HUCK FINN 2        ŢESĂTORUL          ACADEMIC

 

ARTA NU CHIAR DELICT

Mass-media tehnologizate de la sfîrşitul secolului al douăzecilea si impactul lor asupra societăţii globale aşa cum se reflectă în literatura cyberpunk

INTRODUCERE (INTRODUCTION)

CAPITOLUL 1: DEFINIŢIE ŞI AUTORI (1: DEFINITION AND AUTHORS)

CAPITOLUL 2: CONTEXTUL CULTURAL (2: THE CULTURAL CONTEXT)

CAPITOLUL 3: SCHIMBĂRILE TEHNOLOGICE (3: TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES)

CAPITOLUL 4: SCHIMBĂRILE PSIHOLOGICE (4: PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES)

CAPITOLUL 5: SCHIMBĂRILE SOCIALE (5: SOCIAL CHANGES)

CAPITOLUL 6: DEGRADAREA ECOLOGICĂ (6: ECOLOGICAL DEGRADATION)

CAPITOLUL 7: EFECTELE CULTURALE (7: CULTURAL EFFECTS)

CONCLUZII (CONCLUSIONS)

 

Introducere

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Capitolul 1: Definiţii şi autori

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Capitolul 2: Contextul cultural

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Capitolul 3: Schimbările tehnologice

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Capitolul 4: Schimbările psihologice

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Capitolul 5: Schimbările sociale

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Capitolul 6: Degradarea ecologică

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Capitolul 7: Efectele culturale

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Concluzii

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ART NOT QUITE CRIME

Late Twentieth-century Technology Media and Their Impact on the Global Society

as Reflected in Cyberpunk Fiction

 

Introduction

           At the beginning of the 1980s there emerged in North America a literary genre focused on information and telecommunication technology, the metamorphosis of industrial societies, anomie and the rise of crime. The genre was named cyberpunk by editor Gardner Dozois, but the term itself was created by writer Bruce Bethke to serve as a title for his first short story, which he published in 1983.

           A decade later, when the writers involved in this movement as well as some newcomers focused away from outlaws and onto characters with jobs and families, the genre was said to have evolved into a new stage named postcyberpunk. Since the similarities between the two stages are much more numerous than the differences, I chose to analyse various aspects of them under the title (Post)Cyberpunk.

           This term covers a wide set of literary works which are emblematic for the changes undergone by post-industrial societies. Therefore, after a detailed examination of (post)cyberpunk's authors (chapter 1) and cultural context (chapter 2), the thesis focuses in turn on technological, psychological, social and ecological changes manifest in Western countries in the last two decades of the 20th century, and on the way in which these changes are identified, extrapolated and debated in (post)cyberpunk fiction. Finally, it also discusses the genre's influence on culture and the arts in the 1990s.

           But for the time being, let us see who the cyberpunk authors actually are. (top)

 

Chapter 1: Definition and Authors

           The term "cyberpunk" was coined by science fiction writer Bruce Bethke in the early spring of 1980 as a title for a short story about teenage computer hackers. He attempted to invent a new term that expressed the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. He also wanted the title to be short and easy to remember. Judging by the fact that the "cyberpunk" word has had a wide circulation for two decades now, Bethke almost feels sorry for not trademarking it. Later on, as a reaction against the wide use and misuse of the term, and especially against the proliferation of second- and third-hand imitations of cyberpunk fiction, Bruce Bethke published the satiric novel Headcrash (1995) which won the Philip K. Dick Award.

           In the early 1980s, however, Bethke was not the only author to move away from conventional space-opera and heroic-fantasy material, such as Star Trek novelizations and Conan the Barbarian imitations. A number of young authors whose careers were just taking shape at that time focused on visions of a near future based on a careful extrapolation of trends existing in contemporary society. Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, argued at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, 1981, while chairing a panel called "Beyond the Punk Nebula", that a new literary movement was about to emerge, pointed out William Gibson in the audience as being part of it, and used Bruce Bethke's term "cyberpunk" to label it.

             Under this label, a number of original authors and quite a few imitators and latecomers launched successful careers. As the authors are rather numerous, at this point it would be useful to cluster them according to criteria of chronology and originality.

           First, there is a hard core of cyberpunk authors that includes William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner and Rudy Rucker. On the one hand, their early novels and short stories helped define the subgenre's themes and tone. Such works are Neuromancer (1984), Schismatrix (1985), Eclipse (1985), Frontera (1984) and Software (1982), respectively.

           On the other hand, they form a tight nucleus of friendship, manifested among other things in a great number of stories written in collaboration and mutual appraisal in the media. Bruce Sterling, the movement's unofficial spokesman, wrote a novel and a short story in collaboration with William Gibson and novelettes with Shirley, Rucker and Shiner, among others. He also wrote introductions to collections of short stories by Pat Cadigan, Gibson and Shirley. Gibson, in his turn, wrote a novelette with Shirley, as well as introductions to Sterling's and Shirley's novels.

           William Gibson, the movement's central figure, was born in 1948 near  Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA. He has lived in Canada since 1968. After some time in Toronto, where he received a BA in English philology, he moved to Vancouver in 1972. William Gibson began publishing science fiction with "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" in 1977. After several other short stories, in 1984 he published the novel Neuromancer, which won an astonishing number of literary awards: the Hugo (1984), the Nebula (1985), the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award (1985), SF Chronicle (1985), the Australian Ditmar (1985) and the Japanese Seiun Taisho (1987). In Neuromancer Gibson also used the term "cyberspace" for the first time, a word which the journalists picked up in the early 1990s to designate the Internet.

           Gibson completed the Cyberspace trilogy with Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), published a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome (1986) and a collaborative novel with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1990), and then wrote the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). William Gibson also wrote the script for the motion picture Johnny Mnemonic (1995). He is currently working on a book entitled Pattern Recognition.

           Bruce Sterling, nicknamed by the other cyberpunk authors "Chairman Bruce", was born in 1954 and lives in Austin, Texas. He published his first novel, Involution Ocean, in 1978, then pre-figured cyberpunk fiction with The Artificial Kid (1980). In the early 1980s he published the interconnected Shaper/Mechanist short stories that culminated with the novel Schismatrix (1985). In 1986 he edited cyberpunk's showcase anthology Mirrorshades. His 1988 novel Islands in the Net re-focused cyberpunk away from outlaw characters and onto socially-integrated ones, thus leading to what critics later called post-cyberpunk. After The Hacker Crackdown (1992), a non-fiction book about law and disorder on the electronic frontier, he published novels such as Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), Distraction (1998) and Zeitgeist (2000), as well as three collections of short stories: Crystal Express (1989), Global Head (1992) and A Good Old-Fashioned Future (1999). Bruce Sterling won a Hugo Award for his short story "Taklamakan" in 1999. He also writes columns for Wired, The SF Eye and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

           John Shirley, probably the movement's most extravagant member, followed several careers as a writer of science fiction and horror, rock musician, journalist and screenwriter. He was born in 1954, started publishing with "The Word 'Random' Deliberately Repeated" (1973), and while performing with punk rock bands such as Sado Nation he wrote the novels Transmaniacon (1979), featuring the typical Shirley protagonist: punk, anarchic, unconstrained, Three-Ring Psychus (1980), and City Come A-Walkin' (1980). He also introduced William Gibson to Bruce Sterling and wrote his finest cyberpunk work in the Song Called Youth trilogy: Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988) and Eclipse Corona (1990), set after a realistically conceived World War III and describing a resistance movement which fights a neofascist regime. His other science fiction novels include A Splendid Chaos (1988) and Silicon Embrace (1996). John Shirley published short-story collections such as Heatseeker (1988) and Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories (1999) and wrote scripts for motion pictures, most notably The Crow (1994), as well as for the adult cartoon series Spawn.

           If John Shirley is at the punk end of the movement's spectrum, Rudy Rucker is most definitely at the cyber one. Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, born in 1946, has advanced degrees in mathematics from Rutgers University and is currently a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Jose State University. He started writing as early as 1962, but had great difficulty publishing his complex stories. Some of his novels belong to the cyberpunk genre, most notably the "Ware" series: Software (1982), Wetware (1988), both of which received the Philip K. Dick Award, Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000), as well as  The Hacker and the Ants (1994), a tale involving Artificial Intelligences and viral ants. Other novels form a genre created by Rucker himself which he calls transrealism. Such works are White Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980), The Sex Sphere (1983), The Secret of Life (1985) and Master of Space and Time (1984), where he combines humour and autobiographical elements in imaginary worlds generated by high mathematic concepts. He also wrote collections of short stories like The 57th Franz Kafka (1983) and Transreal! (1991), poems, technical works of non-fiction and computer software for generating virtual reality.

           Lewis Shiner, also associated with the movement's hard core, was born in 1950 and started publishing with "Tinker's Damn" in 1977. He wrote a great number of short stories, assembled in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (1990) and The Edges of Things (1991). His novels include Frontera (1984), the magic-realist Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), Slam (1990) and the fantasy Glimpses (1993). He co-edited the movement's fanzine "Cheap Truth" with Bruce Sterlng, and lives in Austin, Texas. In 1991, Lewis Shiner announced in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times that he had resigned from the cyberpunk movement, which triggered a variety of reactions from the other members.

           Second, there is a number of authors who associated themselves with this literary movement for a long time. Such authors are Pat Cadigan, Walter Jon Williams, Jack Womack, Tom Maddox, James Patrick Kelly and Richard Kadrey. Except Womack, they all contributed to cyberpunk anthologies such as Mirrorshades (1986) or Storming the Reality Studio (1991).

           Among these, Pat Cadigan is the only female writer constantly associated with cyberpunk fiction. Born in Schenechtady, New York, in 1953, Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan received a degree from the University of Kansas. She began publishing in 1978 with "Death from Exposure" for Shayol, a semiprofessional magazine which she edited throughout its existence (1977-85). Her novels include Mindplayers (1987), Synners (1991), Fools (1992), both of which received the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish is Digital (2000). She also published short-story collections such as Patterns (1989), Home by the Sea (1992) and Dirty Work (1993). Since 1996 she has lived in London with her husband Chris Fowler.

           Walter Jon Williams, born in 1953 and residing in New Mexico, had started a career in genre SF with novels such as Ambassador of Progress (1984) and Knight Moves (1985). However, he switched to cyberpunk with short stories like "Video Star" (1986), a trilogy comprising Hardwired (1986), Voice of the Whirlwind (1987) and Solip:system (1989) and the individual novels Angel Station (1989) and Days of Atonement (1991).

           Jack Womack's work parallels some of cyberpunk's themes and ideas, but his six-volume series of novels is much darker in tone, and also quite experimental in point of language, which earned Ambient (1987), the first volume of the cycle, the name of "An American Clockwork Orange". The other volumes of his New York Series are Terraplane (1988), Heathern (1990), Elvissey (1993), which received the Philip K. Dick Award, Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993) and Going, Going, Gone (199?).

           Tom Maddox, born in 1945, was acknowledged by William Gibson as the inventor of ICE, Intruders Countermeasures Electronics.  Maddox began publishing with "The Mind like a Strange Balloon" in 1985. His first novel, Halo (1991), expands the universe sketched in a Mirrorshades short story, "Snake Eyes", and the author made it available for free on the Internet. He also wrote the novel Walls of Light (1998), and co-authored with William Gibson the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch" and "First Person Shooter".

           James Patrick Kelly, born in 1951, was mostly associated with the "Humanists" in the 1980s, but published cyberpunk short stories and also a novel, Wildlife (1994), an analysis of the relationship between a child artificially re-engineered each time he nears puberty and his extraordinary mother.

           Richard Kadrey, writer, rock musician and illustrator, was born in 1957. He published cyberpunk short stories in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Interzone, and the novels Metrophage (1988), singled out by William Gibson for its literary quality, and Kamikaze L'Amour (1996), as well as the non-fiction Covert Culture Sourcebook: A Guide to Fringe Culture (1993). Kadrey offered Metrophage on the Internet for free distribution, and also an extract from Kamikaze L'Amour entitled "Horse Latitudes". 

           Third, there are authors with well-established careers in different genres who at one stage or another produced (post)cyberpunk novels and short stories. Such authors are Greg Bear, mostly associated with hard science fiction, Michael Swanwick, usually associated with humanist science fiction, and Lucius Shepard, who is associated with magic realism.

           Greg Bear, born in 1951, is an extremely prolific writer who began publishing science fiction wth "Destroyers" in 1967. Critics consider him to be central to American genre science fiction with novels such as Eon (1985) and Eternity (1988). However, he gave an excellent treatment of cyberpunk themes like nanomechanisms, virtual reality and genetic engineering in Blood Music (1985), the 1983 novella version of which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, Queen of Angels (1990), Slant (1997) and, more recently, Darwin's Radio (1999).  

           Michael Swanwick, who was born in 1950, also wrote short stories with distinctive cyberpunk settings and characters at the very beginning of the 1980s, when the movement under discussion had scarcely started, much less had a name. Most of these were assembled in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991), which was later followed by A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000) and Tales of Old Earth (2000). He wrote a variety of novels, including In the Drift (1985), Vacuum Flowers (1987), Griffin's Egg (1991) and Stations of the Tide (1991) which won the Nebula Award. In 1993 he published The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a fantasy novel set in a fairyland in the grips of the Industrial Revolution.

           Lucius Shepard, born in 1947, travelled widely between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. Quite a lot of his short stories, assembled in The Jaguar Hunter (1987) and The Ends of Earth (1991), as well his novels Green Eyes (1984), for which he received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Life During Wartime (1987) and Kalimantan (1990) mix science fiction themes like the near future or alternate worlds with elements of magic realism in a very stylish manner that proved quite influential on other writers.

           Fourth, there are imitators, authors who during the mid- and late-1980s, as well as in the early 1990s, decided to exploit for their own benefit the newly-created literary market. Such latecomers include Kathy Acker, Wilhelmina Baird and Jeff Noon. It is precisely due to the latecomers' advent that in 1988 the originators of cyberpunk fiction tried to declare the literary movement dead, but this enterprise proved unsuccessful.

           Kathy Acker, 1948-1997, writer and playwright, not so much joined the cyberpunk movement or imitated it as used extracts from William Gibson's Neuromancer and the William S. Burroughs cut-up technique to create her own post-modern ironic version of cyberpunk in Empire of the Senseless (1988).

           Wilhelmina Baird is the pen-name of British writer Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson, born in 1935 and active in the literary field in the early 1960s. After a long absence, she returned to writing in the 1990s. Her cyberpunk trilogy comprising CrashCourse (1994), ClipJoint (1994) and PsyKosis (1995) is set in a 21st-century England.

           Jeff Noon is another British writer, born in 1957, whose first two novels, Vurt (1993) and Pollen (1994) are set in a near-future Manchester and deal with a reality-shifting drug.

           Last, but not least, there are second-generation cyberpunks. Younger than the movement's originators, sometimes dissenting with their ideas, but every bit as brilliant, they emerged on the literary scene in the early 1990s. They are Neal Stephenson and the Australian Greg Egan.

           Greg Egan, a writer and computer programmer born in 1961, criticized some stereotypical aspects of cyberpunk fiction in interviews. In his fiction, however, he gave a brilliant treatment of cyperpunk themes such as cybernetics and virtual reality, informed by thorough knowledge of mathematics, physics and computer programming. His short stories, assembled in Axiomatic (1995), Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995) and Luminous (1998), as well as his novels Quarantine (1992), Permutation City (1994), Distress (1995), Diaspora (1998) and Teranesia (1999) upped the ante for the entire science fiction genre with their throrough documentation of scientific information and their density of ideas.

           Neal Stephenson, born in 1959, was hailed by both Sterling and Gibson as a brilliant writer. After The Big U (1984) and Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988), both of which are fiction about science rather than traditional science fiction, Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash (1992), and The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1996), in which he focused on virtual reality and nanotechnology, respectively. With Cryptonomicon (1999), Neal Stephenson chose to write a historical novel rather than a science-fiction one, focusing on cryptography, the Second World War and the development of digital computers. He also published In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999), a non-fiction book about operating systems.

           If Egan took the themes and settings of cyberpunk into the realm of hard science, pitching them against quantum physics and multi-dimensional mathematics, Stephenson completed the circle and, especially with Cryptonomicon, brought (post)cyberpunk where it began, near the work of predecessors such as Thomas Pynchon. (top)

 

Chapter 2: The Cultural Context

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Chapter 3: Technological Changes

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Chapter 4: Psychological Changes

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Chapter 5: Social Changes

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Chapter 6: Ecological Degradation

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Chapter 7: Cultural Effects

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Conclusions

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HUCK FINN 2        ŢESĂTORUL          ACADEMIC