Cyberpunk course

Week 5 : P2PU : SNOW CRASH I, ROBOT C DOCTOROW N STEPHENSEN [brianwilliams]

“…“I think it s a fallacy that the science fiction is about the future anyway.  The science fiction I like is always about the present.  It’s about holding a warped mirror up to today, so that we can see it more clearly…”

-       Cory Doctorow. Pond, Doug.  “Interview with Cory Doctorow” The Massachusetts Review, Winter 2004/2005; 45, 4; @ 753

The easy differences between Snow Crash (SC) and I, Robot (IR) are many:  the one (SC) sprawls across 440 pages, the other (IR) 50 some.

SC flits back and forth from the deepest historical depths to the most poignant, absurdist present like an old timey comic strip kaleidoscope flashing, “Zing! Zap! Pow! Bang.”  The other (IR) is situated in a bifurcated world, split by an enormous social chasm … The kind we see today, yesterday, tomorrow, in our world …

SC moves from the dawn of virus, language, and code, to the disturbingly hilarious and familiar contemporary world of Hiro – Where government is ineffectual, language a virus, and the world gated, racist, surreal, and infected. IR moves from one regime to another, a world divided by intellectual code, norms, and control systems.

But perhaps one could argue the protagonists of Snow Crash and I, Robot both approach their dissimilar worlds in the same general heroic arc … The more or less doomed police detective of IR is, I would argue, braver still than Hiro.  Arturo, PD 3^RD GRADE, is an almost innocent tool of fascist systems he doesn’t necessarily see.  Arturo is a latter day Don Quixote tilting windmills.  At the story’s conclusion, with no alternatives remaining, he only just begins to understand the extent of the mutated synthesis of human  | machine that his ex-wife, “The most brilliant human scientist working in Eurasia today,” has wrought.  As he considers the present for his daughter, and his purchase for her, archaic toy soldiers, he sees a bridge to a past that can never exist again.  Arturo is courageous in his solemn loyalty to family and country.  He is equal parts deluded, brave and tragic.

Hiro, on the other hand, is a savant of the Metaverse, even while living in Reality’s storage facility.  He is, in fact, the best sword fighter in the fabricated world (he wrote the program), the hero savior of hackers in Metaverse and humans in Reality alike.

The police detective discovers his society is constructed around an elaborate lie.  The other world of Eurasia poses challenges to the very core of what Arturo believes humans are, and what robots threaten to become.

He must see one iteration of his child’s mother die at the hands of his culture’s black arachnid warriors before he understands the depths of his culture’s repression.  And he cannot accept the world his child almost immediately embraces.  A world of copies of humans and robo/biologic blends.  Mortality is lost inEurasia, as is the foundation of his world view – that robots are to be disdained and dismissed and kept distant from humanity.

HP of SC is at home with his world.  He seems incapable of surprise at the endless ironies, indignaties, etc.

I suppose Hiro is more like a Kevin Kline force of nature to me — he’s hysterical, he’s brilliant, he’s so far embedded in the “warped present” as to be The Prince of Metaverse.

Hiro is the real deal. For all of those reasons, it’s hard to see someone like Hiro as “real” … [though he is one of my fav characters, all time ]

And while I’ll always consider the last words of one of William Burroughs’ characters, mumbled to his son on his death bed … , “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shithouse…

And never wear a policeman’s badge…”

I have to say, Cory Doctorow’s Arturo seems so real to me. He is human confronting inhumanity. He is not unjustifiably deluded into thinking fealty to his country of origin and family, his life, is a principle worth defending …. Until he learns the truth, of course.

And i love how nothing is simple in the balance between Arturo’s repressive, corrupt, and controlling society and the “Utopian” .alt society of Eurasia …

I immediately felt an electric charge when I realized Arturo’s x-wife was in fact a synthesized copy.

To extrapolate from that epiphany leads to some very challenging futures, for anyone with thoughts of what it means to be human. And finally, the fact that

Arturo truly has so little choice. To love a child is to know that you have no choice but to save your child.

All things else — dust.  [ "But wé dream we are rooted in earth—Dust!" Gerard Manley Hopkins]

So Arturo is Father of the Year and far more real than Hiro … But both characters shine!