Joanna McNeil has a new piece up at Filmmaker. The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk. It’s a terrific appreciation for cyberpunk, and for William Gibson’s writing in particular. I’ve often wondered why cyberpunk tattooed itself into my brain the second I encountered it. This passage from her column sounds like “why” to me:
Gibson’s writing is always lucid, never surreal. Machines in his novels are plugged into something; things happen for a reason; alienation, rather than madness, is what animates his characters. They are users of software and hardware and data systems, in cities and networks of infrastructure, siloed before connecting with others through networked machines.
There’s a verisimilitude in Gibson that connects. He name-checks real brands: Braun makes a coffee maker and a hologram projector in Neuromancer. Somehow by not telling us every detail about how the computers work the prose lasts longer. I don’t recall any particular facts and figures about the computers and networks in the book. They describe global telecommunications without bogging down in poorly-aging technical details.
It was a total accident that I acquired a paperback copy of Neuromancer. I wrote a bit about it back in 2005. Cyberpunk Guy, 1988. I liked more anodyne and even innocent SF at that point in my life. Neuromancer had street gangs, curse words, killings and sex. I devoured it. The ubiquity of computers and the net was full of promise.
Back then, 1983, computers were in every department store. Largely unmonitored. I would be very wealthy if I had a dollar for every time I entered a Radio Shack, Sears, or JC Penney back then and wrote a computer program. It was as simple as walking up to that TI-99, Commodore, Timex Sinclair, Apple ][, or Atari 400 and typing out:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Adults considered me a genius because I could do that–and that I was unafraid to do that. It was not genius. The world knew computers were the future. In 1982 Time Magazine’s Person of the Year? The computer. We knew the future was on its way. Gibson’s writing made that future tangible and despite the horrors of the world he envisioned, it did seem like a “chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” In some ways, yes, we have created the Torment Nexus he warned us of. But we also got opportunity, and certainly we have adventure.
In 1988 at a signing for Mona Lisa Overdrive at DG Wills Books in La Jolla, William Gibson, when asked (by me) for recommendations for other authors to read, animatedly walked over to “S” in the Science Fiction section and recommended Bruce Sterling without hesitation. It’s Sterling who I’ll cite as my favorite author, consistently, for the last few decades, but Gibson’s brilliance seldom leaves my thoughts.
In December last year I complained about the lack of a place to purchase old abridged audiobooks, particularly Gibson’s Virtual Light, a favorite orphaned audiobook of mine. Since then I was gifted audio recordings of that book courtesy Benji, an IndieWeb acquaintance. It’s not my place to make that available here, but know that the networks that surveil and seek to control us are also networks that connect us to friends and allies.
Via Mastodon, also via Benji, here’s another unique piece of media related to cyberpunk: Blade Runner Aquarelle Edition.
twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35 minutes. it took two years of painstaking work, all done in his spare time after work each night.
