Cyberpunk Scene: A “Disaster Aesthetic” — Week Three. Assignment Three – P2PU – Brian Williams … brian.williams@gmail.com
September 28th, 2009 at 21:57God Save the Queen, Sex Pistols
“[C]yberpunk transforms the negative space of the external environment into a positive zone. Still ruined, it is now converted into a site where interesting things happen and where humans flourish, as the throbbing vitality of Gibson’s Sprawl and Chiba City demonstrate…”1 Cyberpunk is“… “at home with alienation, staged in a landscape of decay.” (at 261)
The beauty everywhere … Cyberpunk’s dystopian worlds offer the reader uniquely damaged visions of a near future, especially compelling because these strange approximate futures are so well lived in, and if not exactly comfortable to all, then beautiful, discordant and honest, like the world feels honest, familiar then to both the punk characters who skate through and the punk readers/watchers who immerse themselves in the construct.
The power of the degraded world of the Sprawl and Chiba City in Neuromancer flows from the readers’ essential familiarity with the environment. The setting is postmodern, post something. Yet unlike many traditional science fiction narratives, the cyberpunk’s world view is one of adaptation and survival and acceptance. This is a place we see as a logical extension of our society’s current trajectory. It may be that the smell of oil refineries on the Long Beach night air is just another particularly vivid indicator of how close we are to a future where there is no true sense of nature remaining.
I had a cyberpunk epiphany watching Ken Burns’ “National Parks” documentary last night on AmeriKan t.v. The narrative of the parks, the quotations from the ecstatic geniuses John Muir, Thoreau and Walden … They all spoke of an imperative connection to earth and god and man’s place among all of the above by touching nature, nature revealed. It seems that visiting Yellowstone or Yosemite might create a new vision of my place – and I can remember thinking as a child that Mt. Hood outside my home in Portland Oregon was as good a deity as any in the pantheon. This like the protagonist in Do Androids Dream musing about the love or desire for a real sheep, an animal, I can feel the parallels, but can I change?
Last night, I recognized my divorce from these musings. How long has it been since I’ve gone for a drive not fearing traffic snarl? Police? Yes, I believe nature could be useful to me, my children, and yet it all seems so remote to life here in the city, or the suburbs, or the society. In traffic, in apartments, in laundromats, our contemporary American cyberpunk culture thrives like a slightly watered down blade runner. For city dwellers, there is something to the cyberpunk setting that touches our world view.
This singular element makes cyberpunk “real” in the modern world: we will survive adapt and live, even after World War Terminus, we may love, we will desire, the most human trait of all. We will go forward, the devolution taking us all along for the ride.
1 Claire Sponsler, “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play. Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 251-265, at 254.
September 29th, 2009 at 2:43 am
“Yet unlike many traditional science fiction narratives, the cyberpunk’s world view is one of adaptation and survival and acceptance … In traffic, in apartments, in laundromats, our contemporary American cyberpunk culture thrives like a slightly watered down blade runner. For city dwellers, there is something to the cyberpunk setting that touches our world view”
I certainly concur with that, and I think that’s why it is so immersive, we can see ourselves in that world, we can see how we would have to adopt as the protagonists we read about have had to. It’s easy to empathise with, and easy to visualise because the world around is often echoing the words on the page.
That’s a very thoughtful piece Brian, thank you.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Wow, excellent essay! I really enjoyed your point of view. I, unlike you, do not live in a city. In fact. My current residence is as far as you can get from in the city. It is in a National Forest. I used to dwell in the City (DC), but it has been several years and the experience of it has slowly gone to the back of my mind. I forget that not everyone can turn out there lights and hear nothing at all. Or that not everyone has to drive for 45 minutes to get to a bookstore. It is interesting to me that pretty much all Cyberpunk is set in the city. I think it would be interesting to see what a Cyberpunk story set in a more rural environ would be like. Maybe I’ll have to try and write something like that.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:57 am
“…the cyberpunk’s world view is one of adaptation and survival and acceptance …” I really like this idea, and I think it subverts one of the most alarming realities of modern life – the manipulation of the environment. We’ve manipulated and used out setting to suit ourselves for so long, but in cyberpunk novels/films, it’s like nature (however broken and bastardized it is) has turned on us, and people are forced to adapt to their settings instead.