“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.

The Setting of a cyberpunk story is one of the most important aspects of the genre. It is a unique place that draws the reader in. It does this by being in some aspects almost identical to the world that we live in; while also being different enough to fascinate the reader or viewer. This combination of familiarity and strangeness is what makes Cyberpunk settings successful. Sometimes the setting is the most appealing aspect of the whole story with the reader more interested in hearing more about it than what happens to the characters. Often there are two settings: the real world and cyberspace. These settings are often rather bleak, sometimes even post-apocalyptic. There is almost always some powerful authority, whether it be corporation, government, or even religion, that has an enormous influence of the lives of everyday people. By observing the settings of various cyberpunk stories we can see what similarities they have.

Initially in the film The Matrix, the setting is very familiar. It is the towering office buildings and slow moving traffic jams and degenerating apartment buildings of any of dozens of cities around the world. At first the rules of this setting seem to be the same as these of our world. However, as the story progresses we learn that nothing is as it seems. This first manifests in strange occurrences ranging from the coincidences of the white rabbit incident to the nightmare where the agents literally seal Neo’s lips and implant a bug into him. Later it is revealed that everything that Neo has ever known is really just a computer generated virtual reality. The real world is something altogether foreign to what we are accustomed to. It is cold and dark and barren. The only place where humans survive is deep under the ground. The surface is the domain of viscous robots controlled by cold and cunning computer intelligences. The virtual reality setting of the Matrix can be viewed as a responsive character in the story as there are many intelligences that control it. Neo can control parts of it as well.

The setting of Neuromancer is less familiar at first than that of The Matrix. However, it too is similar enough to our current world that we can readily identify with the world that the characters are interacting with. The story starts in a smoky bar with an ugly and nosy barkeeper. A setting that occurs thousands of time in real life, I am sure. There are cheap hotels and busy streets and hectic markets. All of these settings have been influenced by the course of technology but they are recognizably similar to the settings that we are familiar with in our everyday life. It doesn’t matter that all the trains are maglev in this story, they still shake the apartments of those unfortunate enough to live too close to the tracks.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep my not be considered Cyberpunk by some people but the setting is very Cyberpunk. It takes place on Earth after a devastating World War. The large apartment buildings of the cities are still there, but they are largely abandoned. Perhaps the most similar aspect of this story’s setting is that of the media. In the story the TV and radio media has an absolutely enormous influence on people. Every single person knows who Buster Friendly and his guests are. Just as most people are familiar with the media celebrities of our world. These peoples’ opinions carry extra weight because they are so widely known and have access to such ubiquitous methods of mass communication. The setting even has what may be considered an early prototype of cyberspace, with access to it being obtained though the use of empathy boxes. If one uses one of these devices they are instead into another reality entirely, just like the Cyberspace of Neuromancer or the Matrix in The Matrix.

Cyberpunk settings are gritty, dirty and in a strange way they are realistic. They are not hard to envision as a possible future. They are, I think, essentially today’s society and culture as the author thinks it might be if we have access to tomorrow’s technology and science. It acknowledges that science and technology can be used for both good and ill purposes and that they can be used by both oppressors and freedom-fighters alike. Take the world as it is today, then add not-too-distant-future tech and science to it, perhaps sprinkle in a disaster or apocalypse. Now you have a Cyberpunk setting.

“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wikipedia, Here be dragons)

As a reaction to the Utopian science fiction (frequently set into a distant glorious future), cyberpunk projected all our fears into the uncharted territory of the very near future.

What separates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspecified, yet imminent apocalypse. Hence, most of the cyberpunk scenes are post-apocalyptic ones, where the apocalypse is a given, part of a forgotten history:

“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Chapter 2)

This lack of the time dimension, from disinterest in history to a “carpe diem” attitude towards life is the image of a chronic existential nihilism.

Actually various forms of nihilism are present in the cyberpunk settings: from the aforementioned existential nihilism, underlined by the timeless Mercer’s cycle in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,’ to the metaphysical nihilism in The Matrix:

Boy: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.”
Neo: “What truth?”
Boy: “There is no spoon.”

Moreover, The Matrix features Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” book, as a hollowed book from the chapter “On Nihilism,” beautifully underlying Baudrillard’s message. Later in the movie, Morpheus shows Neo “the desert of the real,” a clear reference to Baudrillard’s work (see first page here).

The “carpe diem” behaviour fuels the consumerism, which becomes extreme and devalues everything: Penfield mood organ devalues genuine feelings, plastic surgery devalues beauty, simstim edited reality replaces reality. Everything is available in too many ephemeral options, anchoring everyone in a perpetual present.

“…by the 1990, the variety of (android) subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The lack of genuine items is underlined by the concept of ‘cheap copies of replicas.’ This and the continuous re-purposed antique objects illustrate almost a coprophagous society, feeding on its own detritus.

Paradoxically, these settings makes you experience a claustrophobic feeling in an open space, this is achieved in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy through the social and urban detritus; the ‘dessert of the real’ in The Matrix.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the kipple, the radioactive fallout and the pressure to emigrate from Earth creates the claustrophobic environment on a depopulated Earth; with overlapping glimpses of agoraphobia triggered by the sound the empty buildings creates.

“And for a minute I shut off the (TV) sound. And I heard the building, this building. I heard the—” She gestured. “Empty apartments,” Rick said. — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

It is the same blending between extremes characteristic to cyberpunk, here blurring the physical space between claustro- and agoraphobia:

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls … From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out … It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive!
— Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

This is the uncharted territory to which we know we’re heading to, the scariest future of all possible futures: the future without a future.

Rather than write a long narrative this time, I considered the nature of this weeks assignment which I have interpreted as: to explore and discuss the role that setting and environment play in the stories and how these elements contribute to the tone of the stories, and decided to do something slightly different. To me, Setting and Environment are very much about imagery, so what I’ve decided to do is to share my thoughts using images (apologies in advance if this completely fails ).

What I have done is to create a small gallery on flickr into which I have added images that evoke different elements, themes and aspects that seem to recur in cyberpunk stories. I’ve added some notes with each of the images. I had hoped to embed the gallery directly into this blog but sadly I don’t seem to be able to do that – at least I haven’t figured out how to do that.

You can access the gallery here.

Los Angeles November 2019, a decaying city, the negative of its once bright and sunny side, set in a post war apocalyptic future stands for the home for our notorious Cyberpunk anti-heroes who roam the dirty streets in the shadows of the powerful and rich. Cyberpunk would not only be half as exciting if the characters didn’t life in such a crazy morbid place. The setting is significant for the genre or else people would not say, ” Oh! Neuromancer and the Matrix are definitely Cyberpunk. The atmosphere is permeated with a sense of impending doom.” But which images and elements give the recipient this sense of foreboding? And what kind of influence to they have on the narrative? I will discuss these questions by examining the setting of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” of 1982 in detail. Firstly I will name and describe the elements used for a typical Cyberpunk setting, and secondly I will display which influence they have on the narrative.

The first shot in “Blade Runner” shows Los Angeles at night  illuminated by its great many lights and occurring erupting fire pillars. The absence of moonlight or stars suggests a darker mood and underlines the infernal touch the fires of the factories give to the city. At first glance, it is obvious that the inhabitants don’t make a difference between night and day. The lights are on around the clock exhibiting people from numerous ethnic groups, colors and shapes. The streets are full at all times and flooded with gleaming stroboscopic lights, isolating the individual scamping with his perception. Huge omnipresent advertisement boards dominate the view and display the presence of companies existing in every aspect of life. Politicians and parties are extinct in a world where corporations wield the power to suppress everything and everyone. Those with power always have a “place in the sun” like the “Tyrell” corporation in their giant golden pyramids giving the impression of being the height of human civilization. The people who live literally at the bottom of the city have to live with Scott’s “endless” rain, unshielded in the dark alleys and slums of the city. The dark and sinister mood permeats the whole movie by using a film method named “low-key-style” to create and condense shadows at odd spaces. Even the characters appear latent and hidden in shadow as if being part of the setting.

These images give the Cyberpunk genre the essential detail for the world in which cyberpunks move, breathe and live. Some places in the setting are necessary for the course of conflict in a story. It is already known that many films novels have a detective flair or “film noir” atmosphere, because of the setting. Alleys, offices, slums and factory buildings give the characters substance in a story. But so is it the other way around. The setting cannot stand alone without its characters, because it is a medium which needs mass or the characters in this case in order to act and interact. The recipient is able to visualize these interactions, because he or she can imagine how it would feel to move in this kind city. It is necessary to say that the setting delivers us an impression how the protagonist perceives his surroundings. As a recipient, we have the chance to understand the insight of a cyberpunk more clearly when we understand in what kind of world the anti-hero developed in.

In cyberpunk novels and film, setting is often as much a character as the human and non-human characters. The dystopian futures are often nightmarish visions of imagined post-capitalist societies where large multinational corporations have more power than national governments. Grey skies and polluted air permeate Gibson’s novels; the famous opening line of Neuromancer describes a sky that is “a color of television, tuned to a dead channel”. Blade Runner and The Matrix both illustrate similar realities, and Snowcrash imagines a world where governance has been ceded to corporations and entrepreneurs.

This week’s discussion will focus on the idea of setting in cyberpunk novels and film. What is the effect of the crowded cityscapes, rain, eternal dusk or nighttime, neon signs, faceless masses and speeding rapid transit on the narrative? How do these elements contribute to the tone of the novels, and could they be said to be responsive characters in their own right? Write a 1-2 page paper on the settings of the cyberpunk novels and films in the curriculum and explore the questions raised above.

Please upload your piece as a blog post by Monday 28th of September, in preparation for the discussion on Wednesday 30th September. Please tag your post with the tags “Week 3″ and “scenery”, as well as any other tags you would like to add.

Image: Night City on Flickr,  by LordFerguson, CC BY-SA 2.0