This month I am participating in National Novel Writing Month, by attempting to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It will not surprise you to learn that my novel has some very strong cyberpunk themes to it. I thought I would post this short excerpt to see what you all thought of it.

The county dump was a few miles outside of town. In a few minutes they were they were pulling up to the darkened facility.
“Should I leave my headlights on so you can see?” asked Bryan.
“No, they actually have security cameras. I doubt anyone ever checks them. But even if they do they wouldn’t be able to tell who anybody was as long as they aren’t illuminated. So keep your lights off. I have an LED on my key chain.”
As they got out of the car, Bryan asked, “So, have you cut a hole in the fence some where”?
“No,” he replied, “that is not really a very elegant solution. I would prefer to have the people running the dump not even now that people are dumpster diving”.
“So how are going to get in?” Bryan asked.
“We just climb over the fence,” he answered.
“But it’s a barbed wire fence. How will we be able to get over it without needing tetanus shots”?
“I’ll show you,” Edwin said while reaching back into Bryan’s car.
He came back out with the floor mat from Bryan’s car. Bryan looked askance at him but said nothing. They walked towards the fence, the light of the nearly full moon providing more than enough light to see. When they reached the base of the fence, Edwin handed Bryan the floor mat and climbed up near the top of the fence. He waved for Bryan to hand him the floor mat. He took it and draped it over the barbed wire. This created a place on the top of the fence where he could grip the top of the fence without injuring himself. He pulled himself over and let himself drop to the ground.
Looking back through the fence at Bryan he grinned and said, “Nothing to it. Barbed wire seems pretty silly don’t you think”?
Bryan just laughed and started climbing the fence. After he was back on the ground on the other side, they set off across the complex. They left the floor mat on the fence so they wouldn’t have to put it back up on the way out.
“This isn’t going to smell very nice is it?” asked Bryan, his voice dripping with sarcasm. It was clear from his tone that he considered his question to be rhetorical.
“Actually, it is not going to be very bad,” replied Edwin, “The dump prohibits throwing away electronics in the trash. There are some toxic chemicals in some of the components that have to be disposed of in a special way. So they have a separate dumpster for electronics and computers and such”.
“That’s pretty awesome actually,” Bryan said, “It’s almost like they want people to take that stuff”.
“I think that may actually be the case. I can’t be sure, but why would they really mind. It costs money to dispose of that stuff correctly. Not to mention that it is better for the environment for all this to be reused instead of thrown away.”
They came to the electronics dumpster and he opened the lid. As Edwin peered in he saw that it was almost empty.
“Damn. They must have just emptied it. I’m going to have to crawl in to reach anything,” said Edwin.
He scrambled over the edge and let himself gently down into the dumpster, carefully avoiding stepping on the few items in the bottom of the dumpster. Edwin didn’t want to damage anything more than it already was. There were about half a dozen computers of various configurations and completeness strewn about. Also in the dumpster where a couple of dead monitors, an old CRT television, and other assorted kipple of an electronic nature. Edwin spotted a likely looking old beige box and handed it out to Bryan. The only other thing that looked worth the effort was what once had probably been a top of the line laptop. It was now obsolete and looked the worse for wear. He handed this out to Bryan as well. After a few more minutes of scrounging he didn’t see anything he wanted to haul back over the fence. He pulled himself out, and he grabbed the computers from Bryan. He and Bryan headed back to the place on the fence where they had left the floor mat. Edwin put down the computers and went over first.

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!

Punks Not Dead – Week Four – Assignment Four – P2PU – Brian Williams … brian.williams@gmail.com.  “BTDUs (bathroom tissue distribution units (i.e., rolls))” (NEW TP POOL REGULATIONS) at 265.  “Give me convenience or give me death.” Dead Kennedys

I would argue the “warnings sounded by Gibson, Stephenson and Sterling” became “reality” at the instant it became possible for these bio-organisms to imagine such a narrative, future, and to extrapolate from that narrative image to a sonic present where pizza will be delivered in “30 minutes or less” … or else … and we don’t need to go forward to imagine unimaginable things and endless cyberpunk content, storytelling.  Cyberpunk comes from inside the authors, like all meaningful writing or storytelling.

The cyberpunk’s eye is the prism through which they distinguish their content.  They may, as in Snow Crash, imagine alternative realities that flow from civilizations millennia before … The Code of Hammurabi is the most ancient, first known subject arrangement of laws.  The phrase, a subject arrangement of laws, is the very definition of “code” and code and snow crash and language and infection and disease and virus and Eden are all ingeniously tied up in knots: Cyberpunk as backward looking and timeless black comedy …

Yet it can hardly be disputed:  Something about our species seems to force our culture to bury the very styles, movements, and genres, we once experienced as transcendent, vital.

Our society kills fun things by posturing about whether a particular thing is “dead” and our fear of death informs this process –to describe a music or genre or style as dead is to metaphorically kill it. Yet neither cyberpunk nor punk is dead.

And, never mind the bollocks, or the encyclopedia that reads like a tombstone — “Cyberpunk began dying off as a literary subgenre in the early 1990s, as acceptance of cyberculture and computers increased among the public” (Cyberpunk. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Gale Group, 2001. p170-367.) – there are plenty of academics who view the cyberpunk genre as well, healthy and changing, as all living organisms  must, who find in cyberpunk the depth requisite to sustain the curiosity, imagination, of  readers and writers alike.

Is Cyberpunk Dead? No. It is, in fact, alive and well, thank you very much. Has Cyberpunk evolved? Yes. It has indeed evolved. To look at this question more closely we need two things. A working definition of cyberpunk, and a work produced recently to prove that the genre is still alive and thriving. I will use Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother as an example of a successful modern day Cyberpunk novel. My definition of Cyberpunk I take directly from our Class Description and it is a definition that I assume was written by our fair teacher Rebecca Kahn:

“Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in technologically-enhanced cultural ‘systems’. In cyberpunk stories’ settings, there is usually a ‘system’ which dominates the lives of most ‘ordinary’ people, be it an oppressive government, a group of large, paternalistic corporations, or a fundamentalist religion. These systems are enhanced by certain technologies (today advancing at a rate that is bewildering to most people), particularly ‘information technology’ (computers, the mass media), making the system better at keeping those within it inside it. Often this technological system extends into its human ‘components’ as well, via brain implants, prosthetic limbs, cloned or genetically engineered organs, etc. Humans themselves become part of ‘the Machine’. This is the ‘cyber’ aspect of cyberpunk. However, in any cultural system, there are always those who live on its margins, on ‘the Edge’: criminals, outcasts, visionaries, or those who simply want freedom for its own sake. Cyberpunk literature focuses on these people, and often on how they turn the system’s technological tools to their own ends. This is the ‘punk’ aspect of cyberpunk””

Although, on the surface Little Brother may not appear to be Cyberpunk (it’s marketed as YA not SF or Cyberpunk). It really does fulfill all the requirements of the above definition. The reason that it may not seem cyberpunk at first glance is that it takes place in almost the present day. Most of the tech describes in the book exists. Some of the tech is even identified by a particular brand name or product name of something that is on the market and available to consumers right now. The rest of it is either stuff that exists, but not in the specific form that is described in the book, or is not at all hard to see being made four or five years from now. But the rest of the elements of Cyberpunk are there. There is an oppresive system, in this case the Department of Homeland Security, that infiltrates many of the lives of the people in the story. They operate a surveillance society where the DHS tracks everyones movements and everyones expenditures. People are stopped and questioned by the police if their “histograms” are non-standard. They take people off the street and wiretap the Internet. The main character of the story is a cyberpunk in the finest tradition. He is not really an anti-hero. Neo from the Matrix is not really an anti-hero either. The main character, Marcus Yallow, finds ways of using the DHS’s technology against them. He starts a techno-revolution that uses the same technology that the DHS is using to oppress people to liberate them.

Little Brother is not an older book like Neoromancer or Snow Crash, it was published last year. Furthermore, it was highly successful. It was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel. It got great reviews from several publications including the New York Times which named it as one of the best books for young people of the year. Does it look like classic cyberpunk? Not really. It is modern Cyberpunk. Today you don’t really need to invent a futuristic technology to write a cyberpunk story. You can use today’s tech just fine. That is not to say that you can’t write about futuristic technologies. There are plenty of stories that involve entoptic displays and bioware implants and nanobots. But in a few decades these may very well be real and commonplace technologies.

Nayar, Pramod K., Wetware Fiction: Cyberpunk and the Ideologies of Posthuman Bodies. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1140647

Wall, David S., Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear: Social Science Fiction(s) and the Production of Knowledge about Cybercrime (July 3, 2008). Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 11, No. 6, pp. 861-884, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1155155

Blitz, Marc Jonathan, The Freedom of 3D Thought: The First Amendment in Virtual Reality (October 28, 2008). Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 30, No. 3. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1291415

open access …. from california digital library eScholarship repository …

Richard Kahn. (2005). How the West was One? The American Frontier and the Rise of a Global Internet Imaginary. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 6.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art6

Chris Newfield, “Nano-Punk For Tomorrow’s People” (March 1, 2006). Center for Nanotechnology in Society. Paper 22.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/isber/cns/22

Lorie Sauble-Otto (1997) “The Bodypolitics of Feminist Science Fiction: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la cité”, Paroles gelées: Vol. 15: No. 2, Article 10.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucla_french/pg/vol15/iss2/art10

Janet Sarbanes (1996) “Literary Criticism after the Revolution, or How to Read a Polemical Postmodern Literary Text”, Paroles gelées: Vol. 14: No. 2, Article 12.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucla_french/pg/vol14/iss2/art12

Elizabeth Swanstrom. (2005). Wax Blocks, Data Banks, and File #0467839: The Archive of Memory in William Gibson’s Science Fiction. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 1, Issue 2, Article 7.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/gseis/interactions/vol1/iss2/art7

William Warner, “Breaking the Code of The Matrix; or, Hacking Hollywood to Liberate Film” (September 1, 2002). Department of English, UCSB. Digital Cultures and New Media. Paper Warner2007b.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucsbenglish/digitalcultures/Warner2007b

“There is no future”

God 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.

I must admit to feeling like a total novice in answering this question. I mean, if I knew the answer to this in Week 1 before our first discussion, I wouldn’t be signed up for the course! I read Do Androids Dream for the first time last week. I’ve seen The Matrix movies (Matrices?), read a little Neal Stephenson, and seen things like Serial Experiments: Lain (which is truly fabulous). What unites works like these? And what separates them from science fiction? I’ll probably unknowingly disagree with some cyberpunk experts out in the ether, but…

1. Many of these stories scream “prophetic warning” to me. They seem to be meant to jar you and I from our easy thinking about how dandy a life filled with increasingly advanced technologies will be. The problems technologies create can be philosophical or moral (Do Androids Dream, and I suppose I, Robot), or threats against life itself (Terminator comes to mind). Cyberpunk seems to be asking, ‘do you really want to go here? Let me show you what you’re asking for…’ On the other hand, much of sci-fi seems to reinforce the narrative that technology will make things better (e.g., in the future Star Trek world no one needs or uses money.)

2. The heroes begin the tale not knowing they are heroes. This isn’t a particularly cyberpunk quality, I suppose – the trait that unites Neo, Luke Skywalker, Paul Atreides, and Harry Potter is that they all come slowly, unbelievingly, and hesitantly to their gifts. It’s a tale that is delicious to many – that I might one day wake up as a normal Joe and go to bed that night having learned that I am The One, have the force, am the Kwisatz Haderach, or am a wizard. But as I said, this seems to be a trait shared by much of sci-fi as well. Does cyberpunk have a special angle on this?

3. Finally, although I can hear people throwing things even as I type the phrase, cyberpunk seems to have a very Christian sensibility about it. By this I mean that when you consider the audience of most of Christ’s messages, they were the outcast fringe of society. He spoke to them almost exclusively, ignoring those who were wealthy, popular, or had “made it” from society’s perspective, trying to instill in the wretches the belief that even the most boring, mundane person matters and can make a difference. Cyberpunk seems to also celebrate the fringe, the nerd, the cubicle-warrior, and focus on what they are able to do and how valuable to society they are. In contrast, many sci-fi heroes are perfectly respectable contributors to society (e.g., Hari Seldon is a math professor).

Well, this is a slightly embarrassing contribution, but not as embarrassing as not contributing at all! I’m looking forward to our discussion Wednesday…