is nothing Orwellian about the cyberpunk dystopia--it is a loose, chaotic hotbed of social activity. It may be horrible, but it is also, fundamentally, a place of opportunity--even for the "low-lifes."

Cyberpunk is, then--like other forms of genre focused on "low-life"--centrally concerned with questions of agency. In cyberpunk, however, agency is typically mediated by cybernetics--enhancements rendering the bearer "more than human"; modules that allow the user to navigate visualized data streams; drugs that heighten sensory perception; and so forth. These are not just elements of world-building, but tools--mechanisms through which agency is realized and with which opportunities are seized.

By the end of the 1980s, the boom had largely run its course, with many cyberpunks authors beginning to distance themselves from the style, or at least from the label. Presumably what had once felt like a shot across the bow of genre convention had become a straightjacket of tropes and expectations. After all, like any art movement based on a strong critique of reigning conventions (real or imagined), cyberpunk risked losing its edge once it was accepted as part of the mainstream, and that's exactly what happened. Bethke again:

Cyberpunk fiction went from being something unexpected, fresh, and original, to being a trendy fashion statement; to being a repeatable commercial formula; to being a hoary trope, complete with a set of stylistic markers and time-honored forms to which obeisance must be paid if one is to write True Cyberpunk.

And Shirley:

But on the whole what happened to it, is that it was appropriated, co-opted, by other people, into other forms…cannibalized…

Cyberpunk's Ending Legacy

Fans of other media--film, TV, games, etc.--probably associated cyberpunk more with 1990s culture than the 1980s literary artifact. After all, the 1990s were the decade that gave us a slew of cyberpunk-inspired films, most of which--like Timecop (1994), Hackers (1995), Strange Days (1995) and The Matrix (1999)--had the form but not the substance of the 1980s literature. (It also gave us the occasional gem, like the 1995 anime film Ghost in a Shell).

For gamers, the 1990s were the golden decade of the Shadowrun franchise (launched in 1989 as a pen-and-paper RPG but later also serving as the basis of a revered 1993 Sega Genesis game), which mixed traditional fantasy elements (non-human races, magic, etc.) into a dark cyberpunk world littered with tropes lifted straight out of Neuromancer. And it concluded with Deus Ex, technically released in 2000, but with its cultural feet planted firmly in the 1990s--a video game that is still considered one of the best ever made.

The 1990s were also, of course, the decade in which the internet evolved from something some people do to that thing everyone does all the time. And like Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash seemed to perfectly capture where everything was headed from inside the moment of change. Snow Crash is, among other things, a defining work of postcyberpunk, a style that strips off the tropes and adapts the framework of 1980s cyberpunk to the new reality and the new futures that reality implies.

In the years since we have seen countless works--fiction, comics, film and games--resurrect and reconfigure the initial formula--testament to our enduring fascination with cyberpunk. Some have even been good and original and forward-thinking--like Charles Stross' collection of linked, singaularity-themed short stories, Accelerando. Others have been...well, not so much.

Also worth noting is the cyberpunk revival movement. It is driven by nostalgia for the aesthetic and atmosphere of first-wave cyberpunk, the best examples of which ooze retro cool, but which--in celebrating the outmoded futurism of days past--arguably tilts more fantasy than science fiction. Nevertheless, this is an active fan culture that can be really fun for the nostalgia-minded. There are high-quality cyberpunk blogs, a dedicated subreddit with an active community and a dizzying array of cyberpunk-themed tumblrs--all testament to the enduring legacy of cyberpunk. I love it.


"Cyberpunk Revisited"

...which brings us back to the idea I had: to re-examine cyberpunk as a distinctly science fictional literature and as a set of themes within science fiction, from our position 30 years into the future. So we'll be doing that--starting with a series of structured reviews of classic cyberpunk fiction from the 1980s, but eventually moving on to other media and decades. We'll critically examine both the positives and negatives about the approach--the stuff cyberpunk does well, not so well or not at all--and also ask the tough questions, such as whether cyberpunk suffers from an "orientalism problem." Throughout the project, we will try to contextualize cyberpunk within broader histories of science fiction and global culture, and we'll draw in diverse voices (both among and beyond ourselves) to do so.

Practically speaking, our reviews will take the form of dossiers with standardized subheadings to help tease out the comparables, such as:

Filetype: whether it's a book, film, comic, game, etc.

File under - whether it's cyberpunk (i.e. the 1980s literature), proto-cyberpunk (i.e. something that foreshadowed cyberpunk), postcyberpunk (i.e. later evolutions/adaptations of the cyberpunk framework to new conditions), a cyberpunk derivative (i.e. something that draws from cyberpunk but is not cyberpunk) or a cyberpunk legatee (i.e. a derivative that is more substantively attached to the legacy of cyberpunk). 

High-tech - the technologies involved and how are they portrayed.

Low-life - how the nitty-gritty of life at the lower rungs is portrayed.

Dark times - the essence of the future envisioned, the degree and form of dystopianism involved and the key structures of the sociopolitical environment action takes place in. 

Legacy - the significance/influence of the work in question. 

In retrospect -  what it's like to read/watch/play it today.

The Cyberpunk Revisited project, of course, won't just consist of reviews. As I mentioned earlier, we'll be doing other stuff too--essays, lists, interviews, discussions and so forth--drawing in many of our writers and also some illustrious guests.

So sit back, jack in and enjoy the ride, decker.


***

POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a
Feather founder/administrator (2012).