New Technologies, the Power and the Body in William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER
(1984)
Text Configurations and Discourse Registers in Bruce
Sterling’s SCHISMATRIX PLUS
Intertextual Aspects of Thomas
Pynchon’s Novel V.
Thomas Pynchon’s Novels and Their Influence on Other
Postmodern Writers
Representations of Cyberspace In (Post)Cyberpunk Fiction
Ecological Degradation In
(Post)Cyberpunk Fiction
Charles Babbage and the Difference
Engine – An Alternative History
Fictional Representations of
the Shift in Family Patterns in the Information Society
Objects, Memory and Nostalgia in
William Gibson’s Fiction
Background Elements of Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR Transposed into
Cyberpunk Fiction
New Technologies,
the Power and the Body
in William
Gibson's NEUROMANCER (1984)
Contents
1.
NEUROMANCER: The Book and
Its Author
2.
Marshall McLuhan’s
Theory concerning the Interactions of Media and Human Psycology
3.
Michel Foucault’s
View on Systems of Power Intended to Punish and to Discipline
I.
The Media and the Body:
Anatomic and Psychological Consequences of New Technologies
II.
The Society and the Individual:
Relations of Power in a Panoptic World
III.
Illegalism with a
Technological Touch: Reversal of a Trend
1. NEUROMANCER: The Book and Its Author
William Ford
Gibson had published only four short stories when the editor Terry Carr
proposed him to write a book for the New Ace Science Fiction Specials, a
collection destined to give a chance to talented young writers. This is how
Gibson evoked the event in an interview:
He was looking for people he thought had some promise -
he'd offer them contracts and say, "Do you want to write a book?" I
said "Yes" almost without thinking, but then I was stuck with a
project I wasn't sure I was ready for. (...) Neuromancer is fueled by my terrible fear of
losing the reader's attention. Once it hit me that I had to come up with
something, to have a hook on every page, I looked at the stories I'd written up
to that point and tried to figure out what had worked for me before. I had
Molly in "Johnny Mnemonic"; I had an environment in "Burning
Chrome". So I decided I'd try to put these things together. (Larry
McCaffery, An Interview with William Gibson, 1986)
The
book was published in 1984. The following year brought a surprise. Neuromancer
won the Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick Memorial and Science Fiction Chronicle
awards in the USA, as well as the Ditmar Award in Australia. It also won the
Seiun Taisho, a Japanese equivalent of the Nebula Award, in 1987.
Although
it was marketed under the label "science fiction", Gibson's novel
took a distance from traditional SF themes and plots such as those that one can
find in the works of Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein. It was the first book
belonging to a new subgenre which editor Gardner Dozois named
"cyberpunk". Neuromancer was followed by other
books written by co-founders of the literary movement, such as Bruce Sterling,
Lewis Shiner and John Shirley, and its themes were quickly
"assimilated" by second-generation cyberpunks like Walter Jon
Williams, Neal Stephenson and James Patrick Kelly. Although the movement was
declared dead in 1988, cyberpunk books continued to be published and will
probably be with us at least until the end of the 1990s.
Gibson's
debut novel proved to be quite influential in other media as well. The
atmosphere of Neuromancer can be found in motion pictures (Johnny
Mnemonic, Strange Days, The Crow), in television series (Wild
Palms), in comic books (Frank Miller's Elektra series) and video
clips. In this respect, along with Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, it
formed the basis of a contemporary mythology, an imaginary realm of high
technology and low life that permeates contemporary popular culture.
However,
the most important contribution of the book lies somewhere else. William Gibson
painstakingly extrapolated from the megatrends of the early 1980s the model of
a society dominated by multinational corporations (referred to with the
Japanese word zaibatsu) and whose main medium of activity is a
computer-generated environment named cyberspace. The speculations
regarding the social and psychological changes engendered by this medium proved
remarkably accurate. In 1983, when Neuromancer was being written, the
Internet was a far cry from what it is today, and the revolutionary Apple
Macintosh, with its icons and pulldown menus, was still a project. Virtual
reality still belonged to the future. It took the eye of a gifted observer to
recognize the dominant trends reshaping our society, and the talent of a good
writer to use these trends as the basis of an influential book.
2. Marshall McLuhan's Theory Concerning the Interactions of Media and Human
Psychology
At the end of the 1960s, William
Gibson spent three years in Toronto, in the midst of counter-culture places
such as Yorkville and Rochdale College. Then he met his future wife, Deborah
Thompson. They moved to her native town of Vancouver and both completed
bachelor degrees in English literature at the University of British Columbia.
Either during his stay in Toronto or while he was a student, Gibson probably
assimilated the influential works of Marshall McLuhan, who at that time was a
professor at St Michael's College, University of Toronto.
Professor
McLuhan's fundamental theories date from the early 1950s. His first books, The
Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New York, 1951) and Explorations
in Communication (Boston, 1960) won him academic praise in Toronto,
but remained practically unknown to the public. It was in 1962, with The
Gutenberg Galaxy, that Marshall McLuhan gained a wider audience.
This book dealt with the effects that the technology of printing had on the
Western civilization, as well as with the psychological and sensorial effects
of the medium of printed text.
Another
book, even more ambitious, followed in 1964: Understanding Media.
It had a synthetic character and studied the social and psychological effects
of various media, examining them in chronological order, beginning with the
oldest of them, face-to-face communication. The Medium Is the Message (1967)
was an experimental work destined to a public whose tastes favoured the
illustrated magazine rather than the printed text. Later on, McLuhan's theories
were so well received that a whole academic group was formed, named "the
Toronto school".
In
a nutshell, Marshall McLuhan's theory could be expressed as follows: The medium
used for communication determines the users' sensorial perception, mentality
and cultural activity, with deep consequences over social life and structure.
In fact, every medium is an extension of the human body. Clothes and houses are
extensions of our skins, wheels and roads are extensions of our feet, and the
electric media are extensions of our nervous system. Gibson uses the metaphor
himself, referring to the information network as "mankind's extended
electronic nervous system".
According
to this theory, the Western world and thought were dominated from the fifteenth
to the twentieth century by the medium of printing. It was the printing press
which focused human perceptions on the visual aspect, educated the sense of
perspective, imposed the ideas of uniformity and linearity which were used in
fields such as Newtonian physics or the assembly line, and, last but not least,
enabled standard languages to crystallize, leading to the emergence of
nationalism and, in the long run, to the creation of nation-states. The neat
separation of printed words on paper, very different from the strings of
letters in medieval manuscripts, favoured the appearance of the Cartesian
method of analysis.
However,
"the Gutenberg Galaxy" drew to an end with the emergence of electric
media. It was gradually replaced by what McLuhan called "the Marconi
Galaxy", which brought about contrary effects. If printing is visual,
electricity is primarily tactile. If print favours detachment, electricity
involves participation. Uniformity is reversed into diversity. National borders
are replaced by global participation.
Most
of these ideas seemed rather hard to accept in the early 1960s when they were
published. The uniformity of products, lifestyles, ideas appeared to be so
strong as to last forever. But nowadays professor McLuhan is the patron-saint
of avant-garde computer magazines such as Wired, and his works can be
found in multimedia form on CD-ROM. And his theories will be quite helpful in
approaching the medium that Gibson's characters use in Neuromancer.
3.
Michel Foucault's View on Systems of Power
Intended to Punish and to Discipline
Discipline
and Punish (1974) analyzes the mutation suffered by systems of power
between 1760 and 1840. It focuses on a shift from the power to punish, as
manifested under the Ancien Regime, to the power to supervise and
discipline, as manifested in nineteenth-century institutions. The symbol of the
old kind of power is the scaffold, whereas the most typical example for the new
one is the prison.
The
point of similarity between Foucault and McLuhan lies in the fact that both
take into account the tight relationship between anatomy and psychology,
between the body, the actions and the frame of mind. Their theories are
adequate tools in approaching Neuromancer, which focuses in its
turn on these aspects.
During
the Ancien Regime, the power was oriented towards spectacular
manifestations. The officials acted as representatives of the king, and in
dealing with the criminals they had to restore the royal power in all its
plenitude, since the crime had supposedly diminished it somehow. This ritual of
punishment was highly codified, and in the execution of regicides, where
several types of torture were performed in an ascending scale, it lead to the
dismemberment and complete destruction of the offender's body, as a
manifestation of the infinite power of the monarch.
This
approach was gradually replaced by another one. Although the new doctrine
claimed to focus on the offender's soul, Foucault demonstrated that it simply
wanted to obtain a disciplined type of behaviour, and its techniques dealt with
a minute training of movements and postures. The body had to be made useful
instead of being destroyed. The offender had to be disciplined, not punished.
If
in the first part of the book Foucault described the various means of torture
and punishment, in the third part he focused on techniques of discipline which
could be found in the army, the hospital, the college or the prison. This shift
of power aims led to a number of consequences, such as the development of
pyramidal hierarchies and of a continuous network of panoptic surveillance.
What started as a local phenomenon, such as the rules governing Frederick II’s
regiments or the Marseille hospital, was soon adopted on a general basis. The
variety of prerogatives and jurisdictions, traces of the feudal type of
government, were replaced with equal rights and codes of law uniformly applied
all over the nation-state.
This
confrontation of institutions and mentalities, with special attention dedicated
to the relation between systems of power and the human body, will enable us to
analyze the dystopic society envisioned in William Gibson's novel.
In
Discipline
and Punish, Michel Foucault also opposed two notions, each of them
characteristic for a type of society and for a kind of power.
Illegalism
is a term coined by Foucault. It refers to a number of activities, among which
one might mention loitering, tax evasion, smuggling, desertion, robbery, murder
and attacks on officials (especially tax collectors). Some of these acts were
committed by all social classes. To some extent, the Ancien Regime was
such a chaos of local powers, overlapping authorities, regulations
counterdicting each other, that the society itself could not have functioned
otherwise. However, if the seventeenth century offenders did physical harm,
such as maiming and killing, the eighteenth century saw the advent of criminals
who were oriented towards economic aims and practiced theft and robbery. Under
these conditions, the class solidarity under which illegal practices were
taking place gave way to a different attitude. The lower classes no longer
supported outlaws, because they knew they had become predilect targets for
criminal activities.
Therefore,
the late eighteenth century saw the advent of delinquency, an enclosed medium
which acted against the rest of the social structure. The prisons acted as a
receptacle, enabling the delinquents to form relationships and to draw on each
other's experience. At the same time, even after their term in prison, the
delinquents were placed under surveillance, and in some cases acted as shadow
servants of the power, becoming strike-breakers, informers or hired assassins.
The
gray zone of illegalism, into which everybody partook under the Ancien
Regime, was replaced by a clean delimitation between the closed-circuit of
delinquency and the rest of society. Foucault goes into an analysis of
delinquency's sources, since most delinquents had a low social, economic and
educational background. He notices that the upper classes also indulged in
illegal activities, such as frauds and tax evasion, but avoided scandals and
shameful trials by recurring to the equally illegal practices of blackmail and
bribery.
The
shift from illegalism to delinquency coincided with France's evolution from
absolutist kingdom to modern nation-state. Under the influence of electric
media, with their de-centralizing effect, one might assume that the trend will
revert, and the closed class of delinquents will dissipate back into a wide
range of illegalism practiced by all social classes. It is precisely the point
that William Gibson made in his debut novel. Neuromancer's heroes
define themselves as outlaws rather than as delinquents, although they are
highly skilled. Their technology is brand new, yet their illegalism is age-old.
I. The Media and the Body: Anatomic and Psychologic Consequences of New
Technologies
According to
Marshall McLuhan, each new medium has an impact on the user's sensorium. In Understanding
Media, Part One, Chapter 4, he reinterprets the myth of Narcissus.
It is quite significant that the name Narcissus and the word narcosis,
or numbness, are etymologically related.
The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the
water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his
perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated
image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech,
but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had
become a closed system.
Now the point of
this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of
themselves in any material other than themselves. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media, pp.41-42)
This
initial numbness is the result of actions taken by the central nervous system
in order to protect itself. The new medium brings about sensorial overload, and
in order to handle it the nervous system changes the ratio of the senses. The
best example was given in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and is
probably familiar to all literate persons. While reading a text, especially a
printed one, all attention concentrates on the sense of sight, whereas the
other senses are numbed.
Medical
researchers Hans Selye and Adolphe Jonas, quoted by McLuhan, equate these
extensions of ourselves referred to as media with "autoamputation",
and they find that the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the
body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation.
In Neuromancer, the hero suffers a
similar numbness from a medium called "cyberspace", a
computer-generated environment in which all the data in the world's databases are
stored. This medium is mostly visual, and its users isolate themselves through
technological means from the sensorial input which normally links them to the
outside world. It is precisely the narcosis described by McLuhan.
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade
games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military
experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space
war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the
spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned
through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control
circuits of tanks and war planes.
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of data abstracted from
the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines
of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of
data. Like city lights, receding..." (William Gibson, Neuromancer, p.51)
Although the new
medium was discussed at the time in scientific papers under names such as
"virtuality" or, later on, "virtual reality", Gibson's term
gained high popularity. The reference to early arcade games has a personal
meaning. In several interviews, when asked to recount how he conceived the idea
of cyberspace, Gibson told that, when walking down Granville Street, in
Vancouver, he looked into one of the video arcades and saw, from the physical
stance of children, that they really believed in the space the games projected.
This observation was confirmed by his acquaintances who worked with computers,
who seemed to have developed "a belief that there's some kind of actual
space behind the screen, some place you can't see but you know is there."
This is how he recalls the coinage of the word:
"Their posture seemed to indicate that they really,
sincerely believed there was something behind the screen," he recalls.
"I took that home and tried to come up with a name for it. I literally did
sit down at a typewriter one night and go, "Dataspace? Noooo. Infospace?
Boring. Cyberspace? Hmmm. It's got sibilance. It sounds interesting." What
did it mean? I had no clue. It was like an empty chocolate cup awaiting the
whipped cream." (Brian D. Johnson, "William Gibson
Profile", Maclean's, June 5, 1995)
Gibson
also developed this concept as a metaphor, a technological counterpart for humankind's
collectively accumulated knowledge. At the end of the 1980s, NASA researchers
and an independent inventor named Jaron Lanier pieced together a device called
"virtual reality", a computer-generated environment with
three-dimension binocular view and real-time interaction with the user.
Gibson's initial reaction was cold, even sarcastic, as he wasn't very pleased
to see a crucial metaphor read literally and turned into an artifact. Today,
the Net is often referred to as "cyberspace".
In
Neuromancer,
the implied author's attitude is not enthusiastic as regards the new medium. On
the contrary, it is highly ambivalent. The very name of the protagonist, Case,
suggests detective fiction on the one hand, and the idea of case or container
on the other hand. The name is highly appropriate for the character's attitude.
His body - which he treats as almost an alien entity with which he is not on
friendly terms - is a kind of case for his mind and for the cyberspace with
which it fuses, no more significant in itself than the case of a computer CPU.
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of
cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot,
the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body
was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. ( Neuromancer, p.6)
Case's alienation
from his own body, or autoamputation in McLuhan's terms, is so profound that
even the most intense experiences cannot change his feelings. In this respect,
the sensations that he undergoes while having sex with Molly are ironically
described by the narrator as evoking cyberspace and being turned into an
abstract, informational counterpart: "his orgasm flaring blue in a
timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and
blown away down hurricane corridors".
The
new medium of cyberspace holds such a powerful attraction for the protagonist
that his life without it does not have much meaning. At the beginning of the
book, as a punishment for his attempt to steal from his employers, Case is
maimed with a mycotoxin that destroys his ability to access cyberspace. Case's
reaction is to become an amphetamine addict and to behave in such a way as to
determine the organized crime in Chiba City to assassinate him. Briefly, he
becomes almost as suicidal as Narcissus himself.
"Our profile says you're trying to con the street
into killing you when you're not looking. (...) We've built up a detailed
model. Bought a go-to for each of your aliases and ran the skim through some
military software. You're suicidal, Case. The model gives you a month on the
outside. And our medical projection says you'll need a new pancreas inside a
year." (Neuromancer, pp. 28-29)
On
the other hand, when a character called Armitage cures Case and employs him for
breaking into an unspecified database, the protagonist's attitude is reversed.
He spends hours on end in cyberspace, attempting to complete his mission, and
has the exultant feeling of having returned home. Since Case is an expatriate
who finds his native urban Sprawl even stranger than Chiba City, his place of
exile, the narrator's use of the term home for a simulation with no
correspondent in real space contains a subtle irony.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver
phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past
like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, fragmented
mandala of visual information.
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. (...)
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of
paler gray.
Expanding-
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard
extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the
Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi
Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military
systems, forever beyond his reach. (p.52)
But
the author's ambivalent approach to the medium of cyberspace reaches its climax
towards the end of the book, where in his attempt to set free an artificial
intelligence, Case is approached by representations of two informatic entities
in a set of carefully constructed virtual realities. He ends up marooned on a
beach, accompanied by his former girl-friend (who had been killed in actual
reality some time before) and he learns to feel and show affection. The fact
that the very medium which had atrophied in Case the capacity to empathize with
other human beings is used to teach him about affection is seen by William
Gibson as the crux of the book.
To
some extent, Neuromancer seems
to have predicted not only the emergence of the medium, but also the psychological
consequences it entails. "Netsurfing", as it is called, has its own
addicts. Someone half-jokingly set up a Usenet support group for victims of
cyberspace addiction: (alt.usenet.recovery).
Cyberspace
was only one medium which Gibson imagined in analogy with the technologies of
the early 1980s. Another such environment was the "simstim", or
simulation of stimuli. Gibson extrapolated the concept from the intimacy of the
Sony Walkman, extending it to cover all senses and sensations. Simstim is a high
fidelity recording of scenarios, and it is the basis of a flourishing industry
with stars (such as Tally Isham), interminable soap operas and an addicted
public, modeled after the motion picture and television industries today. The
author's mild irony expressed in Neuromancer exploded in explicit
sarcasm in Count Zero (1986):
He was asleep, for sure, but somehow Marsha's
jack-dreams were bleeding into his head so that he tumbled through broken
sequences of People of Importance. The soap had been running
continuously since before he was born, the plot a multiheaded narrative
tapeworm that coiled back in to devour itself every few months, then sprouted
new heads hungry for tension and thrust. He could see it writhing in its
totality, the way Marsha could never see it, an elongated spiral of Sense/Net
DNA, cheap brittle ectoplasm spun out to uncounted hungry dreamers. (William
Gibson, Count Zero, p. 51)
If
cyberspace explorers like Case are fleeing from the flesh, retreating in a bodiless
realm where they have a simulacrum of activity and choice in an abstract
medium, simstim addicts are passive consumers of pre-packaged products which
amplify the sensorial input. Their numbness is even more advanced than that of
cyberspace addicts, because the medium of simstim requires total passivity, and
when accessed in excess leads to illiteracy, like television today. In
analyzing the effects of media, be they real or imaginary, William Gibson
proved to have learned well the lessons of Marshall McLuhan.
II. The Society and the Individual: Relations of Power
in a Panoptic World
If
the medium of cyberspace was spectacular enough to bring William Gibson a great
number of fans all over the world, the social background of his literary works is
certainly much more disturbing. In this respect, some parts of Michel
Foucault's Discipline and Punish will provide useful ideas for
interpreting this aspect.
According
to Foucault, pre-modern governments had to deal with a fragmented territory, where
the land was divided under various forms of jurisdiction, and individuals
claimed a diversity of prerogatives. Under such conditions, the government
relied mostly on punishment in order to restore the monarch's power in all its
plenitude. The advent of
nation-states imposed uniformity (under the logic subliminally imposed by the
uniformly printed letters, McLuhan suggested) in various domains, including the
law. The modern states also introduced a new type of power, one destined to
produce, supervise and control disciplined citizens. It achieved this aim by
imposing everywhere pyramidal hierarchies wherein each one surveilled and was
surveilled in his turn. Briefly, a panoptic disciplinary society.
The
introduction of electric media, with their quasi-instantaneous speed, brought
into being a new fragmentation of jurisdictions and a re-emergence of
prerogatives. As David Brown underlined in his book Cybertrends, our
society is headed to a new feudalism where various "territories" such
as information networks, cable TV nets or telephone lines will be divided
amongst companies whose power will be based on a combination of monopoly,
information and encryption.
Such
is the world envisioned by William Gibson in Neuromancer. The new centers of power are the zaibatsu,
or multinational companies, whose scope is primarily informatic and economic.
Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to
identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then
chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of
a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the
individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. (William Gibson,
"New Rose Hotel", Burning Chrome, Ace Books, New
York, 1987, p. 107)
The
old centers of power are eroded to such an extent that they are very rarely
mentioned. The political entity known as "the United States of
America", for instance, is never referred to as such in the book. Gibson
does not make clear whether this entity has collapsed or divided. Its closest
equivalent is "the Sprawl", also named BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta
Metropolitan Area.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange,
every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and
Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic
threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it
down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million
megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown
Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core
of Atlanta...( Neuromancer, p. 43)
The
BAMA is not a state, but rather a loosely managed megalopolis run out of
control. There is a trace of the old panoptic system of surveillance, since all
residents in the Sprawl are issued a SIN - acronym for single identification
number. High technology data on each BAMA inhabitant are available in data
banks, such as retinal prints. And since the elementary relations have mutated,
leading to the elimination of cash and the widespread use of credit chips, it
is possible for organizations with enough resources to spy on every transaction
of individuals of their choice.
And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over
the city's data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered
accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We're an information
economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's
impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces,
bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that
can be retrieved, amplified... ("Johnny Mnemonic", Burning Chrome, pp.16-17)
These
amounts of information concerning the citizens are accessible not only to
public institutions, but also, in more or less legal ways, to private
corporations, the organized crime, and even to individuals whose power and influence
are significant enough.
As
to the relations of power, the world of Neuromancer is divided into two
distinct territories. One type of influence is exerted within the jurisdiction
of the zaibatsus over the employees. This is the disciplinary sort of power, as
described by Foucault. Gibson put it in a nutshell as follows:
He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all
your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral. (Neuromancer,
p.37)
The
other kind of power is exerted by the various organizations outside their
territories. It is the older type of punitive power, more discreet, less
spectacular, but just as lethal. The zaibatsus, the organized crime dominated
by the Yakuza and even the extremely wealthy families like the Tessier
-Ashpools afford to have assassins whose pphysical capacities are widely
amplified by technological means and who are sent on missions in the outside
world if necessary.
And then he had a visitor, a visitor unannounced, one who
walked in through the elaborate maze of Smith's security as though it didn't
exist. A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a
vatgrown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes
of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost
apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and
return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken
from the house of his master. It had come to his attention, the ninja said,
that Smith might know of the whereabouts of this object. Smith told the man
that he had no wish to die, and produced the head. (...) And who, the man
asked, brought you this object? Smith told him. Within days, Smith heard of
Jimmy's death. (Neuromancer, pp.74-75)
Even
the employees of multinational corporations in Neuromancer's world
are subjected to a form of punishing power, at least in a latent form. Although
they live under disciplinary conditions, as mentioned above, and (in the case
of top researchers) inhabit laboratories which in matters of security and
isolation rival prisons, this is sometimes not enough. Training and discipline,
brainwashing and indoctrination are considered no longer sufficient.
Consequently, the key-employees are equipped with devices destined to ensure,
or rather enforce, their loyalty: cortex bombs, programmed to detonate when
taken outside the corporation's perimeter. It is a step back to the punishing
type of power, reflecting at the level of bodies the shift of power relations,
the new fragmentation of nation-states into quasi-feudal corporate territories.
The
treatment most adequate to characterize the hybrid society of Neuromancer,
with its combination of punishment and discipline, is the one suffered by
characters who went to prison. Deke, the protagonist of the short story
"Dogfight", was stigmatized with a device named
"brainlock".
"Well... did you ever see the-"his voice
involuntarily rose and rushed past the words-"Washington Monument?
Like at night? It's got these two little... red lights on top, aviation markers
or something, and I, and I..." He started to shake.
"You're afraid of the Washington Monument? (...)
"I would rather die than look at it again," he
said levelly.
She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face.
White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something
she didn't want to think about. At last she ventured, "Brainlock?"
'Yeah," he said bitterly. "They told me I'd
never go back to D.C. And then the fuckers laughed."
"What did they get you for?"
"I'm a thief."
("Dogfight", Burning Chrome, p.148)
It
is a reversal from the modern type of social thinking to the medieval one,
where the aim was social purity. Deke's treatment strongly resembles the facts
mentioned by Foucault in Folie et deraison (1961), such as the forced
exile of the mentally ill or the separation of the lepers from the rest of the
medieval society. However, it is an exile forced by technological means, a
punishment of refined cruelty.
III. Illegalism with a Technological Touch: Reversal of a Trend
Under
the social conditions which form Neuromancer's background, the distinction made by Foucault between illegalism
and delinquency is a fertile one. With the political authorities dwindling to
insignificant proportions, the law-enforcing institutions seem in their turn to
have faded away, with the notable exception of the Turing police whose job is
to prevent artificial intelligences from gaining autonomy. As a consequence,
the category of delinquents who periodically serve sentences in prisons has
largely disappeared in its turn. This shadow army of informers and criminals is
no longer needed in a world where all necessary pieces of information about
individuals are obtained via the ubiquitous information network.
On
the other hand, the older concept of illegalism re-emerged, edged with a
technologic touch. The reaction of individuals to obtrusive methods of
surveillance is to protect their privacy by adopting informatic invisibility.
Molly uses hand signals whenever she supposes that she and her partner might be
spied on. Case travels with a false passport wherein he figures as Truman Starr
(a postmodern collage of semiotic fragments where an ex-president meets an
ex-Beatle). Later on, in the Freeside space station, he introduces himself as
Lupus, a name picked from a Sprawl teenage gangster. When the Turing police
agents come to arrest him, a strange scene occurs.
"Your name is Henry Dorsett Case." She recited
the year and place of his birth, his BAMA Single Identification Number, and a
string of names he gradually recognized as aliases from his past. ( Neuromancer,
p. 159)
In
this respect, Case does not constitute an exception, but rather a rule. The
other characters are outlaws too, and they use aliases in their turn. The
female protagonist calls herself Molly, yet this is half of the nickname Molly
Millions she used in the short story "Johnny Mnemonic". It might not
be her real name at all. Moreover, she registers in a Freeside hotel as
Kolodny.
Their
employer introduces himself a Armitage, but later on Case discovers that he is
major Willis Corto, a World War Three veteran. A friend of Molly's is known as
the Finn, and although he appears in each book of the Cyberspace trilogy, we
never find what his name is. Another member of the team was born in Bonn,
travels under a forged Dutch passport and goes by the name of Peter Riviera.
And a colourful teenage gangster introduces himself as Lupus Yonderboy.
The
notion of illegalism is so broad that it can easily cover almost every activity
described in the novel. There is an illegalism of the lower class, with outlaws
travelling under false names and using pirated military programs, and an
illegalism of the upper classes, with members of aristocratic families killing
off each other and breaking the laws on cloning and cryogenic storage.
In
this confrontation, the outlaws use "icebreaker" penetration
programs, like Case, a cracksman's tools for breaking and entering, such as
Molly, or elaborate projections on the adversary's retinae, like Riviera. The
most striking example is probably constituted by the Panther Moderns.
The Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary version of
the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage
DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various
short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals. The Panther Moderns
were a softhead variant of the Scientists. If the technology had been
available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with
microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The
Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists. (Neuromancer,
pp. 58-59)
The
outlaws' efforts to absorb the local colour, to fade in the informational
background in order to escape the panoptical surveillance is metaphorically
illustrated by the Panther Moderns' chameleonic suits. On the other hand, they
oppose the rigid system of discipline and conformity within the corporations by
adopting bizarre haircuts and surgical alterations originating in the nightmare
side of teenage popular culture.
The Panther Modern leader, who introduced himself as
Lupus Yonderboy, wore a polycarbon suit with a recording feature that allowed
him to replay backgrounds at will. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like
some kind of state of the art gargoyle, he regarded Case and Armitage with
hooded eyes. He smiled. His hair was pink. A rainbow forest of microsofts
bristled behind his left ear; the ear was pointed, tufted with more pink hair.
His pupils had been modified to catch the light like a cat's. Case watched the
suit crawl with color and texture. (Neuromancer, p.67)
The
centers of power have their own brand of illegalism. In order to protect the
databases from intruders such as Case, the companies (especially those with
illicit business) use illegal codes known as "black ice", which are
able to inflict fatal damage to the victim's central nervous system.
The
aristocratic family Tessier-Ashpool has built its own space station, named
Freeside, and, profiting from the orbital laws which were more permissive as
regards the genetic materials, cloned eight boys and eight girls. The family's
wealth is used as a shield against the press, and although there is a law
specifying that persons undergoing cryogenic conservation are legally dead for
the duration of the hibernation, they never let the outside world know
"what generation, or combination of generations," is running the
business. On the other hand, Ashpool killed his wife a number of years before,
and Molly finds him while, after having murdered one of his clone daughters, he
is committing suicide by means of a heroine overdose.
Another
touch is added by the presence of the artificial intelligences, who practice
another range of illegal activities. Wintermute, the one who is behind the
plot, illegally extends his influence to reach the psychiatric asylum where
major Willis Corto is marooned, assembles confidential documents to inform Case
about Armitage's instability and organizes a conspiration to set himself free.
The
three types of illegalism are hopelessly tangled together in the event of Ashpool's
suicidal. They are no longer in conflict, but rather act as factors combining
with each other in order to attain their result.
"Why'd he kill himself?" Case asked.
"Why's anybody kill himself?" The figure
shrugged. "I guess I know, if anybody does, but it would take me twelve
hours to explain the various factors in his history and how they interrelate.
He was ready to do it for a long time, but he kept going back into the freezer.
(...) It's all tied in with why he killed his wife, mainly, you want the short
reason. But what sent him over the edge for good and all, little 3Jane figured
a way to fiddle the program that controlled his cryogenic system. Subtle, too.
So, basically, she killed him. Except he figured he'd killed himself,
and your friend the avenging angel figures she got him with an eyeball full of
shellfish juice. (...) Well, actually, I guess I did give 3Jane the odd hint, a
little of the old how-to, you know?" ( Neuromancer, p. 205)
Ironically,
even the agents of the Turing police have committed quite a few illegalities of
their own. Their presence in Freeside is not known to the local authorities,
they travel under false names and they pretend to be French tourists. When Case
asks them about their right to act within Freeside's jurisdiction, their false
kindness vanishes. When taking into account the methods that they employ, the
outlaws and the law enforcers in Neuromancer are strikingly
similar. It is another proof that the trend has reversed and that the small
enclosed medium of delinquency has turned in the novel's universe into an
all-encompassing chiaroscuro of illegalism.
William
Gibson's first novel is the expression of a literary orientation which
attempted to revigorate the science fiction genre. The author's talent and
power of observation made Neuromancer into much more than an
average SF book. The technological and social orientations that Gibson detected
earned his novel the title of "book of the year". I would rather say
that it was the book of the decade.
As
far as technology is concerned, the author's ideas run very close to the
theories of Marshall McLuhan. The numbing effect of new media, the shift of
perceptions engendered by them, the way in which they change the user's mentality
are very vividly captured in literary form by Gibson. His extrapolations
concerning media in an incipient form proved to be accurate, and some of his
technological ideas were actually put into practice. McLuhan's adagio that the
medium never fails to exert an influence over the users as well as over the
messages is ever present in Neuromancer's pages.
As
far as the social background of the novel is concerned, Foucault's ideas
regarding the forms of government and the types of power they generate are
reflected in an interesting way. Gibson envisions a society where the
uniformity brought about by the nation-states has been broken into a
fragmentariness of loosely-defined, overlapping jurisdictions. Under these
conditions, the power itself reverted from discipline to punishment, and the
offenders have ceased to be closely-surveilled delinquents, turning into
chameleon-like outlaws.
Gibson's
implicit warning is that with the emergence of new centers of power based on
monopoly over coded information, and wielding international influence, the
citizen's privacy might be in serious danger, and the universal rights could
crumble into unequally distributed privileges. The historical process analyzed
by Foucault in Discipline and Punish can be reverted under the
de-centralizing influence of the new media, and not all consequences are going
to be beneficial. Neuromancer is mostly focused on the negative ones, and under
the glossy surface of action, colourful language and impressive technology, it
contains an undercurrent of ideas belonging to a generous humanism.
1) David Brown, Cybertrends: Chaos, Power and
Accountability in the Information Age, Viking, London 1997;
2) Michel Foucault, Istoria
nebuniei în epoca clasicã, Humanitas,
Bucureºti, 1996;
3) Michel Foucault, A
supraveghea ºi a pedepsi: Naºterea închisorii moderne, Humanitas,
Bucureºti, 1997;
4) William Gibson, Neuromancer,
Ace Books, New York, 1984;
5) William Gibson, Count
Zero, Ace Books, New York, 1986;
7) William Gibson, Burning
Chrome, Ace Books, New York, 1987;
8) William Gibson, Mona
Lisa Overdrive, Bantam Books, New York, 1989;
9) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York,
1965;
10) Marshall McLuhan, Galaxia
Gutenberg, Editura Politicã, Bucureºti, 1975;
11) Brian D. Johnson, "William
Gibson Profile", Maclean's, June 5, 1995;
12) Larry McCaffery, "An
Interview with William Gibson", Mississippi Review, September 1986. (top)
Text
Configurations and Discourse Registers in Bruce Sterling's SCHISMATRIX PLUS
There are tight connections between the
technical means used by writers and the shape of the literary text. The
technical means also exert an influence on the author's mentality and
psychology. These relationships and influences can be illustrated by the
structure of some literary works that were written on personal computers. In
this respect, Bruce Sterling's volume Schismatrix Plus constitutes a
good example.
Born in 1954 and residing in Austin, Texas,
Bruce Sterling is a leader of the avant-garde literary movement which appeared
in the early 1980s and which editor Gardner Dozois named 'cyberpunk'. After
writing two novels, Involution Ocean (1977) and The Artificial Kid (1980),
in 1982 Sterling started publishing a series of short stories in The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. These stories had as a background
a human society divided in factions with divergent ideologies and technologies.
The most important of these factions were called Shapers and Mechanists. In
1985, the cycle of short stories was completed with a novel called Schismatrix.
After a decade, the publishing house Ace Books from New York decided to
reprint this set of texts in one volume under the title Schismatrix Plus.
Bearing
in mind that between the short stories on the one hand and the novel on the
other hand there are multiple connections, the content of Schismatrix Plus may
be treated as a hypertext. For instance, there are numerous characters who
reappear from one text to another, following the 'Comedie Humaine' model. Among
these, captain-doctor Simon Afriel from the Shaper faction can be encountered
in various stages of his career in the short stories "Swarm" and "Twenty
Evocations", as well as in the novel Schismatrix. Another such
character is a member of the Mechanist faction who appears under the name
Wellspring in "Cicada Queen" and as Wells in Schismatrix. Landau,
the narrator-protagonist in "Cicada Queen", is mentioned in
"Sunken Gardens" as the Lobster-King, leader of a powerful faction
who has in charge the terraforming of planet Mars.
Another
hypertextual kind of link established between the short stories and the novel,
as well as between different sections of the novel, is constituted by memorable
phrases which are evoked in later texts in order to let the reader recognise
them. For instance, the short story "Swarm" begins as follows:
"I will miss your conversation
during the rest of the voyage," the alien said. (Schismatrix Plus,
p. 239)
The last
sentence of the same novelette echoes the first one:
"I'm glad I don't have to absorb
you. I would have missed your conversation." (p. 257)
And both these
sentences are evoked in the novel by the alien pilot who had accompanied Simon
Afriel in "Swarm":
"I knew one of your students once.
Captain-doctor Simon Afriel. A very accomplished gentleman. (...) He died on
embassy. (...) A pity. I always enjoyed his conversation." (p. 171)
On yet
another level, the relationship between the short story "Twenty
Evocations" and the novel Schismatrix can also be considered as
hypertextual. There are similitudes of form and content between the two texts,
so that in some respect the novelette can be regarded as a small-scale model of
the novel. Both works are made up by the narration of a chronologically ordered
series of events, separated by intervals of time on which there are indirect
presentations in the interstices of the narrative. Their protagonists are male
characters who are given a professional training in the Shaper sphere of
influence, then defect to the Mechanist faction. In the volume's foreword,
Bruce Sterling declared:
The experimental "Twenty Evocations" was my
final word on the subject. It was a dry-run for the forthcoming novel, and with
that effort I was carrying my
"crammed-prose" technique as far as it would go. (p. vii)
On the
other hand, this set of texts also has a metatextual role. Namely, the
Shaper/Mechanist series can be interpreted as a commentary (which is often
ironic or polemic) on the works of an older generation of science-fiction
writers. A great number of positivist ideas used by authors such as Robert A.
Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov are passed through the filter of
scepticism.
In this
respect, one can state that with the advent of Bruce Sterling's generation we
witness the ending of a great cycle of convictions expressed in literature. The
first novel considered to be science-fiction, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein,
manifested pessimism with regard to the relationship between human beings and
technology. After the appearance of positivism, the dominant tone in science
fiction literature became optimistic. For the representatives of sf's
"Golden Age", scientific knowledge and technology were sources of
progress and well-being, and their effects had to be beneficial.
Sterling
and his colleagues, on the other hand, created a highly dynamic vision that is
essentially pessimistic. In the Shaper/Mechanist series, the fast flow of
technological changes creates in society tensions that do not have time to be
absorbed. The result is society's shredding into so-called factions. The new
technologies serve to physically and mentally change the members of these
factions by means either genetic or surgical, and as a consequence the human
species' unity gradually disappears and is replaced by a diversity of
post-human species with divergent evolutionary lines.
This polemic
attitude towards the quasi-dogmatic idea that new technologies can only have
benefic effects for society is most concisely expressed in the short story
"Spider Rose", where the female protagonist remarks in a tone of
bitter sarcasm:
"Our own technologies have
shattered us. We can't assimilate what we already have. I see no reason to
burden myself with more." (p. 261)
Another
idea of the previous generation of writers with whom Sterling polemizes is that
intelligence had a crucial role in the human species' success. In his first
short story, "Swarm", the author argues ironically through an alien
character that intelligence is a handicap rather than an advantage, an obstacle
rather than a tool for survival.
If in
point of form the Shaper/Mechanist series is a future history, following the
model of "Golden Age" sf, in terms of ideas Sterling's texts hotly
polemize with those works. For this reason, Schismatrix Plus also has a
metatextual function with respect to the writings of the previous generation.
Namely, the place of centralisation is taken by decentralisation, and
uniformity is replaced by multicultural diversity.
An
illustration of this aspect is the form of "Twenty Evocations", which
is made up of short anecdotal texts, similar to the Zen koans or to the
telegraphic fragments in Kurt Vonnegut's novels. At the end of every five such
fragments there is a collage of keywords extracted from them and reassembled in
a new way that is ironic and poetic at the same time.
The
writing of such a text was made much easier by word-processing computer
programs, and the presence of new ways to treat the literary text changed the
author's attitude towards it radically.
It was a revelation when I first saw my
text become electric vapor on the screen of a computer. I realized that I'd
become part of a new generation in science-fiction, a generation that had
profound, genuine, "technical" advantages over all our predecessors.
This freed me almost overnight from any sense that I still dwelt in the long
shadows of Verne, Wells, or Stapledon. Those writers were titans of the
imagination, but they were one and all confined to analog technologies of ink
and woodpulp. Now I could do what I liked with words - bend them, break them,
jam them together, pick them apart again. It was like patiently studying blues
guitar and suddenly finding a fire-engine-red Fender Stratocaster. (p. vi)
The
reference to the technical means used enables one to understand the different
views of the two generations of writers. Heinlein, Asimov and their colleagues
from Astounding Stories were brought up and educated in an industrial
society oriented towards centralisation and standardisation whose main medium
was print. However, Bruce Sterling's period of ascension coincides with the
marketing of first-generation personal computers and data networks not
subjected to political borders or geographic barriers. This is an important
factor which led to the multicultural, ironic and polemic tone of his works and
which encouraged the experimental side of literary discourse in ways that were
completely inaccessible to the typewriter.
Bibliography:
1) John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The
Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, 1993, St. Martin's Press, New York, USA;
2) Florin Manolescu, Literatura SF,
1980, Univers Publishing House, Bucharest;
3) Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg
Galaxy, 1975, The Political Publishing House, Bucharest;
4) Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966, McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, New York;
5) Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus,
1996, Ace Books, New York. (top)
Intertextual
Aspects of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel V.
This essay is currently under
translation. (top)
Thomas Pynchon's
Novels and Their Influence
on Other
Postmodern Writers
If
one were to use a label for the literary works of the American writer Thomas
Pynchon, which is hard to do for books which transgress the structural
distinctions between genres, this label might be "pseudo-historical
novels", since minutely researched historical facts are mixed in these
novels with imaginary elements, sometimes grotesque or fantastic, at other
times almost plausible. Pynchon became a central figure of post-modernism
immediately after publishing his first novel, V. (1963), a book that had
a huge critical success and that determined its author to quit his job at
Boeing in order to become a full-time writer. This change entailed an enormous
risk that few Western writers can afford, since leaving the job involves giving
up regular income, and the psychological pressures brought by lack of material
safety are enormous and can affect the creative process considerably. No one
knows how the American writer copes with those problems because Pynchon doesn’t
give interviews, nor does he attend banquets. There are no photographs with
him, except some made more than four decades ago, and his address is not
public.
This
attitude has led to various speculations regarding Pynchon’s identity. Some
supposed this is Jerome David Salinger’s pen name, as the latter retired from
public life at the same time when V. was published, but the supposition was
contradicted when, after Salinger’s death, Pynchon published the huge novel
Mason & Dixon (1997). Others believed „Thomas Pynchon” is another literary
identity of Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975),
andthe latter declared to be extremely pleased with the supposition.
Readers
hoped that the mystery would clarify in the introduction that Pynchon wrote for
his collection of short stories, Slow Learner (1984). However, the foreword was
written in such a way as to shed light on the literary skills that the writer
was developing in the beginning of his career rather than on the person’s
private life.
Even
if Pynchon’s private life remains a mystery, his literary works exerted a
remarkable influence on numerous younger-generation writers. This influence can
be found in the narrative techniques and elements of plot or background that
occur in novels published in the last four decades of the 20th century. Further
on we shall identify a series of such elements of Thomas Pynchon’s novels and
we shall see in which form these elements reappear in the texts of younger
writers.
Pynchon created
a new kind of novel - if novel is the most appropriate name for his
books - built on an abundance of carefully researched historical details and on
a similar abundance of more or less plausible invented items. Readers, in their
turn, find themselves under obligation to do some research while reading in
order to separate the true items of information from the invented ones. For
instance, in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) a great number of authentic
historical data regarding the private postal delivery system Thurn und Taxis in
Europe are ingeniously mixed with details about Tristero, an imaginary parallel
postal system.
Thurn und Taxis postal system - imperial and, after
1806, private postal system operated in western and central
The
novels which combine fiction and the multitude of historical facts just as
convincingly are rather rare. This method of creation was taken to an extreme
by John Fowles in the novel The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). The
novel's plot seems to be a pretext for the profusion of footnotes, introductory
quotations and other apparently periphereal fragments, with meticulously
specified sources, which make up the real center of interest. In turn, the
quotations illustrate aspects of the British society in queen
The mid-19th
century British society is also the focus of The Difference Engine (1990)
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, where the fragmented plot is in fact a
support for the profusion of details regarding the Victorian age. The two
authors regarded the 19th century in point of the evolution of science and technology,
as they were interested in the way this evolution changed, or could have
changed, society. Bruce Sterling showed in an interview the focus of his
interest in this age.
Thomas Myer: What is it about the 19th century that
fascinates you? I'm thinking now of your work on The Difference Engine
and the references to T. E. Lawrence in Islands in the Net.
Bruce Sterling: The best laboratory model for the 20th
century is the 19th century. It's also an industrial society undergoing a
technological revolution. You don't see that phenomenon in the Roman Empire or
Ancient
In
the case of The Difference Engine, the density of cultural and
historical allusions proved to be so great that it required the compilation of
a dictionary which at the same time served as a commentary on the novel. The
work, aptly titled The Difference Dictionary, was coordinated by Eileen
K. Gunn, who published it in 'Science Fiction Eye' magazine in 1995, and later
on attached it to the novel's new editions.
These
are only two examples of the enormous influence that Thomas Pynchon exerted
over several generations of younger writers, especially along the 1980s and
1990s, by the novels V., The Crying of
William Gibson: Pynchon has been a
favourite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as
almost the start of a certain mutant breed of SF - the cyberpunk thing, the SF
that mixes surrealism and pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and
scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect
that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's
Rainbow several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into
Pynchon early on - I remember seeing a New York Times review on V.
when it first came out - I was just a kid - and thinking, Boy, that sounds like
some really weird stuff! (Larry McCaffery, "An Interview with William
Gibson", Across the Wounded Galaxies, University of Illinois Press,
Urbana & Chicago, 1990, p. 138)
There
are stylistic elements in the literary works of the two authors which sustain
Gibson's statement. The descriptive, paragraphs, for instance, put together
heterogeneous elements in combinations full of poetic charge, with a special
esthetic effect.
Certain trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly
by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of
naphtha winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like and
mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves and out the lonely spurs, a
sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust, developing through those
emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal
its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero... (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's
Rainbow, Penguin Books, New York, 1995, p. 3)
This
intensely evocative assembly of words can be found throughout William Gibson's
work, and sometimes the phrases themselves seem to evoke Pynchon's.
The bridge maintains the integrity of its span within
a riot of secondary construction, a coral growth facilitated in large part by
carbon-fiber compounds. Some sections of the original structure, badly rusted,
have been coated with a transparent material whose tensile strength far exceeds
that of the original steel; some are splined with the black and impervious
carbon-fiber; others are laced with makeshift ligatures of taut and rusting
wire.
Secondary construction has occured piecemeal, to no
set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material; the result is
amorphous and startlingly organic in appearance. (William Gibson,
"Skinner's Room", The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual
Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992, p. 92)
In
both fragments we find a preoccupation for describing settings in a special
manner. On the one hand one notices the absence of beings from these settings,
an lack of life in general. This lack is stressed by phrases such as
"rolling-stock absence", "Sundays when no traffic came
through", and by the use of the passive voice. On the other hand, the
landscapes being described are artificial, man-made, which suggests both the
natural landscape's elimination and and the builders' absence. This artificial
character is suggested by terms such as "trestles",
"spurs", "blind curves", or "carbon-fiber
compounds", "transparent material", "black and impervious
carbon-fiber". The materials that appear in these descriptions are organic
in some cases, which involves fossilization of organisms and suggests the
disappearance of life. Even if devoided of life, however, the artificial
structures described are not static, but undergo a process of degradation,
symbolised mainly by "maturing rust" or "sections of the
original structure, badly rusted", and at the same time suffer a growth
compared to the development of organisms: "coral-like and mysteriously
vital growth" in Pynchon's text, and "a coral growth" and
"startlingly organic in appearance" in Gibson's short story.
Pynchon's literary
influence can be thus identified on a stylistic level. It is also admitted
implicitly by numerous authors by means of more or less transparent textual
allusions. Further on, severla such allusions will be enumerated, but the list
is far from being exhaustive.
The
main plot in The Crying of
In the novel Count Zero (1986),
William Gibson combines three plots, out of which one is very similar with the
one summarised above: Marly Krushkova is sent by Josef Virek, an old dying
plutocrat, in search of the author of some artifacts, and on the way she
discovers not only the vast dimensions of Virek's influence, but also a
conspiracy. As a supplementary allusion, one of the supercorporations
controlled by Virek is called
Bruce
Sterling also created variations on this narrative theme. His protagonists
usually travel to numerous places, and it seems quite clear that one of the
reasons for their journey is that it eases the readers' access to a fictional
world that constitutes the novels' real center of interest. Sterling used this
technique in almost all his novels, such as Involution Ocean (1977), The
Artificial Kid (1980) or Schismatrix (1985). More often than not,
the main character is a woman, like in The Difference Engine. Finally,
These
allusions can be more punctual, such as the one towards the ending of Umberto
Eco's Il pendolo di Foucault (1988), where the protagonist Casaubon,
overcome with paranoid fear, sees conspiracies everywhere, even in trashcans.
This is a reference to the trashcans marked W.A.S.T.E. - We Await Silently
Tristero's Empire - that served to collect the correspondence by the secret
postal system in The Crying of
In
his turn,
Lastly and most puzzling of all there was a non-descript
fellow, tall, dressed for the times with brown or black hair, not so tall
perhaps, but certainly not short and gaunt rather than full in the face
although neither description wholly missed the mark. (...) Lempriere looked at
the man suspiciously.
’’Who are you?” he asked at length.
’’This is Mister O’Tristero,” said Septimus. There was
a second long silence.
’’I am your rival,” said Mister O’Tristero.
(Lawrence Norfolk, Lempriere’s Dictionary,
Sinclair Stevenson LTD, London, 1991, p. 170)
This
appearance is not incidental, since the whole novel has as a theme a cabbal
which presumably was involved in the siege of the protestant city of La
Rochelle in 1628-1629 by the Catholic troops led by Louis XIII and Cardinal
Richelieu, in the creation of the East Indies Company with the high-quarters in
London, a company which had a crucial role in the development of the British
colonial empire, especially in the Eastern countries, and in the life of the
author of a mythology dictionary highly appreciated by the romantic poet John
Keats. Since in The Crying of Lot 49 Tristero was the shadow competitor
of legal companies such as Thurn und Taxis in Europe or Wells & Fargo in
America, it is logical for it to appear, even if apocryphally, as the rival of
the East Indies Company in the British Isles. There are numerous resemblances
between the Lemprieres and the Tristero organization: both had to go on an
exile, and then they seeked to recover their lost legacy. In the second case,
the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars forced most Tristero members to
seek refuge in
On
the other hand,
So
far, we have seen how
Michael
Swanwick places his female protagonist Rebel Elizabeth 
Mudlark from the novel Vacuum
Flowers (1987) in a similar situation, a puppet of supercorporations, and
the heroine decides to protect her freedom and self-determination.
She didn’t know she had died.
She had, in fact, died twice - by accident the first
time, but suicide later. Now the corporation that owned her had decided she
should die yet again, in order to fuel a million throwaway lives over the next
few months.
But Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark knew none of this. She
knew only that something was wrong and that nobody would talk to her about it.
(Michael Swanwick, Vacuum Flowers, Ace Books, New York, 1988, p. 1)
Brainwashing
techniques and artificially implanted personalities, especially by the use of drugs,
such as described in Gravity's Rainbow, appear throughout the cyberpunk
subgenre. Vacuum Flowers constitutes again a good example. In the third
chapter, "Storm Front", the heroine confronts herself with a
procedure that gives her a strong feeling of insecurity, an echo of Slothrop's
uncertainty as to who is his ally and who is an agent of the forces that
conspire against him. The procedure is more ingenious than in Pynchon's case,
where cooperation with the secret services or supercorporations is obtained by
means of blackmail and psychological torture, and the results are less
ambiguous:
"They arrest maybe one out of five people they
nab for failure to cooperate and sentence them to like six hours enforcement
duty. Program 'em up on the spot, give them their orders, and send them out to
bring in more to be programmed. They spread out like a storm. Before long, you
got jackboots everywhere." (Vacuum Flowers, p. 42)
Another
example of the protagonist's manipulation by obscure forces can be found in the
novel Idoru (1996) by William Gibson. Like Slothrop, who during
childhood was subjected to behaviourist techniques of conditioning and later
understood gradually that he was a minor part in a vast plan, Colin Laney was
exposed while in orphanage to experimental drugs. If Slothrop develops and
intuitive knowledge of the places where the German rockets will fall, Laney
gains the ability to see patterns in the apparent chaos of information streams
and, consequently, is put under pressure by malefic forces that need to use his
talent for their own purposes.
However, the allusions to Pynchon's
work don't always take the shape of characters or plots. Sometimes, they
appears as a phrase or even a buzzword, such as "IN THE ZONE/YES", a
recurrent slogan in the novel Hardwired (1986) by Walter Jon Williams
that echoes the title of the third section from Gravity's Rainbow.
Until
now we have examined some influences that two of Pynchon's early novles exerted
over other authors. On the other hand, one of Pynchon's late novels,
In
his turn, in the novel
According
to the ennumerated facts, we can state that beyond the mid-1980s the literary
influences in the midst of which Thomas Pynchon was became not only complex,
but also reciprocal. For instance, Kathy Acker's postmodern texts contain a
great many narrative elements taken from Pynchon and Gibson, especially in Empire
of the Senseless (1988), but Gibson in his turn is stylisticallly alike
with Acker and Pynchon, most notably in his novels from the 1990s where the
characters abound and the plot becomes complicated to the point of
incomprehensibility.
However,
the apparently heterogeneous plot is by no means Kathy Acker's monopoly. The
narrative line of Pynchon's novels also has the aspect of a collage, with
episodes in different historicla periods. The best example in this respect is V.,
where the narrative moves forwards and backwards in time permanently. a similar
technique, taken to the extreme, was used by Kurt Vonnegut jr. in Slaughterhouse
Five (1969), where the protagonist Billy Pilgrim has the possibility to
relive any moment of his existence, which he does, travelling in time sometimes
even between one paragraph and the next. John Fowles also, along the novel The
French Lieutenant's Woman, always contrasts the British society of the
1860s with the one of the 1960s. In William Gibson's Neuromancer, a
considerable part of the background information appears in a fragmentary,
non-chronological manner, and is sometimes introduced in the text by means of
quasi-subliminal techniques. In each of these cases, the protagonists' efforts
to find a reasonable sense of the events they witness constitute a reflection
of the readers' strain to create an order of the plot, based on cause and
effect, where maybe there is no such thing.
In
its extreme form, this urge to integrate everything in a unifying scheme leads
to a paranoid frame of mind. This attitude, dominant in the novels V., The
Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, and represented by the
characters Stencil, Oedipa Maas and Tyrone Slothrop, respectively, is omnipresent
in the cyberpunk subgenre. The dark corporations similar to those that struggle
covertly in order to gain influence and control along the novel Gravity's
Rainbow appear as main or, in most cases, unique centers of power in books
such as Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling, Vacuum Flowers by
Michael Swanwick or Harwired by Walter Jon Williams, and one of the
protagonists' functions is to reveal the links among events in order to find
the answer to the typically paranoid question "Who is behind all this?"
The
most spectacular example of this direction towards a unifying scheme is
probably The Crying of
Both
with Pynchon and Eco and in the case of the Illuminatus! trilogy, the
integration of data in the unifying scheme involves a distortion of their
original sense, and this distortion is most often done in order to obtain
comical effects. Pynchon proved to be a pioneer in this field as well, as his
books are proof of an extremely peculilar sense of humour. Numerous scenes in
his novels recall slapstick comedies or cartoon gags, and sometimes border on
the absurd, on the terrifying or on sado-masochism. Some of them were so
appreciated by other post-modernists that they took the scenes as such and
introduced them in their creations. An already well-known example is the
scatological scene where Slothrop, under the influence of drugs he was injected
with when questioned by PISCES agents, hallucinates that he plunges down the
toilet and swims in the sewer system (Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 60-71).
Both in
A sense of humour similar to
Pynchon's is present in Neal Stephenson's novels, especially in Snow Crash
(1992), in Rudy Rucker's fiction and, to a lesser degree, in William Gibson's Virtual
Light (1993). For instance, one of Stephenson's characters assures the
protagonist repeatedly that their opponents will listen to reason, and later on
he uses against them an experimental machine gun code-named REASON. In chapter
five of Rudy Rucker's Software (1982), protagonist Sta-Hi becomes
prisoner of a gang of youth who put him in a torture device, planning to detach
the top of his skull and eat his brain, in the most macabre register of
Pynchonesque black humour. In Gibson's novel, the whole plot is triggered and
motivated by the stealing of a pair of shades, a practical joke at the expense
of both characters and readers.
Along
the same line, in his literary works Pynchon manifests an interest for parodic
songs, verse and limericks, in the best tradition of nonsense poetry from
English-speaking countries. Such an example is the dirty-limerick contest in Gravity's
Rainbow, where each of the participants must refer to the components of V2
rockets.
There was a young man named McGuire,
Who was fond of the pitch amplifier.
But a number of shorts
Left him covered with warts,
And set half the bedroom on fire.
(Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, Penguin
Books, New York, 1987, p. 334)
In
his latest novel, Cryptonomicon (1999), Neal Stephenson succeeded not
only i adopting Pynchon's style and themes very convincingly, but also in
following the model even in the parody of popular forms of poetry. Limericks
were adequate for the background of Gravity's Rainbow, where Americans
fought alongside with British soldiers on the
The leaves of
Pale doors in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.
(Neal Stepehenson, Cryptonomicon, Avon Books, New
York, 1999, p. 4)
Another
permanent preoccupation of Thomas Pynchon's that proved quite fruitful is the
one for science and technology, sometimes also accompanied by humorous accents.
For instance, in the Crying of
Similar
imaginary artifacts from the field of physics occurred in postmodern novles
published in the 1990s. We shall discuss a single example, namely some literary
appearances of Schrodinger's cat. Erwin Schrodinger proposed this mental
experiment as an illustration of Heisenberg's principle of indetermination. One
puts a cat, a particle emitter and a particle detector in a box. Both the
emitter and the detector are triggered repeatedly at random intervals. When
both of them function simultaneously, the detector triggers a system that
breaks a vial of cyanide inside the box. By the methods of quantum physics, one
can only determine the probability for the cat to be still alive or to have
already died, but it is impossible to establish one or the other as certain.
Once theexperiment is stopped, however, and an observer has opened the box, the
equations describing probabilities collapse into one certainty. In other words,
the observer influences by his act the nature of the observed phenomenon.
The
box previously described is used in Dan Simmons's novel Endymion (1995)
as a method of detention and execution, while in Greg Egan's Quarantine
(1992) people's capacity to reduce probabilities to certainties by simple observation
endangers numberless possible universes and leads to humankind's isolation as a
species from the rest of the Cosmos.
Pynchon's
preoccupation, however, is not limited to hard science, but also deals with
social sciences. Ever since the first short stories that he published and going
on throughout his entire creation, entropy as a notion of physics and
especially its reflection in social loss of organization have been central
themes. One can state that the disintegration of chronology and of intelligible
linear plot in Pynchon's novels was designed as a parallel to the changes in
the real world, such as the transition from an industrial society to an
informatic one, from centralization to de-centralization, from sequentiality
educated by printed books to simultaneity similar to multi-channel television.
This process of change was sometimes
reflected dramatically by the disintegration of states and societies, such as
Retrospectively,
the historical details and pseudo-historical inventions, hard sciences and
social ones, paranoia and entropy, gags and parodies, the dismembered
chronology and apparently chaotic plot form a heterogeneous mixture. The
historical past and the mundane present formed ever since Pynchon's first
novel, V., an unstable union that led to a gradual separation. The
Crying of Lot 49 and
The most revolutionary act we can perform, as writers,
is to cross genres, graft idioms from other kinds of work onto the subject
matter. Style IS content. Gibson gives us something new - a new style. Not
because he invented it, but because he had the wit to see that an old style
could be adapted to out traditional material. (“Hunilla de Chollo”, "Cheap
Truth" #15)
The
two genres were reunited only in the late 1990s by Neal Stephenson in works
such as The Diamond Age (1995) and Cryptonomicon. In the latter,
most especially, one can find Pynchon's preoccupation for the counterpoint of
past and present in the form of two plots, one placed during World War Two, the
other in the last decade of the 20th century. The parallel is deepened by the
first plot's focus on the breaking of Enigma codes, which evokes the center of
interest in Gravity's Rainbow, the V2 rockets. Both matters, apparently
relevant only for the ongoing war, had an enormous impact on the post-war
world, and that is why they were so interesting for post-modern writers. The
second case, the study of V2 rockets, led to the development of space flight,
but also of intercontinental ballistic missiles, while the first, the code
machine Engma, helped among others the development of informatics and digital
computers.
In
conclusion, we can state that Thomas Pynchon had a remarkable influence on
literature for the last four decades and came to be recognized explicitly or
implicitly as a source of inspiration by a wide range of writers, from Umberto
Eco to William Gibson and from Neal Stephenson to
Bibliography:
Primary
Sources:
1)Kathy Acker, Empire
of the Senseless, Grove Press,
2) Philip K. Dick,
Timpul dezarticulat, Nemira, Bucarest, 1994;
3)
4) Greg Egan, Quarantine,
Legend Books, Random House UK Ltd.,
5) John Fowles,
The French Lieutenant's Woman, Jonathan Cape Ltd.,
6) William
Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Books,
7) William
Gibson, Count Zero, Ace Books,
8) William
Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Bantam Books,
9) William
Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, Vista Books,
10) William
Gibson, “Skinner's Room”, in The Year's Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual
Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1992;
11) William
Gibson, Virtual Light, Penguin Books,
12) William
Gibson, Idoru, Viking Books,
13)
14) Thomas
Pynchon, V., Bantam Books,
15) Thomas
Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, Harper & Row,
16) Thomas
Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, Penguin Books,
17) Thomas
Pynchon, Slow Learner, Little, Brown & Co,
18) Thomas
Pynchon,
19) Thomas
Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, Henry Holt & Co.,
20) Robert Shea
& Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, MJF Books,
21) Dan
Simmons, Endymion, Bantam Books,
22) Neal
Stephenson, Snow Crash, Roc Books, Londra, 1993;
23) Neal
Stephenson, The Diamond Age, Roc Books, Londra, 1996;
24) Neal
Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, Avon Books,
25) Bruce
Sterling, Islands in the Net, Ace Books,
26) Bruce
Sterling, Holy Fire, Bantam Books,
27) Bruce
Sterling, Distraction, Bantam Books,
28) Michael
Swanwick, Vacuum Flowers, Ace Books,
29) Kurt
Vonnegut jr., Slaughterhouse Five, Panther Books,
30)
31) Walter Jon
Williams, Hardwired, Ace Books,
Secondary
Sources:
32) Mara Magda
Maftei, “
33) Larry
McCaffery, editor, Across the Wounded Galaxies,
34) Larry
McCaffery, editor, Storming the Reality Studio, A Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Fiction, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 1991;
35) Marshall
McLuhan, MUnderstanding Media; The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill Book
Company,
36)
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998, CD-ROM edition. (top)
In
(Post)Cyberpunk Fiction
The Internet
has received a lot of attention for the last two decades, or, more precisely,
it has been the focus of activity of various groups and organizations,
beginning with philosophers and writers and ending with megacorporations such
as Microsoft and Time/Warner. It has also been the subject of debate in
magazines and newspapers, academic journals and television shows. It is a new
medium of communication which led to the emergence of new states of mind and
new forms of literary expression, most of which appeared between 1980 and 2000,
at the same time when the medium itself was being developped.
Since the Internet is a relatively new medium
the content of which consists in several media, old and new, it was given
different names, such as the net, the web, the matrix or cyberspace.
Interestingly enough, the journalists who used this last term,
"cyberspace", to designate the Internet did not pick it from the
scientific reports of a research laboratory, but from the literary work of
William Gibson.
Gibson is
only one of the writers who, beginning with the early 1980s, focused on the
possible uses and misuses of computer-generated environments and the
world-spanning network of communications. These possibilities are quite
numerous, but they generally fall into several distinct categories, some of
which we shall examine closely in order to see what they are and how they
relate to one another, how individuals and communities might adapt to the
changes brought about by these media.
Originally, in the story entitled
"Burning Chrome" which was published in Omni in 1982, William
Gibson envisioned cyberspace as a convenient medium for depositing and
exchanging data. As such, it was more a metaphor for humankind's collective
knowledge than a serious technological proposition concerning a new medium.
Gibson stated time and again that the ever-changing landscape of cyberspace, a
realm existing only inside computers, was meant to symbolize human memory,
which on the one hand consists in information, and on the other hand is
permanently subjected to change. This fluid, abstract state of cyberspace was
intended to make Gibson’s readers more aware of the abstract, transient state
of the memories inside their mind. This is how cyberspace, herein called
"the matrix", was described initially:
The matrix is an abstract
representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate
programmers jack into their employers' sector of the matrix and find themselves
surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
Towers and fields of it ranged in the
colorless non-space of the simulation matrix, the electronic
consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive
quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they work
behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from
industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine. [1]
In 1981,
when Gibson wrote "Burning Chrome", the interface between the
Internet and the human users was mostly text. As we can see nowadays, it still
is. Gibson's vision made sense in terms of people's natural environment, which
consists of a three-dimensional space with solid objects and six degrees of
freedom. Consequently, the literary vision was taken and turned into a
technological artifact commonly known as "virtual reality".
Personally, I find it both exciting and disquieting that over the span of only
a few years a literary idea was turned into an actual artifact that was mass
produced and marketed on a grand scale. If anything, it may well prove Gibson’s
point that his novels are not at all visions of the future, but rather his own
view of the present-day world.
In the
novels that he published later on, Gibson made use of this environment again
and again. His most influential novel to date, Neuromancer (1984),
introduced the term "cyberspace" in a passage that books and essays
on virtual reality have quoted ever since.
`The matrix has its roots in primitive
arcade games,' said the voice-over, `in early graphics programs and military
experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war
faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the
spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned
through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control
circuits of tanks and war planes.
`Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by
children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and
constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...' [2]
Both
quotations convey on the one hand the idea that cyberspace is open to public
access. This is suggested by its apparent lack of boundaries, by the number of
users - "billions of legitimate operators" - and by the large-scale
integration it provides - "data abstracted from the banks of every
computer in the human system". Apparently, this environment is democratic
and accessible to anyone, offers equal opportunities to all its users, and
shares all the human knowledge to all people. I cannot help but notice that
some of the non-fiction books written about the Internet at the beginning of
the 1990s expressed a lot of enthusiasm along similar lines.
On the
other hand, however, cyberspace has sectors where access is definitely
restricted. There are corporate centers protected by "ice" - Intruder
Countermeasures Electronics. These centers are represented as huge objects -
"towers and fields" - as opposed to individual users, whose
representations are on a small scale. There is also the seemingly inaccessible
military sector, described as "the cold spiral arms of military
systems" [3]
In opposition to a
vast matrix where billions of users deposit and exchange data, in the novel Idoru(1996),
we see Gibson imagine a small-scale, personalised version of cyberspace for
only one user, in this case a teenager. It is a virtual rendering of her home,
but some virtual objects are actually ways of access to other media. Chia Pat
Mackenzie's schoolwork, for instance, is represented as a three-ring binder,
whereas the system software looks like a canvas water bag and her collection of
archives concerning her favourite band is in the shape of a tin lunchbox. She
also has a virtual version of Venice, a digital representation of the city that
she can access by touching a dusty book in her room. This personalised matrix
would represent in cyberspace what a home is in actual reality: a safe personal
environment where adults can rest or recreate and children can grow up,
experiment and learn while being sheltered from possible dangers.
Other writers have
explored not only cyberspace as a storage medium, but also the interrelation
between cyberspace and the real world. In Islands in the Net (1988),
Bruce Sterling extrapolated on the social and economic consequences of
large-scale communication networks. Countries that were left out of this
technological development, such as Mali in Africa, are depicted as completely
isolated from the rest of the world not only in terms of communication, but
also in point of economic relations, therefore they are still affected by
poverty. On the other hand, countries that were quicker to adapt
technologically, such as Singapore, appear to ride the wave of accelerated
changes. Socially, Mali is depicted as tribal, backward and torn by civil wars
and guerillas, whereas Singapore emerges as a well-organized society where
everything is clean, under control, and profit-oriented. Unfortunately, as is always
the case in cyberpunk fiction, too much technological change too soon leads to
a special kind of chaos, and the Singaporean social mechanism breaks apart.
Individuals from Singapore, unlike those from Mali who can understand clearly
where they stand according to blood lines and geographic location, are
completely isolated and confused in this situation, as we can see from the
discourse uttered by a secondary character over an improvised broadcasting
system:
"If this is for the good of the city
then where are citizens? Streets empty! Where is everyone? What kind of city is
this become? Where is Vienna police, they the terrorist experts? Why is this
happening? Why no one ask me if I think it okay? It not one bit okay to me,
definitely! I want to success like everyone, I am working hard and minding
business, but this too much. Soon come they arrest me for doing this telly
business. Do you feel better off to hear me? Is better than sit here and rot by
myself....” [4]
In Holy Fire
(1996), Bruce Sterling offered his own view of a personalised cyberspace in the
form of a virtual palace inherited by protagonist Mia Ziemann from her
ex-lover, Martin Warshaw. Mia is supposed to make some sense of this heritage
by exploring and setting in order the information in Warshaw's virtual palace,
but the task proves to be difficult, as access to certain areas is difficult or
even impossible, and some of the information itself is best left alone. This
virtual heritage makes Mia Ziemann go on a tour of Europe in actual reality and
puts her in personal contact with a lot of characters. Unlike Chia Pat
Mackenzie’s personal cyberspace, which provides her with temporary comfort and
relief from unpleasant situations such as flight next to a person she dislikes,
Warshaw’s virtual palace brings Mia Ziemann a steady stream of trouble
throughout the book.
In an
earlier novel, Schismatrix (1985), Sterling also explored the effects of
cyberspace on the way users perceive both themselves and their environment.
Extremely aged members of a faction named Mechanist have been connected so long
to the stream of data in cyberspace that now they feel their consciuosness is
spread, just like their perception, over the entire solar system.
"With the loss of mobility comes
extension of the senses. If I want I can switch out to a probe in Mercurian
orbit. Or in the winds of Jupiter. I often do, in fact. Suddenly I'm there,
just as fully as I'm ever anywhere these days. The mind isn't what you think,
Mr. Dze. When you grip it with wires, it tends to flow. Data seem to bubble up
from some deep layer of the mind." [5]
With this
extension we also witness the loss of a basic distinction between the self and
the outside world. The body itself, as a basis of identity and consciousness,
and the distinction between oneself and the rest of the world tend to
dissipate:
"The wires bring changes,"
Ryumin said. "It all becomes a matter of input, you see. Systems. Data. We
tend towards solipsism; it comes with the territory." [6]
Neal
Stephenson, on the other hand, argued against the representation of cyberspace
as an infinite three-dimensional space where humans operate as disembodied
consciousnesses, and in his novel Snow Crash (1992) he proposed a
virtual system named the Metaverse.
Hiro is approaching the Street. It is
the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit
boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses
of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are
walking up and down it. [7]
Stephenson's
vision is based on an environment much more similar to the natural one. The
Metaverse is spherical, and various companies use its surface to construct virtual
buildings, whereas individual users appear as three-dimensional representations
that interact quite realistically.
Another
writer, Dan Simmons, took these visions one step further in a series of novels
known as The Hyperion Cantos. In the first one, Hyperion (1989),
Simmons achieved a postmodern version of The Canterbury Tales, where
several pilgrims have a story to tell, each in a different style and focusing
on a different theme, and all the stories contribute to the definition of a
shared background for the frame story. One such story, the detective's tale in
chapter 5, is entitled "The Long Good-Bye" and most of its action
takes place in a cyberspace dominated by god-like Artificial Intelligences that
form the so-called Techno-Core. It is precisely the difference between the
humans and the AIs, triggered by the different habitats where they live and
develop, that leads to the saga’s central conflict, which rages both throughout
the outer space and in the computer-generated Techno-Core. AIs and humans
perceive each other as fundamentally alien, and the bridges between the two are
few and frail. As a homage to the originator of cyberspace, the characters in
the story refer to a legendary figure, Cowboy Gibson, who not only went past
the defences of the Techno-Core, but also merged with it.
Writers,
however, imagined other uses for cyberspace except data storage and retrieval.
Virtual reality for instance can be used as a medium for social interaction.
Such is the case with characters in William Gibson's novel Idoru. Early
in the novel, the teenage protagonist Chia Pat Mackenzie takes part in a
meeting of a fan group which occurs in a virtual rainforest, whereas later on
she gains access to an illegal data haven that looks like a reconstruction of
Kowloon City in Hong Kong.
Neal
Stephenson's characters in Snow Crash also use the Metaverse for such
purposes. Representations of users, known as avatars, can interact in a club
called The Black Sun, among other places.
It doesn't pay to have a nice avatar on
the Street, where it's so crowded and all the avatars merge and flow into one
another. But The Black Sun is a much classier piece of software. In the Black
Sun, avatars are not allowed to collide. Only so many people can be here at
once, and they can't walk through each other. Everything is solid and opaque
and realistic. [8]
Virtual clubs are
also favoured by the characters in Pat Cadigan's novella "Tea From an
Empty Cup" (1997). The protagonist, a young woman named Yuki who is lost
in mental conversations with an absent acquaintance, Tom, gradually discovers
that beyond her virtual identity there lies a schizophrenic man with serious
problems of social integration, Iguchi Tomoyuki. Ironically, the social
interactions in virtual reality did nothing but aggravate Tomoyuki's mental
disease and misadaptation. Roleplaying in virtual spaces, Pat Cadigan tells her
readers between the lines, is only a simulacrum, and there is no way in which
it can replace going out, in the real world, and meeting real people in order
to share their joys and sorrows.
The new
medium is so useful for social interaction that, in Tom Maddox's novel Halo (1991),
artificial intelligences take human shape in cyberspace to interact and benefit
from the full range of periverbal and nonverbal elements of face-to-face
communication. This is a hint that, in the process of exploring new electronic
media, people might be in danger of paying less attention to the most ancient
and complex form of communication that is fundamental for keeping together
families and communities.
Virtual
reality can also be used for education, and Gibson was one of the first to
illustrate this direction as well. In Count Zero (1986), the protagonist
Bobby Newmark refers to the uses of cyberspace in school:
"You've
probably seen one of these before," Beauvoir said, as the man he called
Lucas put the projection tank down on the table, having methodically cleared a
space for it.
"In
school," Bobby said.(...) "They used one to teach us our way around
in the matnx, how to access stuff from the print library, like that..."
[9]
The
possibilities for education, formal or not, are vast. In novellas such as
"Mr. Boy" and in his novel Wildlife (1994), James Patrick
Kelly envisions a feasible system of education based on laptops linked to a
school's computer network. Pupils are supposed to do homework and research on
these laptops, and to get credits for it, irrespective of where they are.
In The Diamond
Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995), Neal Stephenson proposes
a high-tech version of the book, under the form of an interactive volume that
contains not only print, but also animated sequences and audio parts, as well
as a link to cyberspace. This book, originally destined to the education of a
prime-minister's grand-daughter, is illegally copied by its maker and ends up
by significantly changing the life of a poor girl, named Nell in honour of
Charles Dickens' character, then reshaping the entire society.
The most daring vision of education in
cyberspace, however, was the one expressed by the Australian author Greg Egan
in the novel Diaspora (1998). In it, characters use virtual reality to
explore geometric properties of space and re-discover mathematical concepts.
This space bears the name of Truth Mines, and offers both the opportunity to
learn what other mathematicians have proved before and to test one's own
theories.
In the Truth Mines, though, the tags
weren't just references; they included complete statements of the particular
definitions, axioms, or theorems the objects represented. The Mines were
self-contained: every mathematical result that fleshers and their descendants
had ever proven was on display in its entirety. The library's exegesis was
helpful - but the truths themselves were all here. [10]
References to
other such educational spaces appear as well, bur Egan only mentions these
spaces rather than describing them in detail.
Hundreds of thousands of specialized
selections of the library's contents were accessible in similar ways - and
Yatima had climbed the Evolutionary Tree, hopscotched the Periodic Table,
walked the avenue-like Timelines for the histories of fleshers, gleisners and
citizens. Half a megatau before, ve'd swum through the Eukaryotic Cell; every
protein, every nucleotide, every carbohydrate drifting through the cytoplasm
had broadcast gestalt tags with references to everything the library had to say
about the molecule in question. [11]
The cyberpunk writers’ preoccupation for the
educational uses of cyberspace came at a time when the media discussed here
were under development, and big corporations were already busy appropriating,
regulating and orienting large portions of the Internet. Bruce Sterling, for
one, spoke openly against turning the Internet into another profit-making
machine and in favour of dedicating portions of it to the children, as a place
where they can experiment and learn, mostly in order to make them adapt to the
new medium, use it and have a place in it in the future:
Kids need media that they can go places
with. They need the virtual equivalent of a kid’s bicycle. Training wheels for
cyberspace. Simple, easy machines. Self-propelled. And free. Kids need places
where they can talk to each other, talk back and forth naturally. They need
media that they can fingerpaint with, where they can jump up and down and
breathe hard, where they don’t have to worry about Mr. Science showing up in
his mandarin white labcoat to scold them for doing things not in the rulebook.
Kids need a medium of their own. A medium that does not involve a determined
attempt by cynical adult merchandisers to wrench the last nickel and quarter
from their small vulnerable hands. [12]
Ultimately, cyberspace was seen by many
writers as an environment for an alternative form of life. In William Gibson's Neuromancer,
for example, the protagonist Henry Case is accompanied in cyberspace by a
simulacrum, a program that speaks and acts like Dixie Flatline, Case's dead
mentor. Although this simulacrum does not exist in the physical world, in cyberspace
it acts on a more or less equal footing with the protagonist.
A more
gradual version of the same process of transfer from actual reality to
cyberspace features in Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. Extremely aged
characters who gradually merge with cyberspace are called either
"wireheads" or, with a more politically correct term, "Senior
Mechanists".
"We wireheads - or, rather, Senior
Mechanists, to give us a name not tainted by Shaper propaganda - we have our
own modes of dataflow. News networks. At its most intense it approaches
telepathy. (...) There's a whole world behind this screen. The lines have
blurred so much that mere matters of life and death have to take a back seat.
There are those among us whose brains broke down years ago: they totter along
on investments and programmed routines. If the fleshies knew, they'd declare
them legally dead. But we're not telling." [13]
This
process of consciousness transfer from the body to cyberspace seems to hold
special interest for the authors under discussion. In Pat Cadigan's short story
"Pretty Boy Crossover", published in Patterns (1989), the
entire process is focused on lines of fashion and pop music, but the
protagonist, albeit a superficial teenager, refuses to give up existence in
actual reality and the freedom of choice that comes along with it.
For Lise,
the female protagonist of William Gibson's "Winter Market", published
in Burning Chrome, uploading is like a liberation from a body that is
paralysed, a load of inert meat that moves around propped in an exoskeleton,
but it is also tinged with the sadness of separation from the company of other
human beings.
Greg Egan's
"Learning to Be Me", in the collection Axiomatic (1995),
explores the very definition of identity in a new context. The narrator tells
the story of growing up with an implant that is supposed to develop with his
brain, intercept all the processes going on inside it and copy them exactly.
The implant is supposed to replace the organic nervous system before it starts
to degenerate. In the end, the narratorial voice proves to belong to the
implant, and the self developped inside the organic brain, although sharing the
same memories and experiences, is nothing more than a stranger.
Egan
expanded his vision of life in cyberspace in two major novels, Permutation
City (1994) and Diaspora. The first one goes as far as to propose
the creation by mathematical means of another universe, inhabited by uploaded
human consciousnesses. This universe is generated by a six-dimensional version
of the John von Neumann automaton that can act both as a computer and a constructor that builds copies of itself. Diaspora
goes along the same line to explore life in polises, virtual communities of
citizens that are generated and exist only in cyberspace. The medium has gone
the full way from exotic novelty to all-engulfing environment.
In
retrospect, one can see how in a short interval, 1980-2000, cyberpunk and
postcyberpunk writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson
and the Australian Greg Egan explored in their fiction the possibilities of the
Internet, virtual reality and related technologies. The possibilities that they
wrote about range from data depositing and exchange to social interaction and
education, and in the the long run they even envisioned the possibility of an
alternative form of life in cyberspace. For the readers, the treatment of this
theme worked in the 1980s and 1990s as an early analysis, albeit in the form of
an entertaining kind of fiction, of new electronic media that were about to
emerge in the real world. These media, the authors argue, are on the verge of
changing the way that people think, work, interact and live. Contemplating now
and then the possibilities such media open will make it easier for us to adapt
to the oncoming changes.
Notes:
[1] William Gibson, Burning Chrome,
Ace Books, New York, 1987, pp. 169-170;
[2] William Gibson, Neuromancer,
Ace Books, New York, 1984, p. 51;
[3] William Gibson, Burning Chrome,
Ace Books, New York, 1987, p. 170;
[4] Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net, Ace Books,
New York, 1989, pp. 247-248;
[5] Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix,
Ace Books, New York, 1986, p. 179;
[6] Idem, p. 179;
[7] Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash,
Roc Books, London, 1993 p. 23;
[8] Idem, p. 51;
[9] William Gibson, Count Zero,
Ace Books, New York, 1987, p. 81;
[10] Greg Egan, Diaspora, Harper
Prism, New York, 1999, p. 46;
[11] Idem, pp. 45-46;
[12] Bruce Sterling, „Speech at the
National Academy of Sciences”, at the Convocation on Technology and Education,
Washington D. C., May 10, 1993;
[13] Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix,
Ace Books, New York, 1986, p. 179;
Bibliography:
1) Pat Cadigan, "Tea from an Empty
Cup", in Black Mist and Other Japanese Futures, edited by Orson
Scott Card and Keith Ferrell, Daw Books, New York, 1997;
2) Pat Cadigan, Patterns, Tor
Books, New York, 1999;
3) Greg Egan, Permutation City,
Millennium, Orion Books, London, 1994;
4) Greg Egan, Axiomatic,
Millennium, Orion Books, London, 1995;
5) Greg Egan, Diaspora, Harper
Prism, New York, 1999;
6) William Gibson, Neuromancer,
Ace Books, New York, 1984;
7) William Gibson, Count Zero,
Ace Books, New York, 1986;
8) William Gibson, Burning Chrome,
Ace Books, New York, 1987;
9) William Gibson, Idoru, Viking
Books, London, 1996;
10) James Patrick Kelly, Wildlife,
Tor Books, New York, 1994;
11) Tom Maddox, Halo, Tor Books,
New York, 1991;
12) Dan Simmons, Hyperion,
Bantam Books, New York, 1990;
13) Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash,
Roc Books, London, 1993;
14) Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age,
or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, Roc Books, London, 1996;
15) Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix,
Ace Books, New York, 1986;
16) Bruce Sterling, Islands in the
Net, Ace Books, New York, 1989;
17) Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire,
Bantam Books, New York, 1997.
18) Bruce Sterling and William Gibson,
Speeches at the National Academy of Sciences at the Convocation on Technology
and Education, Washington D. C., May 10, 1993, http://www.elf.org/pub/Global/America-US/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/sterling_gibson_nas.speeches,
June 24, 1998, 10:15:02 PM (top)
Ecological Degradation in (Post)Cyberpunk
Fiction
.
Cyberpunk fiction,
which developped in the USA and Canada in the 1980s, and its continuation in the 1990s, post-cyberpunk,
focused among other problems on the continuous degradation of our environment
and on the effects this degradation has on people. This preoccupation with
ecology has been present from the beginnings of the cyberpunk literary
movement, and has focused on various aspects of the environment, some of which
we are going to analyze here.
Land degradation, to
begin with, has been described mainly in two forms. On the one hand, early
cyberpunk fiction focused on the expansion of urban sprawls to the detriment of
fertile soil. Such examples can be found in William Gibson's cyberspace
trilogy, where the urban areas on the American eastern seaboard have merged
into one vast megalopolis, officially named BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta
Metropolitan Axis. Huge expanses of this urban space, however, consist in
abandoned industrial plants and toxic dumps that are not adequate for any kind
of life. Such is the case with Dog Solitude, an industrial area in Mona Lisa Overdrive, which a character
describes as follows:
"Gentry says it was a landfill operation a hundred
years ago. Then they laid down a lot of topsoil, but stuff wouldn't grow. A lot
of the fill was toxic. Rain washed the cover off." [1]
On the other hand, cyberpunk also
described the results of intensive farming and erosion in books such as Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams or Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling. Sterling's
descriptions of eroded topsoil that is being swept away in Tornado Alley are
extremely impressive, and reminiscent of similar scenes in The Grapes of Wrath.
The main interest in Heavy Weather, however, is not soil degradation, but the change of
weather patterns as a consequence of air pollution. Bruce Sterling argues
convincingly that due to the greenhouse effect, catastrophic weather events
such as El Nino have become both more frequent and more violent, and the trend
will continue in the near future.
I don't think it's
any accident that most of the
Air pollution also features
prominently in other works of cyberpunk fiction. Neuromancer's famous first sentence, "The sky above the port
was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel," [3], describes the
heavily polluted air above Tokyo bay in terms both concise and highly
evocative. Gibson outdoes his own imagery in the opening paragraphs of a later
novel, Virtual Light:
The air beyond the
window touches each source of light with a faint hepatic corona, a tint of
jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. [4]
Such pollution is typically fought
against with technological palliatives, such as filtration masks for people in
the streets and resistant windows for the buildings, or, in Gibson's words:
"layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic". [5]
No matter how technologically
sophisticated, however, these measures are inefficient. Walter Jon Williams's Hardwired, for example, features coastal
towns half-submerged due to the greenhouse effect and the melting of polar
icecaps, disaster areas ironically called "Venices". On the other
hand, in The Diamond Age Neal
Stephenson imagines an unexpected source of air pollution: huge numbers of
nanomachines locked in a deadly espionage conflict, whose infinitesimal debris,
too light to fall to the ground, float in the air and, when inhaled for years,
gradually choke people to death.
It was Neal Stephenson who also wrote Zodiac, cyberpunk's most documented book
on water pollution to date. Out of the numerous water pollutants, such as crude
oil spills, sewage waters and industrial waste, Stephenson chose to focus on
organic chlorine, a toxic chemical which tends to accumulate in aquatic
organisms, pass up the food chain and trigger cancer. As the novel's
protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, puts it in a nutshell:
"There are certain elements, like chlorine,
that are very good at breaking apart your genes. So if you're dumping something
in the environment that has a lot of available chlorine on it, you have to be a
fool not to realize it's cancer-causing."[6]
A similar concern for water
pollution, though not so clearly focused, is manifest throughout cyberpunk
fiction. In William Gibson's Neuromancer,
for instance, the waters of Tokyo Bay appear to be lifeless and heavily
polluted: "Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above
drifting shoals of white styrofoam."[7] The term "shoals",
usually associated with fish, applies here to the debris of a heavily
industrialized society. Ironically, the only seashore that looks clean and
pleasant in the entire novel is a construct in virtual reality.
So far, we have seen how cyberpunk
and post-cyberpunk fiction describe the forms that pollution takes on land, in
the air and in water. This type of fiction, however, also focuses on the
effects of such pollution over living organisms. Most such fiction takes place
in urban areas, and it tends to emphasize that plants, for example, have
largely disappeared with the exception of human-controlled micro-environments.
Such is the case with Virtual Light,
where a huge dome in Los Angeles is supported on three hollow tubes, one of
which is a multi-layered greenhouse for the rich and privileged.
All these trees in there, up all
through this sort of giant, hollow leg, and everything under this weird
filtered light came in through the sides.[8]
Such micro-environments appear in
other novels as well, mostly for life support purposes aboard space colonies.
This is the case in Vacuum Flowers by
Michael Swanwick, Halo by Tom Maddox
and Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling.
The precarious condition of such micro-ecologies is very well rendered in Schismatrix, and makes the readers more
aware of the need for balance in our own environment.
Mutant fungi had spread like oil
slicks, forming a mycelial crust beneath the surface of the soil. This gummy
crust repelled water, choking trees and grass. Dead vegetation was attacked by
rot. The soil grew dry, the air grew damp, and mildew blossomed on dying fields
and orchards, gray pinheads swarming into blotches of corruption, furred like
lichen. [9]
Sterling's descriptions of natural
landscapes and vegetation are also revelatory of the long-term impact that
pollution and irresponsibility exert over the environment. In Heavy Weather, for instance, this is how
he depicts Texas vegetation:
They were passing kilometer after
kilometer of crotch-high, tough-stemmed, olive-drab weeds with nasty little
flower clusters of vivid chemical yellow. Not the kind of hue one wanted in a
flower somehow; not inviting or pretty. A color one might expect from toxic
waste or mustard gas. [10]
While the author explicitly states,
time and again, that these plants are the tough survivors of changes in the
weather pattern, caused by the greenhouse effect on the one hand and by the
holes in the ozone layer on the other, here he also suggests that plants
accumulate toxic substances that will probably be passed up the food chain.
Neal Stephenson analyzes a similar process in Zodiac, where chloride passes and gradually accumulates with a
devastating effect from seawater to plankton, then to crabs, lobsters and fish,
and finally to fishermen.
If plants are scarce in cyberpunk
fiction, animals, and especially large mammals, seem to have disappeared for
decades. Some characters in Neuromancer,
for instance, walk by a stuffed horse in Istanbul, and one of them remarks:
"It's a
horse, man. You ever see a horse? [...] Saw one in Maryland once," the
Finn said, "and that was a good three years after the pandemic. There's
Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always
croak."[11]
The characters suffer from a subliminal guilt for the disappearance of
so many animal species, which is why they fantasize for instance that, as they
pass by, the stuffed horse's glass eyes follow them with a reproachful look.
And feelings of guilt are not the
only consequences of ecocide that characters in cyberpunk fiction have to
undergo. In Heavy Weather, the
protagonist Alex Unger suffers from a wide range of allergies, most of them
triggered by airborne particles, as well as from a resistant strain of
tuberculosis. Harv, a secondary character in The Diamond Age, faces death in his early twenties because his
lungs are coated with the debris of nanomechanisms. For both characters,
survival depends largely on expensive medical treatment and supplies of oxygen,
whereas characters who lead a "normal" life need to use micropore
masks every time they go out. Feeding on fish from contaminated waters or
living on toxic dumps also endangers their health and life. And, as cyberpunk
fiction makes it painfully clear, once the environment is polluted, there is
nowhere left to go.
By treating such themes as pollution
and its consequences over people, animals and plants, (post)cyberpunk
literature exerted an informative and educative role on the reading public in
the 1980s and 1990s. Some cyberpunk writers, especially Bruce Sterling, have
taken the next step and started an ecological movement named Viridian Green
which aims at pooling environment-friendly projects and solutions and offering
them to the general public, in an effort to prevent such aspects of
extrapolative fiction from turning completely into reality.
Notes:
[1] William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, p. 155;
[2] Dwight Brown, Lawrence Person and Michael Sumbera,
"Under Heavy Weather: An Interview with Bruce Sterling";
[3] William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 3;
[4] William Gibson, Virtual Light, p. 1;
[5] Idem;
[6] Neal Stephenson, Zodiac, p. 84;
[7] William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 6;
[8] William Gibson, Virtual Light, p. 275;
[9] Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, p. 17;
[10] Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather, p. 33;
[11] William Gibson, Neuromancer, pp. 91-92.
Bibliography:
1) Dwight Brown,
2) William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Books,
3) William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Bantam Books, New York, 1989;
4) William Gibson, Virtual Light, Penguin Books, London, 1994;
5) Tom Maddox, Halo, Tor Books, New York, 1991;
6) Neal Stephenson, Zodiac, the Eco-Thriller, Penguin Books,
1997;
7) Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer, Penguin Books, 1996;
8) Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, Ace Books, New York, 1986;
9) Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather, Bantam Books, New York, 1994;
10) Michael Swanwick, Vacuum Flowers, Ace Books, New York,
1988;
11) Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired, Tor Books, New York, 1987. (top)
.
Charles Babbage and the Difference Engine – An Alternative History
In 1990, two American authors who up to that
time had been remarked for novels where they extrapolated contemporary trends
and technologies and built possible near futures published a book entitled The
Difference Engine, translated by Nemira Publishing House under the title Machina
diferenþialã. The two authors, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, surprised
the reading public with the fact that they explored the opposite direction,
imagining an alternative past rather than a possible future.
The novel under
discussion explores facets of a Victorian world not as it was, but as it might
have been if the mathematician Charles Babbage had completed his projects to
build a mechanical computer, the so-called Analytical Engine. In fact, between
1820-1822 Babbage built a calculating machine with which he generated
logarithmic tables for astronomy and navigation, then designed a Difference
Engine with punched cards. Unfortunately, before achieving this project,
Babbage imagined a much more powerful computing device, the Analytical Engine,
which he never completed because, before finishing a prototype he would design
new methods for its extension improvement. The project was also extremely
difficult because Babbage was forced by the time’s technology to use mechanical
means. Later on, halfway through the twentieth century, mathematicians such as
Alan Turing used Babbage’s plans and designs in order to build the first
computers with the help of the new electric and electronic technologies.
In
Gibson and Sterling’s novel, however, under Ada Byron’s influence, Charles
Babbage has built the Difference Engine, and the information revolution has
arrived a century earlier. In an interview, Bruce Sterling has motivated the
choice, saying that the Victorian age is a laboratory model for the twentieth
century, since on a historical scale one can see the social shocks of a
technological revolution. Therefore, in order to emphasize the dramatic changes
of contemporary society triggered by information and telecommunication
technologies, Gibson and Sterling placed these technologies in an imaginary
nineteenth century. The result is a very special alternative history.
In
order to write this book, the two authors used an impressive range of
historical, literary and technological detail. The historical context is the
year 1855, in a period of relative internal stability immediately after the
Crimean War. This stability was based on a series of political and social
reforms, resulting from a wish to avoid conflicts such as those in the
so-called Time of Troubles.
As
a possible result of these social conflicts in the 1830s, Gibson and Sterling
imagined a revolution triggered by a Radical Party, led by Lord George Gordon
Byron, based on Babbage’s mechanical calculator and on the concept of
meritocracy. In this alternative Victorian age, access to the House of Lords is
granted on the basis of scientific merit, and it is reserved to people such as
the biologists Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley or the mathematician Ada
Byron.
The
stability of Prime Minister Byron’s regime, however, relies not on social
reforms as much as on a vast oppressive system oriented towards population
surveillance, files of data on citizens in the Police computers, and, in the
case of dissidents such as the atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley, secret
assassination and destruction of the corpses. When such oppressive methods get
to be used by political adventurers for personal profit, their initiator,
already in the grip of doubt and guilt, finds himself in danger and takes
desperate measures.
As
a primary literary source, the American authors used Sybil or The Two
Nations(1845) by Benjamin Disraeli. Characters from the aforementioned
novel, such as Sybil Gerard, Charles Egremont and Mick Radley, also appear in The
Difference Engine, except this time, by a method that Jorge Luis Borges
called „partial magic”, these characters as just as real as the „ghostwriter”
Benjamin Disraeli. Their destinies intersect those of diplomatic personalities,
such as Laurence Oliphant, or artistic ones, such as John Keats.
Another
literary source is The French Lieutenant’s Woman(1967) by John Fowles. The
Difference Engine is closely related with this novel in point of narrative
technique, as the plot and characters represent a pretext for the profusion of
quotations and allusions on each page. If Fowles’s novel brought a liberated
female character, typical for the twentieth century, into a nineteenth-century
context, Gibson and Sterling transferred into the same context a whole
information revolution, accompanied by plausible social consequences. As an
acknowledgement of the influence exerted by the British author, one of the
iterations in The Difference Engine, „Seven Curses”, features two
alternative endings.
Last,
but not least, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel shows the influence of
the USA (1930-1936) trilogy by John Dos Passos. The Difference Engine
deals not with a protagonist, but with several characters who intersect one
another repeatedly, and at the same time the book creates the impression of a
cyclic social evolution from chaos to order and then back to chaos along
several decades. In order to bring homage to this literary influence, the novel
ends with a section entitled "Modus" that puts together, in Joh Dos
Passos’ characteristic style, fragments of articles, memoirs, poems, letters,
theatre posters. Although apparently chaotic, the fragments contain information
which completes this imaginary world’s mosaic, rounding off each character’s
destiny.
As
regards technology, Gibson and Sterling reverted a literary method that they
had used frequently in previous novels. In the cyberpunk literary genre which
they made famous, technologies that in actual reality are either a design or a
prototype are described as ubiquitous and already obsolete in a possible near
future. In the case of The Difference Engine, the two authors performed
a minute research on nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century artifacts
and technologies and described them as last-minute novelties. Good examples in
this respect could be the puched cards for mechanical computers, the bicycle,
or the streamlined motor vehicle.
Along
the same line, Gibson and Sterling imagined mechanical equivalents of
contemporary technologies, amongst which the most frequent to occur is
"kinotropy", an imaginary ancestor of computer animation. The
combined impact of these technologies is enormous. The oppressive regime
instituted by Lord Byron’s Radical Party is made possible by the huge
Difference Engines of the Police. The American states are kept in a permanent
division thanks to the smuggled British repetition rifles. John Keats, after
many decades of kinotropy, regards with mild contempt the fact that he used to
"versify" as a young man. And a program conceived by Ada Byron leads
to the emergence of the first artificial intelligence.
Up
to this point, the Difference Engine may have seemed a vast mosaic of
elements that do not fit too well with one another and do not form a seamless
whole. On the first reading, the novel creates exactly this impression of
fragmentariness, rather than unity. The unifying factor exists, except that, as
the plot unfolds, this factor is present at an almost subliminal level and
becomes manifest only on the last pages.
The Difference Engine
follows the emergence of the first artificial intelligence, and it is this
non-human entity who, by using ancient information preserved in a fragmentary
form, seeks to put together the story of its own origin. The human characters
appear only insofar as their existence was linked to the creation,
transportation and running of the initiating program. In this respect, the
novel runs against the readers’ horizon of expectation. The Difference
Engine is an alternative history in more ways than one. It is not only
another social, cultural, political and technological history, different from
the real one but at the same time eerily similar in places. It is another
history also because it represents the story of an artificial intelligent
entity, and the history’s strangeness reflects this non-human presence
extremely suggestively.
Bibliography:
1) Jorge Luis
Borges, “Partial Magic in Don Quijote”, Other Investigations, in Opere
3, translation by Cristina Hãulicã,
Univers,
2) Benjamin
Disraeli, Sybil or The Two Nations, Wordsworth Classics,
3) John Dos
Passos, USA, The 42nd Parallel, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1963;
4) John Fowles, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, Jonathan Cape Ltd.,
5) William Gibson
& Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, Vista Books, London, 1996.
6) Thomas Myer,
"SF Site at LoneStarCon 2", 29 august 1997,
http://www.sfsite.com/09a/bru16.htm, 30.01.2110 (top)
Fictional Representations of the Shift
in Family
Patterns
in the
Information Society
In his best-selling book on the advent
of the information society, The Third
Wave (1981), Alvin Toffler analyzed, among other things, the family
patterns specific to various types of societies. In agricultural societies, for
instance, which he calls The First Wave, he states that the typical family
consists of a patriarchal structure with numerous children, relatives and
generations, all living under the same roof. Such a family fulfils a number of
functions, such as child birth and upbringing, education, work, medical care
for the ill and the old, etc.
In industrial societies on the other hand,
which Toffler calls The Second Wave, the typical family is the so-called
‘nuclear one’: housewife and husband with a job, plus a relatively small number
of children. With the advent of the Third Wave, or information society, Toffler
argues that the nuclear family has ceased to represent the dominant pattern,
and that it was replaced sometime in the late 1970s in the United States and
Western Europe by a variety of other patterns which include singles, divorcees,
remarried couples and single parents raising children. Toffler's point is that
on the one hand there will be no more single dominant pattern in family
relationships, and on the other hand, an individual's life will consist in
changing one pattern for another and another over relatively short intervals of
time. In his book Megatrends (1984),
John Naisbitt makes a similar point, noting that there is a multiplicity of
choices regarding family life, and the focus seems to have shifted away from families
onto individuals, as attested by the growing number of single people, divorcees
and single parents who raise children.
Cyberpunk
fiction, which emerged in the early 1980s, focused precisely on emerging trends
such as the ones identified by Toffler and Naisbitt. In the preface to the
anthology Mirrorshades (1986), the
unofficial chairman of the cyberpunk literary movement, Bruce Sterling, made a
direct reference to Toffler's book in particular, to a technical revolution
"based not in hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in
fluidity." [Mirrorshades, p. X,
HarperCollins,
One of the factors in this major
change of family relations, alongside with computers, development of service
industries, and increasing wealth, is women's growing interest throughout the
twentieth century, and especially in the last three decades, in establishing
careers and professional lives outside the home. Female characters illustrating
this trend in cyberpunk fiction include Laura Webster and Marie-France Tessier
from Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net(1988)
and William Gibson’s Neuromancer(1984),
respectively.
At the beginning of Islands in the Net, Laura Webster is
happily married, working for Rizome Corporation with her husband David, and
raising her daughter. The only thing that she resents is that, when she herself
was a girl, her mother left in pursuit of her professional life and it was a
grandmother who raised Laura. Ironically enough, Laura Webster is swept away in
corporate intrigue that carries her from
Marie-France Tessier, a character in
William Gibson's Neuromancer,
achieves even more than Laura Webster. Her outstanding talent in the field of
cybernetics leads her to the creation of two world-class artificial
intelligences, which in turn help to the emergence of the powerful aristocratic
clan of the Tessier-Ashpools, a sort of one-family multinational trust. However,
Marie-France's creative genius causes her husband's envy, who murders her in
cold blood.
As a result of factors such as the
ones discussed above, there occur various changes in marital relations. Some
changes of this sort are mild, for instance the Websters in Islands in the Net share professional,
household and parental tasks equally, at least until Laura is forced to go on
her world-wide tour. Other shifts are profound, for instance the ones described
in Jack Womack's satiric novel Ambient
(1987), where plutocrats take their wives, children and underage mistresses to
the church of Elvis and then to sado-masochistic birthday parties. The most
extreme cyberpunk views on marriage were probably illustrated in Bruce
Sterling's Schismatrix (1985), a
novel where the human race has divided into bio-technologically oriented
Shapers and machinery-developing Mechanists. Shapers have clones and genelines,
rather than children and families, whereas some Mechanist cartels impose
policewives on their members, women who have the combined duties of companions,
spies and wives in the harem of the cartel's leader, Michael Carnassus.
Individuals such as the novel's protagonist, Abelard Lindsay, may in turn get
involved in one type of marriage or the other, as well as other types of
relations, like the cloning of a wife in case the original is killed in the
Shaper/Mechanist cold war.
Quite a lot of the cyberpunk
characters have discarded the concept of marriage altogether, and prefer free
unions. This is the case with John Shirley's novel City Come A-Walkin' (1980, revised edition 1996), where rock singer
Catz Wailen and club owner Stu Cole share some romance and a lot of violent
incidents in a surrealist plot. Other such couples are the rock star with a new
identity, Ryder, and would-be musician Frida in Richard Kadrey's Kamikaze L'Amour (1995), or researcher
Greta Penninger and political campaigner Oscar Valparaiso in Bruce Sterling's Distraction (1998). In Jeff Noon's
surrealist novel Vurt (1993), such a
couple, Suze and Tristan, even braids their hair together in dreadlocks for
fear of being separated from one another. For them, it is more important to be
together physically than legally.
Probably the most well-known free
union in cyberpunk fiction, however, consists in Henry Case and Molly Millions,
the protagonists of William Gibson's Neuromancer.
They establish their union not only on a number of interests, sexual, material
and informational, but also on the special applications of a technology called
sim-stim, or simulation of stimuli, which allows Case to experience whatever
physical sensations Molly undergoes. Originally, the author conceived sim-stim
as a technical excuse for channel-swapping between two narrative threads, but
later critics hailed the way Molly and Case use it as a new kind of intimacy
between sexes, and even as a technological equivalent of androgyny.
Other free unions in cyberpunk
fiction are not even monogamous. Such is the situation in Wilhelmina Baird's Crashcourse (1993), where burglar
Cassandra, junk artist Moke and drag-queen Dosh form a highly unstable love
triangle; in Richard Kadrey's Metrophage
(1988), in which protagonist Jonny Qabbala forms a triangle with Ice and
Sumimasen; or in Melissa Scott's Trouble
and Her Friends (1994), where the female protagonist Trouble and her
girlfriend Cerise share both a love affair and a career as computer hackers.
Ironically, however, in Gibson's All
Tomorrow's Parties (1999), the fact that the male character Fontaine has
two wives and children from them seems to encourage him to spend most of the
time away from home, mostly alone in his little shop of antiquities.
The definition
of a family might expand even further to cover apartment sharing, a growing
trend in the last two or three decades in developed countries. Many cyberpunk characters are adepts of this
lifestyle. Probably among the best-known examples are Automatic Jack and Bobby
Quine in William Gibson's short story "Burning Chrome" (1981), who
share a loft. Sybil Gerard and Hetty share a small apartment in Whitechapel in
the recursive novel The Difference Engine
(1990), co-written by Gibson and
Under such conditions of countless
marriages broken, or radically re-defined, parenting and child-raising also
suffer various changes, and cyberpunk fiction illustrates these changes as
well. A widely-spread pattern is the one of single parents raising their
children. This is the case of Marsha Momma, who lives with her son Bobby
Newmark in a poor area in William Gibson's novel Count Zero (1986), or of Unger, the rich old man who raises his
children Jane and Alex but, contrary to his wish to stay together and form a
family, sees them leave and get into health and environment problems in Bruce
Sterling's Heavy Weather (1994).
Other examples might include Neal Stephenson's female protagonist YT in Snow Crash, who is raised by her
divorced mother, or Bruce Sterling's character Leggy Stalitz from Zeitgeist (2000), whose ex-lover decides
she has had enough of their teenage daughter and it is Leggy's turn to take
care of her for a while. Probably the most extreme case of such a situation in
cyberpunk fiction could be found in James Patrick Kelly's Wildlife (1994), where artist Tony Cage raises his daughter Wynne
by himself, and decades later she raises a child of her own, Peter, and also
Tony's clone version.
Sometimes child care becomes the
responsibility of relatives other than the parents, and this trend too is amply
illustrated in cyberpunk fiction. Sarah, the female protagonist of Walter Jon
Williams's Hardwired (1986), runs
away from an alcoholic father and takes on the difficult task of raising her
traumatized younger brother. In Angel
Station (1989), another of Williams's novels, a suicidal father leaves Ubu
Roy and his sister Beautiful Maria to take care of each other. Ambient's protagonist, Seamus O'Malley,
was raised by his elder sister and shares an apartment and a club with her.
Prabir, the protagonist of Greg Egan's Teranesia
(1999), saves and raises his younger sister Madhusree. Harv, a teenage
character from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995), also protects his
younger sister Nell from the brutal actions of their mother's violent lovers,
but most importantly, he provides her with an interactive book that will change
the course of her life and of their entire civilization as well. This gesture
of offering her a stolen book, devoid of importance as it may appear at first,
opens up for Nell the way towards education, self-improvement, and ascension in
society. The same book, multiplied and given to countless other orphan girls,
paves the way to radical social changes in the novel’s final chapters. Harv
acts not only as a substitute father, but also, unknowingly, as a catalyst for
the advent of a revolution.
In some cases, those who take care of
children or teenagers are not even relatives, as in the cases discussed above,
but complete strangers. For instance, the Artificial Kid, a new personality
inhabiting a rejuvenated body in the homonymous novel published by Bruce
Sterling in 1980, is raised and trained by the asexuate Professor Crossbow.
Mona, the title character in William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive, was raised by an old man who kept pointing out
that he wasn't her father whenever she called him that. Chevette Washington,
the protagonist of Virtual Light (1993)
and All Tomorrow's Parties, is
rescued from disease and starvation by Skinner, and old ex-biker who lives in a
room built on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, and later on she takes care of him
as his physical and mental health erode with age.
Unfortunately, sometimes no kind
relatives or strangers are available for the task of child upbringing, and
children are abandoned. A significant number of cyberpunk characters are abandoned in childhood. In Neuromancer, Case's childhood memories
include no references to parents or family, whereas Molly's focus on images of
living with other abandoned children in insalubrious conditions, under the
threat of rats. Angie Mitchell is also abandoned by her father, a top
researcher in Count Zero. More
relevant yet is the fate of Colin Laney, the protagonist in Gibson's Idoru (1996), who, while being raised in
an orphanage, was subjected to an experimental drug which allows him to detect
patterns in the flow of data, but also has side-effects leading to mental
deterioration.
One result of all the changes and
shifts of family patterns may well be that in the future people will have to
spend a significant part of their lives 
living by
themselves, either after leaving their parents, or between marriages, or when
they grow old. Statistically speaking, the number of households comprising a
single individual has increased dramatically over the last three decades.
Cyberpunk fiction illustrates this trend as well, as some of its characters
lead lonely, isolated lives. Sometimes such lonely characters are young, like
Angie Mitchell in William Gibson's Mona
Lisa Overdrive. Sometimes they are adults more preoccupied with career than
with family life, such as Mary Choy in Greg Bear's Queen of Angels (1990) and Slant
(1997), or Dore Konstantin in Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup (1998). Sometimes they are old, like Cobb
Anderson, the retired mathematician in Rudy Rucker's Software (1982) or the Finn, who appears throughout Gibson's
cyberspace trilogy.
According to futurologists such as
Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt, in post-industrial societies the dominant
industrial model of a nuclear family gave way over the last three decades to a
great variety of family patterns, quite a few of which are unconventional, some
of which even undesirable, but all of which are significant statistically and
sociologically. On examining all the cases above, one sees that cyberpunk
fiction, an honest effort to deal with actual trends in contemporary society,
reflected this variety of family patterns from real life in a similar variety
of fictitious family relations among literary characters.
Bibliography:
1) Wilhelmina Baird, Crashcourse, ROC, Penguin Books,
2) Greg Bear, Queen
Angel, Warner Books,
3) Greg Bear, Slant,
Tor Books,
4) Pat Cadigan, Tea
from an Empty Cup, Tor Books,
5) Greg Egan, Teranesia,
Millennium Books,
6) William Gibson, Neuromancer,
Ace Books,
7) William Gibson, Count
Zero, Ace Books,
8) William Gibson, Burning
Chrome, Ace Books,
9) William Gibson, Mona
Lisa Overdrive, Bantam Books,
10) William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, Vista Books,
11) William Gibson, Virtual Light, Penguin Books,
12) William Gibson, Idoru, Viking, Penguin Books,
13) William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties, G.P. Putnam's Sons,
14) Richard Kadrey, Metrophage, Victor Gollancz,
15) Richard Kadrey, Kamikaze L'Amour, St. Martin's Press,
16) James Patrick Kelly, Wildlife, Tor Books,
17) John Naisbitt, Megatrends,
Warner Books,
18) Jeff Noon, Vurt,
Pan Books,
19) Rudy Rucker, Software,
Avon Books,
20) Melissa Scott, Trouble
and Her Friends, Tor Books,
21) John Shirley, City
Come A-Walkin', Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000;
22) Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, ROC, Penguin Books,
23) Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, ROC, Penguin Books,
24) Bruce Sterling, The Artificial Kid, HardWired,
25) Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, Ace Books,
26) Bruce Sterling (editor), Mirrorshades, HarperCollins,
27) Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net, Ace Books,
28) Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather, Bantam Books,
29) Bruce Sterling, Distraction, Bantam Books,
30) Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist, Bantam Books,
31) Alvin Toffler, The
Third Wave, Bantam Books,
32) Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired, Tor Books,
33) Walter Jon Williams, Angel Station, Tor Books,
34) Jack Womack, Ambient,
Grove Press,
in William Gibson's Fiction
In William
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy and the related stories published in Burning Chrome
(1986), memory as an attribute of computers constitutes a realm in its own right,
a computer-generated environment called "matrix" [1] or
"cyberspace" [2]. This medium combines the complexity of the Internet
as we have it twenty years later and the graphic characteristics of virtual
reality, a technology inspired by Gibson's fiction. Since I have already
explored various representations of cyberspace in cyberpunk fiction in another
essay [3], here I will examine memory in Gibson's works from a different angle,
one that the author himself finds considerably more interesting.
Although the environment of
cyberspace was hailed back in 1984 as visionary or revolutionary, and computer
researchers such as Jaron Lanier hastened to create the technologies that
enable us to have a similar device - virtual reality - William Gibson did not intend
this notion as a serious technological proposal, but rather as a metaphor for
humankind's collective memory as expressed in the media: vast, incredibly
complex, fluid.
It just seems so obvious to me, but
people like those guys at Autodesk who're building cyberspace - I can't believe
it: they've almost got it - they just don't understand. My hunch is that what I
was doing was trying to come up with some kind of metaphor that would express
my deepest ambivalence about media in the twentieth century. [4]
In this respect, cyberspace is far
from being the only form in which human memory manifests itself in Gibson's
fiction. On the contrary, memories of various characters spring up on almost
every page of Gibson's literary work, triggered by other characters, places,
situations, dialogues, random fragments of information or mere objects.
Sometimes, which is more puzzling, only the objects themseves are left, and
other characters attempt to use them in order to recreate the memories and
states of spirit of the original owners or users. This special form of
archaeology leads to a key emotional effect on readers, which is why, in the
following paragraphs, we are going to explore the relationship between objects,
memory and nostalgia.
In William Gibson's fiction, things
are either brand new or relics, foci of nostalgia, or sometimes simulacra,
surrogates that mimic the real thing but are fundamentally fake.
The first situation could be
illustrated with items from the shopping list of Henry Case, the protagonist in
Neuromancer (1984):
They'd left the place littered with
the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film
and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono Sendai; next year's most expensive
Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun
coffeemaker. [5]
The characters' attitude to the new,
expensive gadgets, which are not only tools to perform covert operations but
also objects of craving and desire, is best expressed by Case's deranged employer,
Armitage:
"Now go down to the freight
elevator and bring up the cases you find there. (...) Go on. You'll enjoy this,
Case. Like Christmas morning." [6]
The second situation, where objects
appear as relics, could be illustrated with an episode in Count Zero.
One of the characters, Marly Krushkova, looks at disused letterboxes at the
entrance of a building.
Beyond the dark entrance, one of
Gibson's defamiliarization of
everyday things such as letterboxes suggests how much the near-future mail has
shifted from paper to electronic, and Marly's nostalgic attitude is compounded
by her professional preoccupation with similar relics - the junk-art collage
boxes produced by Joseph Cornell.
The last situation, simulacrum
instead of authentic things, is probably best exemplified with artifacts Case
encounters in Julius Deane's office:
Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust
against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled
table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in
scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases,
its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms
that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it
never told the correct time. [8]
The Dali clock, especially, is a
simulacrum of a simulacrum, an artifact constructed after a painting which
pretends to represent a clock. Unlike the "original", however, it
also functions as an actual clock, albeit an unreliable one.
In Gibson's imaginary worlds,
moreover, objects do not appear only as novelties, or relics, or simulacra, but
sometimes go through two of these stages, or even through all three. The
cyberspace decks that Automatic Jack builds are an illustrative case. In the
short story "Burning Chrome", they are described as experimental
prototypes:
I knew every chip in Bobby's
simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the
"Cyberspace Seven", but I'd rebuilt it so many times you'd have had a
hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.
[9]
A decade and a
half later in the internal chronology of this imaginary world, the same
artifacts are treated as relics. The elderly character Jammer keeps one such
cyberspace deck because it makes him nostalgic about his youth in the bar The Gentleman
Loser, with other "console cowboys", and the deck comes along with
memories he tells about to young Bobby Newmark:
"Thing's ten years old and
it'll still wipe ass on most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it
straight up from scratch. He was Bobby Quine's hardware artist, once. The two
of 'em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were
born." [10]
This nostalgic memory triggers a
similar mood in readers who recollect the events in "Burning Chrome"
after a few years. On the other hand, a new generation of console cowboys, who
has nothing to do with these events or the group in the Gentleman Loser,
manifests a completely different attitude to Jammer's technological relic:
"Why the hell anybody plug the
likes of you into a deck like that? Thing ought to be in a museum, you ought
to be in grade school." [11]
As in numerous other cases in
Gibson's fiction, however, the "museum piece" turns out to be more
than meets the eye, and it becomes instrumental in the novel's denouement.
The link between novelties and relics
is not unilateral, either. The Finn's junk shop, a place frequently visited and
revisited in the Sparwl trilogy, is full of technological antiquities. These
relics and fragments serve however as camouflage for extremely new artifacts.
Such is the case with a Russian advanced computer program in "Burning
Chrome", scanning devices in Neuromancer, experimental biochips and
artful boxes in Count Zero. The objects themselves, or the visitors'
casual remarks, serve as points of beginning for the Finn's stories, which in
their turn help introduce background elements to the readers.
"Tessier-Ashpool S.A.,"
said the Finn. "And I got a little story for you about them. Wanna
hear?" He sat down and hunched forward.
"Finn," Molly said.
"He loves a story."
"Haven't ever told anybody this
one," the Finn began. [12]
The shop, with its collection of
fragmentary relics, is simulated later on in Neuromancer in amazing detail
by an artificial intelligence, Wintermute, who needs the environment and the
Finn's image as an interface to communicate with Case, one of his agents in
actual reality. Ironically, in the trilogy's final novel, Mona Lisa
Overdrive (1988), the Finn himself turns into a construct, a software
simulacrum of the character's mind and memories uploaded in cyberspace.
Possibly the most spectacular example
of the novelty/relic/simulacrum process is Freeside, a space habitat built and
owned by the Tessier-Ashpool plutocratic family. In the trilogy's first novel, Neuromancer,
Freeside is fashionable and popular, glamorous, the space equivalent of a Club
Med seaside resort.
Freeside. Freeside is many things,
not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well.
Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town
and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital
Seven or eight years down the
timeline, in Count Zero, Freeside is abandoned, empty, haunted,
inhabited only by isolated squatters such as mentally deranged Wigan Ludgate
and by the equally deranged artificial intelligence that crafts the wonderful
boxes Marly Krushkova and her employer are after. If the space station has the
appearance of a relic at this point, so does the self-assembled box-maker:
Like Jones, she caught herself on
the thing's folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl
of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers,
hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist's drill... They
bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction
remote, the sort of unmanned, semiautonomous device she knew from childhood
videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome,
its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic
lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with
delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an
unfinished box. [14]
After another eight years in this
chronology, in Mona Lisa Overdrive,
Freeside has become a cyberspace simulation, fit for outcasts such as
Slick Henry and Gentry to explore in search of the source of their unwanted
troubles which they find in Villa Strayight.
In Neuromancer, Freeside
contains the Gothic, arcane Villa Straylight, residence of the Tessier-Ashpool
clan. Inside it, the walls and floors are uneven, the structure of rooms is
insanely arcane, corridors wind back and forth around other corridors, and art
objects are treated like junk. William Gibson himself finds it highly ironic
that the Tessier-Ashpools are so rich and eccentric that, for instance, they
have one of Marcel Duchamp's most famous constructs and treat it with
indifference:
There had been (...) a crowded
gallery where Case had stared, through Molly's incurious eyes, at a shattered,
dust-stenciled sheet of glass, a thing labeled - her gaze had tracked the brass
plaque automatically - "La mariée mise à nu par
ses célibataires, mème". She'd reached out and touched this, her artificial
nails clicking against the Lexan sandwich protecting the broken glass. [15]
The Tessier-Ashpools are eclectic in
tastes, which is why Marcel Duchamp's construct is displayed in a gallery that
also contains exhibits of a very different nature. A psychopathic secondary
character, Peter Riviera, possesses the ability to make other people see what
he imagines, and Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool has holograms made of
Memories need not be traumatic, but
Gibson's characters sometimes go obsessively over artifacts and relics in
search of some unitary meaning. In "New Rose Hotel", left isolated in
a cheap hotel room not much bigger than a coffin, the protagonist begins by
remembering in detail the objects in his lost lover's purse and memories of her
actions connected with those items, then goes over her unusual shopping list:
You left me all your things.
This gun. Your makeup, all the
shadows and blushes capped in plastic. Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox,
with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each
item cross the little silver screen.
A freezer. A fermenter. An
incubator. An electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and
transluminator. A tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A
flow cytometer. A spectro-photometer. Four gross of borosilicate scintillation
vials. A microcentrifuge. And one DNA
synthesizer, with in-built computer. Plus software. [16]
The anonymous narrator shares this
attitude with two other characters. They seem to have gone from dissimulating
their past from others to completely losing their sense of identity, as they
are agents in the global war among multinational corporations and frequently
change their location, identification documents and appearance. Sandii, the
lost lover, constructs another imaginary past for herself every night she
spends with the narrator. Fox, his partner, tries to compensate for the loss of
identity by re-arranging his personal items:
My own past had gone down years
before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox's late-night habit of
emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He'd lay the pieces
out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew
what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods. [17]
Unlike the other two characters,
however, the protagonist does not use the items on his list only as foci of
nostalgia. The shopping list triggers memory fragments that help the readers
reconstruct the plot's events, and it finally provides the method by which
Sandii acted out a multinational's revenge against a defector.
Besides providing solutions for
puzzling events in the past, objects in Gibson's fiction sometimes offer compensation
for trauma or relief from psychological sufferance. In Mona Lisa Overdrive,
Slick Henry was the victim of experimentation in a chemo-penal unit, where he
was subjected to a simulation of Korsakov's syndrome. This treatment broke his
subjective perception of time into five-minute chunks and prevented his
short-term memories from turning into medium- and long-term ones. After release
from prison, he sometimes has relapses. As a form of healing, he takes to
planning and constructing remote-controlled robots for the simple pleasure of
documenting each stage of their planning and construction, and remembering his
every action in the process of building them.
When he'd gotten out, when it was
over - three years strung out in a long vague flickering chain of fear and
confusion measured off in five-minute intervals, and it wasn't the intervals
you could remember so much as the transitions... When it was over, he'd needed
to build the Witch, the Corpsegrinder, then the Investigators, and finally,
now, the Judge. [18]
If relics focus individual memories
and provide relief from trauma, they also get to reconstruct collective
memories and provide relief from boredom. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, the
butler Petal shows little Kumiko Kanaka a holographic toy with miniature air
raids above
"Here's a lovely thing,"
Petal said, touching a rosewood cube the size of Kumiko's head. "
The artifact was originally designed
to be marketed at the celebration of a century from the end of World War Two.
At the moment, however, Kumiko sees it only as a relic, fit for a country that
treats all of its relics with nostalgia, and as a useful method for attracting
tourists.
London's relationship to gomi was more
subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi
, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its
relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed,
even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands
in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own
right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it. [20]
Since 1993,
beginning with works such as "Skinner's Room" and Virtual Light,
William Gibson has returned time and time again to an environment built of the
main society's relics and junk. This vision developped from the image of the
Skinner had showed her pictures of
the La
Sometimes the relics Skinner keeps
are simply fragments of a long-lost artifact, and they no longer serve their
original purpose. Possibly the most memorable example is that, in his youth,
Skinner used to be part of a motorcycle gang in
She sees another fire, in memory:
coke glow of a smith's forge, driven by the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner. Beside
her the old man held the drive chain of some extinct motorcycle, folded neatly
into a compact mass and fastened with a twist of rusty wire. To be taken in the
smith's tongs and placed within the forge. To be beaten, finally, incandescent,
into a billet of their strangely grained
Where did that knife go? she
wonders. [22]
In such a community of outcasts, where
relics are recycled and given creative new purposes, Gibson introduced,
ironically, an antiquity shop the owner of which, Fontaine, shares with the
author an interest in antique watches. This, however, is regarded as an
anomaly, since the homeless on the bridge treat relics as a resource. These
fragments their small world is made of are remnants of a past world, of a past
order, incorporated in a new, provisional, fluid one.
An illustration of this fluid order
is the bridge's typically postmodern fate. In William Gibson's own version (All
Tomorrow's Parties - 1999), over a few years, the bridge community is
colonized by the service and tourism industries, and the autonomous,
spontaneous social structure turns into memory. Chevette Washington is shocked
to see that, while she was absent from the bridge for a few years, franchises
such as LUCKY DRAGON started appearing on it. Tessa, her film-making friend, is
quicker to recognize the moment's importance:
"We're just in time. We're
going to document the life before it's theme-parked." [23]
On the other hand, in Richard
Kadrey's Kamikaze l'Amour (1995), the bridge community is wiped out by
authorities under ridiculous pretexts. The remains of this shantytown serve as
a focus of memory and nostalgia to the novel's protagonist, and the clues in
the text lead the readers to understand the intertextual reference, and get
literary flashbacks of their own.
The wreckage was scattered north,
away from the city; around it were cigarette butts, crushed food and beer cans,
graffiti and the scraps of wood and sheet metal that were all that remained of
the squatter shanties. "The National Guard came through here one night
after the homeless took over the bridge," said Frida in a flat voice.
"Troops knocked down all the lean-tos and shacks and tossed them into the
bay. The city council and cops said it was for their own protection. A few
people went over the side, too. There was talk back then of reopening the
highway north, but that was just so much vapor. I don't even think the
authorities were afraid of losing control. I think they were just afraid that
people would find out they didn't really need them." [24]
In actual reality, the imagery of the
bridge's architecture and community was provided by an autonomous community at
the border of Hong Kong and continental
Even if Kowloon City was destroyed,
its memory lives on, in our world - documented in Greg Girard's and Ian
Lambot's photography album, in Gibson's fiction - as a virtual community for
computer hackers around the world, a digital reconstruction, and on the
Internet at http://www.flex.co.jp/kowloon/home_e.html.
Like the steady stream of objects and
fragments that flows through the lives of William Gibson's characters, his
books themselves began as novelty items, the object of fierce debate and
sources of inspiration for techno music, video clips or academic papers, sometimes
emerged on the Internet as pirate electronic simulacra, and ended as foci of
nostalgia bought for dear prices in auctions.
The real "hardcover first" of
NEUROMANCER was published in England by Victor Gollancz Ltd. With its
distinctive yellow jacket and relatively miniscule print-run, this has become
the most valuable book with my name on it. Actually I'm not sure what they go
for, today, but I'd guess well over $1000 in fine condition. [25]
Notes
[1] In the
short story "Burning Chrome", originally published in Omni, 1982, and
collected in Burning Chrome, Ace Books, New York, 1987;
[2] In Neuromancer,
Ace Books,
[3] "Representations
of Cyberspace in (Post)Cyberpunk Fiction", 2001;
[4] "Queen
[5] Neuromancer,
page 46;
[6] Neuromancer,
page 46;
[7] Count
Zero, page 48;
[8] Neuromancer,
page 12;
[9] Burning
Chrome, page 168;
[10] Count
Zero, page 165;
[11] Count
Zero, page 211;
[12] Neuromancer,
page 73;
[13] Neuromancer,
page 101;
[14] Count
Zero, page 217;
[15] Neuromancer,
page 207;
[16] Burning
Chrome, pages 105-106;
[17] Burning
Chrome, page 109;
[18] Mona
Lisa Overdrive, page 77;
[19] Mona
Lisa Overdrive, page 109;
[20] Mona
Lisa Overdrive, page 161;
[21] Virtual
Light, page 71;
[22] All
Tomorrow's Parties, page 79;
[23] All
Tomorrow's Parties, page 67;
[24] Kamikaze
L'Amour, page 51;
[25] http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_02_01_archive.htm.
Bibliography
Primary sources:
1. William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Books,
2. William Gibson, Count Zero, Ace Books, New
York, 1986;
3. William Gibson, Burning Chrome, Ace Books,
4. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Bantam
Books, New York, 1989;
5. William Gibson, “Skinner's Room”, in The Year's
Best Science Fiction, Ninth Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois, St.
Martin's Press, New York, 1992;
6. William Gibson, Virtual Light, Penguin Books,
London, 1994;
7. William Gibson, Idoru, Viking Books, London,
1996;
8. William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties, G.P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, 1999;
9. Richard Kadrey, Kamikaze L'Amour, St. Martin's
Press, New York, 1995;
Secondary sources:
1. Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture -
Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson, Athlone Press, London &
New Brunswick, 2000;
2. William Gibson weblog at http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/archive.asp;
3. Florin Pîtea, "Representations of Cyberspace in
(Post)Cyberpunk Fiction", Analele Universitãþii Spiru
Haret, Seria Fillogie, Limbi ºi literaturi strãine, anul III, nr. 3, 2001;
4. Darren Wershler-Henry, "Queen Victoria's
Personal Spook, Psychic Legbreakers, Snakes and Catfood: An Interview with
William Gibson and Tom Maddox", originally published in _Virus 23_ #0,
Fall 1989, pp. 28-36, re-published at http://paragonasia.warp0.com/intrvu04.html.
(top)
Background Elements of Orwell's
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Transposed into Cyberpunk Fiction
George Orwell's seminal work Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949) projected onto the near future realities and concerns of
the world's present and recent past, most especially the dangers of
totalitarism in its twin manifestations from the extreme left to the extreme
right of the political spectrum, and the horrors and deprivations engendered by
world wars. As journalists love to point out, the year 1984 came and went, and
Orwell's dark predictions failed to materialize. 1984 brought along other
important things, such as the personal computer with a graphical user interface
and the consecration of a literary movement that editor
One such constituent is the global domination exerted by three
superpowers, Oceania,
All of the disputed territories
contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products
such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by
comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless
reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the
countries of the Middle East, or
In William Gibson's works, the division
and struggle is between economic rather than political super-powers. His
characters use the Japanese term "zaibatsu" to designate them, but
they actually are multinational corporations, and they control the economies of
entire countries. Just as the Orwellian superpowers are self-sufficient
economically and perpetually secure on their respective mainlands, William
Gibson's zaibatsus are in some sense immortal because, no matter how many of
their top executives may die, whether accidentally or by design, there are
plenty more employees waiting to climb to higher ranks and keep the
multinationals going.
Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's
come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has
a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the
multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people.
The structure is independent of the
individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. [2]
In John Shirley's A Song Called Youth
trilogy, there is an open struggle between NATO and the New Soviets, and a
covert effort of the Second
Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus
(1996) universe is torn between the Shapers and the Mechanists, and the alien
race of Investors steps in to mediate in the conflict, acting as a third
superpower in its own right. Over a period of a century, the situation evolves
from open warfare to detente, covert operations, economic war and finally
competition in terraforming Mars.
On the other hand, in the collection A
Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999), the world is shared by three blocs locked
together in ambiguous relationships: the North American Free Trade Association
(NAFTA), the Co-Prosperity Sphere and the
NAFTA, Sphere, and Europe: the trilateral superpowers
jostled about with the uneasy regularity of sunspots, periodically brewing
storms in the proxy regimes of the South. During his fifty-plus years, Pete had
seen the Asian Cooperation Sphere change its public image repeatedly, in a
weird political rhythm. Exotic vacation spot on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Baffling alien threat on Mondays and Wednesdays. Major trading partner each day
and every day, including weekends and holidays. [3]
In Jack Womack's Ambient series,
the world appears to be divided into political entities such as the USA, Russia
or Japan, but each of these superpowers turns out to be controlled by
supercorporations such as Dryco in America and Krasnaya in Russia. The
political entities may be at war with each other from time to time, but the
economic superpowers go right on with their trade.
Stalin sold everything from laser printers to
pantyhose. [...] BBDS&S, Dryco's ad arm, discovered this through
countrycrossed demoteering analysis done for Krasnaya while Russian-backed
Saharan forces assaulted a tenth, final time American-supplied Zairian troops.
We sustained a personnel realignment of 275,000 in that entanglement - by
chance, the same number of people who were surveyed. Didn't matter; the
casualties would have never spent like the survivors. [4]
Richard Kadrey's near-future world is also
divided between NATO on the one hand, the OPEC countries on the other hand, and
a mysterious race of alien invaders, nicknamed Alpha Ratz. A further similarity
between Nineteen Eighty-four and Metrophage is the use of filmed
atrocities as a form of propaganda. In
And all the while, lest one should
be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered,
behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army - row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic
faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by
others exactly similar. The dull, rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed
the background to Goldstein's bleating voice. (...)
Then the sheep-face melted into the
figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his
submachine gun roaring and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen,
so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in
their seats. [5]
In Kadrey's Metrophage (1988), as
well, such footage is present on public screens that dominate squares and
avenues, fuelling hatred against the other superpowers:
Jonny caught sight of Carnaby's Pit
a few blocks away, quartz prisms projecting captured atrocity videos from the
Lunar Border Wars. On a flat expanse of wall above the club's entrance, a New
In Rudy Rucker's 'Ware series, the battle
ground is mainly the Moon, and the forces vying to control it are humans, small
independent robots and large AIs with their extensions.
In Cryptonomicon (1999), instead of
a fictitious set of superpowers, Neal Stephenson uses the historical situation
from the early 1940s that George Orwell modeled his imaginary world on: the
Allies, the
As one can see, Orwell's division of the
world in spheres of influence corresponding to three superpowers emerges time
after time in representative works of cyberpunk fiction. And just as important
as this three-way division is the long term relation that the superpowers are
locked in.
This second key element in Nineteen
Eighty-four is the permanent state
of conflict, which serves a double purpose. It keeps the people working
long hours to support the war effort, and, by permanent destruction, it
prevents the results of their work from accumulating and leading to a better,
more plentiful life.
The essential act of war is
destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human
labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere,
or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to
make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still
a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can
be consumed. [7]
In Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, there is a
permanent covert war between multinational corporations. In the short story
"Johnny Mnemonic", such a conflict takes place between the legitimate
corporation Ono Sendai and the organised crime cartel Yakuza, which has become
global.
It was probably research data, the
Yakuza being given to advanced forms of industrial espionage. A genteel
business, stealing from Ono-Sendai as a matter of course and politely holding
their data for ransom, threatening to blunt the conglomorate's research edge by
making the product public. [8]
In Count Zero (1986), a similar
conflict between
He wondered what Mitchell was doing,
feeling. The Maas Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a
sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor. The biosoft
dossier had shown Turner the mesa's face, cut with bright evening windows; it
rode about the uplifted arms of a sea of saguaros like the wheelhouse of a
giant ship. To Mitchell, it had been prison and fortress, his home for nine
years. (...) Somewhere in the
Maas arcology, Mitchell would be moving through his last hours as their star
researcher.
Turner tried to imagine Mitchell
leading a very different sort of life following his defection to Hosaka, but
found it difficult. Was a research arcology in Arizona very different from one
on Honshu? [9]
Gibson's first published short-story,
"Fragments of a Hologram Rose", also takes place against a background
of civil war, power shortages and permanent insecurity.
[Parker] arrived in
In Jack Womack's Ambient series, a
civil war 
artificially
created and maintained in Long Island by the top executives in the Dryco
multinational corporation is an excellent pretext to keep New York, and
especially Manhattan, under permanent military occupation and martial law.
[M]any within the government - some
even within Dryco - wished to remove the soldiers from New York as they'd been
removed from other cities and send them into Long Island where they were
needed. The Drydens said no; the Army couldn't control trouble if it wasn't
around to start it. [11]
In Richard Kadrey's Metrophage, at
a local level in
Two years earlier, with motives as
mysterious to himself as anybody else, Jonny had joined the Committee.
Indifference and boredom seemed to be his main reasons. A few years as a petty
thief and courier for the smugglers had left him fast on his feet and quick
with a knife and pistol. Still, he remained naive enough to be surprised when
it was these same criminal qualities that helped land him a high-paying job
with the Committee. [12]
In Rudy
Rucker's Software (1982), the robots on the Moon are in a permanent
state of conflict with each other for resources such as subcomponents precisely
because their creator, Cobb Anderson, means them to evolve rapidly in
accordance with the Darwinian principle "survival of the fittest".
"You have your own will,"
Ralph said finally. "And it is right that we struggle against each other.
Struggle, and struggle alone, has driven the boppers forward." [13]
In A Song Called Youth trilogy,
John Shirley depicts quite convincingly the coordinated efforts of a right-wing
organization, The Second
Bruce Sterling's Shaper and Mechanist
factions in Schismatrix Plus, on the other hand, go through a permanent
conflict that mutates from cold war to fierce trade competition to quick
development of new technologies to an arms race of ecological development. The
competition is so fierce that individual participants, such as the novel's
protagonist, Abelard Lindsay, find themselves moving from faction to faction,
just like secret agents defecting in the 20th century cold war.
Thus, the effects of this conflict between
superpowers prove devastating to common people, both in Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-four and in the examples of cyberpunk fiction we have examined so
far. In Orwell's novel, the permanent state of conflict is a perfect excuse to
keep the people of
He moved over to the window: a
smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the
blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his
face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor
blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended. [14]
Cyberpunk's near-future imaginary worlds
also teem with hard-working people who somehow do not get to live a prosperous
life, but rather inhabit a precarious zone at the edge of poverty. Such is the
case with a character in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), Hiro
Protagonist, who is one of the originators of a very popular form of virtual
reality, but who lives in a converted depositing space.
In the early years of The Black Sun project, the only
way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing stock to themselves. Hiro tended
to sell his off almost as quickly as he got it. Juanita didn't. Now she's rich,
and he isn't. It would be easy to say that Hiro is a stupid investor and
Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a little more complicated than that:
Juanita put her eggs in one basket, keeping all her money in Black Sun stock;
as it turns out, she made a lot of money that way, but she could have gone
broke, too. And Hiro didn't have a lot of choice in some ways. When his father
got sick, the Army and the V.A. took care of most of his medical bills, but
they ran into a lot of expenses anyway, and Hiro's mother - who could barely
speak English - wasn't equipped to make or handle money on her own. When Hiro's
father died, he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice
community in
In Bruce Sterling's Distraction (1998),
such a precarious state is shared not only by unemployed people, but also by
soldiers, politicians and scientists, as the
Washington, DC, enjoyed a permanent
haze of aerial drones. Helicopters were also extremely common, since the
authorities had basically surrendered the streets. Large sections of the
nation's capital were permanently impassable. Dissidents and protesters had
occupied all public areas, permanently.
Nonviolent noncooperation had
reached unheard-of strategic and tactical heights in the American capital. Its
functional districts were privatized and guarded by monitors and swarms of
private thugs, but huge sections of the city had surrendered to the squatters.
(...)
In many neighborhoods of
In Jack
Womack's Heathern, even the top-ranking officials of the powerful
corporation Dryco live in precarious conditions, for it is only the corporation
itself, its founder Dryden and his wife that are tax-exempted, whereas everyone
else, no matter how well-placed in the hierarchy, works mainly to pay taxes and
mortgage.
"He has so much money,"
Lester said, admitting unexpected awe. "So much must go to taxes -"
"Thatcher and Susie are
exempt," I said. "Dryco, the company, is exempt. I'm not, Bernard's
not, no one else working for them is -" [17]
Hard work and poverty are compounded in Nineteen
Eighty-four's dystopic world with permanent
surveillance by the secret police. The variety of technical means
developed contrasts bleakly with the absence of basic services for the
population, as shown above. Such surveillance includes telescreens able to play
and record sound and image, microphones, helicopters and informants. Even when
Winston Smith and his lover Julia rent a room in an old neighbourhood to have
some privacy, modern surveillance systems turn out to be concealed in the
walls:
"You are the dead,"
repeated the iron voice.
"It was behind the
picture," breathed Julia.
"It was behind the
picture," said the voice. "Remain exactly where you are. Make no
movement until you are ordered."
(...) Unthinkable to disobey the
iron voice from the wall. There was a snap as though a catch had been turned
back, and a crash of breaking glass. The picture had fallen to the floor,
uncovering the telescreen behind it.
"Now they can see us,"
said Julia. [18]
Surveillance is a recurrent theme in cyberpunk
fiction as well, with an equally abundant range of technical means. The
difference is that, in most cyberpunk novels, it is no longer the monopoly of a
centralized secret police, but rather used by the security force of various
corporations, by wealthy, powerful individuals, and even by entities such as
Artificial Intelligences.
John Shirley's trilogy A Song Called
Youth, for instance, has recurrent images of surveillance cameras, and
there is a direct relation between this technology and brutal repression of
social movements. In the trilogy's first novel, Eclipse, media
manipulation is used in the space colony FirStep to instigate social dissent
against Administration. Later on, however, the social movements serve as a
perfect excuse for the crypto-fascist private-security organization Second
In Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix
(1985), citizens of Mechanist cartels are supposed to have policewives who keep
them company but also keep them under control, much like family members in
Orwell's Oceania are encouraged to inform on one another. Newcomers to
Dembowska Cartel, especially, like the defector Abelard Lindsay, are the focus
of such policy, as he finds out from Policewife Greta Beatty:
"A policewife? Oh, I wasn't
involved in security at first. I was a Carnassus wife, a strictly erotic
relationship. Promotion came later. I'm not in espionage. I just do liaison work."
[19]
William Gibson's Count Zero, on the
other hand, shows how a single wealthy individual, Joseph Virek, commands a
shadowy network of agents and spies as impressive as Big Brother's. Art dealer
Marly Krushkova, one of the novel's main characters, gets an assignment from
Virek in
Of course, she thought, of course:
It moves around me constantly, watchful and invisible, the vast and subtle
mechanism of Herr Virek's surveillance. [20]
Also, in William Gibson's Neuromancer
(1984), the Artificial Intelligences that have a major conflict in the
background put the surveillance cameras and the remote-controlled drones to
their own use. Both Wintermute and its opponent, Neuromancer, use the
ubiquitous cameras in the Freeside space station to track down people.
Wintermute also uses remote-controlled devices to help the protagonist, Henry
Case, escape the three agents of the Turing Police that had put him under
arrest before the completion of its covert operation.
They were a little over a quarter of
the way across when the microlight struck, its electric engine silent until the
carbon fiber prop chopped away the top of Pierre's skull. (...) [Case] saw the
fragile biplane strike the iron railing of the bridge, crumple, cartwheel,
sweeping the girl with it down into Desiderata. (...)
The gardening robot took Roland as
he passed that same tree. It fell straight out of the groomed branches, a thing
like a crab, diagonally striped with black and yellow.
"You killed 'em," Case
panted, running. [21]
Some characters in Neuromancer, on
the other hand, are so accustomed to being under surveillance all the time that
they have developed an alternative system of communication, based on hand
signs. Since Case does not understand it, his partner, Molly, takes him to an
expensive place shielded from spy equipment where they can talk freely. Both
the elaborate precautions they take and the high cost of privacy hint at the
ubiquity of surveillance systems in this near-future imaginary world.
"You want me to shut the screen
down?"
"Just as long as it takes you
to leave, Finn. Then we'll want full screen for as long as we want it."
"Hey, that's fine by the Finn,
Moll. You're only paying by the second."
They sealed the door behind him and
Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on
crossed forearms. "We talk now. This is as private as I can afford."
[22]
Last, but by no means least, in Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-four is the result of surveillance and control: individuals guilty
of developing their own conscience and escaping propaganda and mind-control are
tortured and brainwashed. Such
is the case of the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, who ends up in the
Ministry of Love and is tortured and lectured by O'Brien until all his
resistance is destroyed.
"But always - do not forget
this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly
increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will
be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is
helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face - forever." [23]
Torture and brainwashing also occur quite
often in cyberpunk fiction. The crypto-fascist organization called the Second
"[E]ach of the three pens is on a different
dietary regimen. The black-skinned group in number ten are fed rather well and
given a number of privileges, such as cigarettes, the others don't receive. The
brown-skinned group in eleven is on an average diet, with average privileges.
The lighter-skinned coloreds - half-breeds, essentially - in pen twelve are
being starved. (...) It's of no real relevance in the long run which race, if
any, is the superior. First you must understand that this experiment is laying
the groundwork for experiments on a larger scale in the outside world. We can
induce race war with the right social pressures applied..." [24]
In Jack Womack's novel Heathern,
the plutocrat Dryden uses brainwashing in order to manipulate Lester Macaffrey,
an individual with miraculous gifts, into serving his purposes. As Dryden
suspects that the Japanese are interfering with his secret operations and as he
believes that Macaffrey can perform miracles, he re-creates a traumatic event
from Macaffrey's childhood to force him into triggering a major earthquake that
will sink the Japanese archipelago. The effort to re-enact the tragic death of Lester's
father and sister leads, however, to unexpected consequences: Lester Macaffrey
breaks down under stress and Dryden shoots him dead in a fit of anger.
Other cyberpunk books show brainwashing
and personality implants as routine, but by no means harmless to those that
undergo them. Such is the case in Michael Swanwick's Vacuum Flowers
(1986), where Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark discovers she has a new personality
implanted on a stranger's body, but also that the corporation who paid for it
wants her dead.
Possibly the
most complex case of personality implant, however, occurs in Pat Cadigan's
novel Fools (1992), where a policewoman, an actress and an escort
specialized in assisting suicides share a woman's body. The three personalities
surface in turn and take control, and the events that the protagonist is
involved in are interpreted according to the personality that is in control at
one time or another. In order to help one distinguish between Marva the Method
actress, Marceline the Escort and Mercine, the deep-cover cop specialized in
persona-related crime, Pat Cadigan makes use of three types of letters that
change according to which personality surfaces at one moment or another. The
book leaves the readers wondering which of the imaginary worlds is preferable,
one where members of the police force are the first to undergo brainwashing, or
one where ordinary people are tortured into loving Big Brother.
In conclusion, one can state that George
Orwell's dystopia, originally intended to warn against all forms of
totalitarism and later on appropriated by the right-wing as a propaganda tool
against the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, proved a source of background
elements for the literary genre of cyberpunk even after the end of the Cold
War. Such background elements include a division of the world between
superpowers, a permanent conflict that has both economic and military aspects,
surveillance and control of the population, and brainwashing of the dissidents.
These elements serve, both in Orwell's case and in that of the cyberpunk
authors, as a comment on the world in the twentieth century and as a warning
against possible dangers of the near future. If Orwell's warning is primarily
against state-organized surveillance, propaganda and control, cyberpunk authors
who wrote four decades later focused mostly on the dangers of a composite world
dominated by multinational corporations. Such entities, in the works of William
Gibson and his colleagues, are motivated by a greed for profit and make use of
similar techniques for manipulating and controlling individuals, but are no
longer bound by national borders, laws or ideologies.
Notes:
[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, pp.
154-155;
[2] William Gibson, 'New Rose Hotel', Burning Chrome,
p. 107;
[3] Bruce Sterling, 'Taklamakan', A Good
Old-Fashioned Future, p. 238;
[4] Jack Womack, Terraplane, pp. 3-4;
[5] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, pp.
14-17;
[6] Richard Kadrey, Metrophage, pp. 1-2;
[7] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, p.
157;
[8] William Gibson, Burning Chrome, p. 17;
[9] William Gibson, Count Zero, p. 88;
[10] William Gibson, Burning Chrome, p. 39;
[11] Jack Womack, Heathern, p. 17;
[12] Richard Kadrey, Metrophage, p. 20;
[13] Rudy Rucker, Software, p. 23;
[14] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, p. 6;
[15] Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, p. 58;
[16] Bruce Sterling, Distraction, p. 160;
[17] Jack Womack, Heathern, p. 139;
[18] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, p.
182;
[19] Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, p. 172;
[20] William Gibson, Count Zero, p. 73;
[21] William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 164;
[22] William Gibson, Neuromancer, p. 49;
[23] Nineteen Eighty-four, p. 220;
[24] John Shirley, Eclipse Penumbra, Babbage
Press, Northridge, 2000, pp. 46-47;
Bibliography:
Primary sources:
Pat Cadigan, Fools, HarperCollins,
William Gibson, Burning Chrome, Ace Books,
William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Books,
William Gibson, Count Zero, Ace Books,
Richard Kadrey, Metrophage, VGSF, Victor
Gollancz Ltd,
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, Signet
Classics, New American Library, New York, 1961;
Rudy Rucker, Software, Avon Books,
John Shirley, Eclipse, Babbage Press,
Northridge, 1999;
John Shirley, Eclipse Penumbra, Babbage Press,
Northridge, 2000;
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, ROC Books, Penguin
Books, Ltd,
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, Avon Books,
Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix, Ace Books,
Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus, Ace Books,
Bruce Sterling, Distraction, Bantam Books,
Bruce Sterling, A Good Old-Fashioned Future,
Bantam Books,
Michael Swanwick, Vacuum Flowers, Ace Books,
Jack Womack, Terraplane, Grafton Books,
HarperCollins,
Jack Womack, Heathern, Grove Press,
Secondary sources:
Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel,
Penguin Books,
Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, Science
Fiction and the Work of William Gibson, The Athlone Press,
Randall Stevenson, The British Novel since the
Thirties, Institutul European,