what i see – cyberpunk | science fiction writing
September 14th, 2009 at 15:12
Scanner Darkly
Week One, Assignment One – P2PU – What I see – cyberpunk and science fiction writing. Brian Williams brian.williams@gmail.com
“I’m convinced H.G. Wells has had a disastrous influence on the subsequent course of science fiction…”[1]
Cyberpunk is science fiction, of course. Within the broad genre science fiction, cyberpunk is interred in the “hard core” wing, a subspecies, if you will. It’s hard core because it relies utterly on “technology or biology” to tell a story.[2] Cyberpunk is sci fi dropped into a corrupt and blackened petri dish of pulp fiction and noir, technology and biology, reality and unreality. The result may be sublime, may be human, humanizing, inhuman, dehumanizing, trash. “What’s real what’s not” ? … “Who’s human Who’s not” ? Central themes of the cyberpunk brand of science fiction writing… [3]
Inward looking, occlusion filled, the spaces between subjective worlds, invisible webs, networks, Dick and other so-called cyberpunks (humanists?) saw places (some call “science fiction”) where others saw madness. The grey ethereal unknowing interiors of self and disorientation driving story, yet empathy, human empathy, bringing the story back from something distant and vague to something as immediate and challenging as “…boiling a live lobster, eating meat, or using fur…”[4] …
As if Cyberpunk could be summed up by a single, rotoscoped image of the 5 Freeway pointing south to San Diego … The modern world, our world, is Dick’s world, not some distant fantasy where selfless armies abide Society’s greater good so that mechanized Roads must roll.
The crowded Southern California landscape is the perfect tableau for false, doomed cyberpunk narrative. Married and divorced five times — “married, 1949; wife’s name Jeannette (divorced); married, 1951; wife’s name Kleo (divorced); married, 1958; wife’s name Ann (divorced); married April 18, 1967; wife’s name Nancy (divorced); married Tessa Busby, April 18, 1973 (divorced) … ” – Dick’s fertile dystopian nightmare sprawls out from his Santa Ana home, the Orange County police state, Disney, cultural fascism … Themes emerging from a lifelong Southern California [other] world view. There is no escape … It never fucking rains …
Personal experience is one hallmark of the cyberpunk brand. Again, the notion of empathy (humanity) in a post apocalyptic world where to retire is to murder and the most brilliant and beautiful androids enslaved, the cyberpunk author using cognitive dissonance in a way more traditional notions of science fiction, replete with space and final frontiers, can neither penetrate nor reproduce.
A “fabricated reality” constructed here, and often now, that nevertheless remains “unknown to human beings, that we are captive to … subjective perception and unable to discern objective reality…”, worlds where “ … everything is true because nothing is true.”[5] And Dick’s world, the cyberpunk world, may be an illusion “created through an appearance of change, false memories, media, drugs, or digital industry products, covering the stable and unalterable, true dimension of existence…”[6]
The habit of humans of mislabeling things (or should I just say, labeling things) is an often unprofitable exercise, rife with expectation building and shortcut taking, and like most habits, it is hard to break. Having said as much, how cool is the cyberpunk framework? a framework that combines the most evocative, dingy and sublime elements of post-modern culture – the exploration of today and tomorrow and what might or might not be behind what might or might not be the mask, ours, societies… Call it what you will. As one writer said in an earlier post, these are prophetic warnings … Yes, I agree, and they may simultaneously function as paranoid delusions, unleashed, or something between.
[1] James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn (eds) (2003) The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Cyberpunk as a Science Fiction Genre. 12 July 2004. Information Database: The Cyberpunk Project. 09 Sept. 2009.
[3] Kucukalic, Lejla. Philip K Dick : Canonical Writer of the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2009.
[4] Vint, Sherryl. “Speciesism and Species Being in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 40.1 (Mar. 2007): 111-126.
[5] Kucukalic, Lejla. Philip K Dick : Canonical Writer of the Digital Age. New York: Routledge, 2009, at 5.
[6] Ibid.
September 15th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I think the theme of the fabricated reality, which people plug into either willingly or unwillingly, and the people (or machines) who create these realities are one of the most interesting features of cyberpunk. And I agree, the cyberpunk framework is just so phenomenally cool…
September 15th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Some famous writer (I can’t remember who) once said something to the effect that Science Fiction writers don’t really write about the future; they write about the present. In my humble opinion we don’t need hyper-powerful computers or other futuristic technologies to fabricate reality. Current day politicians and corporations do that just fine.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:51 am
I think that personal experience of Cyberpunk authors do leave an impression on their works. A german Cyberpunk author who grew up in germany during the cold war has broached the issue of anxiety towards a omnious future in his novels.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:02 am
Really like this essay ,and I also agree that questions around ‘what is reality’ are one of the most interesting themes in Cyberpunk, in fact its been recurring theme throughout literary history you can go back as far as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave which was probably the pre-cursor to what Descartes wrote in his Meditations on First Philosophy – which eventually translated into the thought experiment we refer to these days as ‘The Brain in the Vat’, which itself was captured so beautifully in the original Matrix film. Its one of those themes that always seems to excite me :p
September 16th, 2009 at 10:15 am
thx so much for the great comments! this assignment challenged me …. the thing i am … perhaps … obsessed with is the notion that this .alt world of dick’s is simply the entirley logical byproduct of living in southern california too long
it’s hard for anyone to begin to generate a complete list of the layers of story in this one ridiculously titled work, right?
my god, mercerism! how perfect! envy. depression. love. drug addled. techno emotion. animal rights. post apocalyptic worlds. codpieces! i was telling an aquaintance that the reason i loved blade runner, even though it was a very different telling of dick’s story, is that it created a post apocalyptic world i might want to live in
… seriously, what a genius for identifying timeless challenges in an obscure but familiar world, our own loving, deteriorating earth …
September 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
While we tend to think of the fabricated reality that we plug into as being a medium-future phenomenon, aren’t we already there? People who fall over dead playing World of Warcraft because they’re unable to unplug, for example. Is the only difference between today and tomorrow the social acceptability of being plugged-in?
March 15th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
thanks for this post about fiction, I like your site.