“The future is already here —
it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
STORIES OF
— WILLIAM GIBSON
Before email, before “the web,” before
hackers and GPS and sexting, before
titanium implants, before Google Goggles,
H
before Siri, and before each and every
ARD
one of us carried a computer in our
W
pockets, there was cyberpunk, and
A
science fiction was never the same.
RE, S
Cyberpunk writers — serious, smart,
OF
and courageous in the face of change —
TW
exposed the naiveté of a society rushing
AR
headlong into technological unknowns.
E,
Technology could not save us, they argued, and it
W
might in fact ruin us. Now, thirty years after The
ET
Movement party-crashed the science fiction scene,
WA
the cyberpunk reality has largely come to be.
RE
The future they imagined is here.
, RE
With an introduction by Victoria Blake and stories by:
VOL
William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Jonathan Lethem,
U
EDITED BY VICTORIA B LAKE
Benjamin Parzybok, Kim Stanley Robinson,
TION
David Marusek, Paul Tremblay, Cat Rambo,
Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Mark Teppo, Lewis
AND
Shiner, Rudy Rucker, James Patrick Kelly, John
E
Shirley, Daniel H. Wilson, Paul Di Filippo,
VOL
and Cory Doctorow
STORIES OF
U
HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, WETWARE, REVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION
TION
WELCOME TO YOUR CYBERPUNK WORLD.
WITH STORIES BY W I L L I A M G I B S O N B R U C E S T E R L I N G
ISBN: 978-1-937163-08-2
US $15.95
JONATHAN LETHEM CORY DOCTOROW PAT CADIGAN
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON LEWIS SHINER RUDY RUCKER
PA U L D I F I L I P P O JOHN SHIRLEY AND MANY MORE…
www.underlandpress.com
Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolutio n EDITED BY VICTORIA BLAKE
Copyright © 2013 Underland Press. All Rights Reserved.
Requests for permission to reproduce material
from this work should be sent to:
Rights and Permissions
[email protected]
Cover design by Claudia Nobel
Text Design by Heidi Whitcomb
ISBN: 978-1-937163-08-2
Printed in the United States of America
Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson,
Blue Clay Blues, by Gwyneth Jones,
first appeared in Omni, 1981, copyright
Interzone, 1992, copyright © 1992
© Omni Publications International 1981,
Gwyenth Jones
used by permission of the author
The Lost Technique of Blackmail, by Mark
Mozart in Mirrorshades, by Bruce Sterling
Teppo, Electric Velocipede #19, Fall 2009,
and Lewis Shiner, first appeared in Omni,
copyright © 2009 by Mark Teppo
1985, copyright © Omni Publications
Soldier, Sailor, by Lewis Shiner, first
International 1985, used by permission of
appeared in Nine Hard Questions About the
the authors
Nature of the Universe, 1990, copyright ©
Interview with the Crab, by Jonathan
1990 Lewis Shiner
Lethem, first appeared in Bread #1, 2005,
Mr. Boy, by James Patrick Kelly, first
printed in Men and Cartoons, copyright ©
appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June
2004, 2012 Jonathan Lethem
1990, copyright © 1990 James Patrick
El Pepenador, by Benjamin Parzybok,
Kelly
collection original, copyright © 2012
The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of
Benjamin Parzybok
Poetics, by Rudy Rucker, first appeared in
Down and Out in the Year 2000, by Kim
New Blood, July 1982, copyright © 2012
Stanley Robinson, first appeared in Isaac
Rudy Rucker
Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1986,
Wolves of the Plateau, by John Shirley, first
copyright © 1986 Kim Stanley Robinson
appeared in Heatseeker, copyright © 1989,
Rock On, by Pat Cadigan, first appeared
2012 by John Shirley
in Light Years and Dark, copyright © 1984
The Nostalgist, by Daniel H. Wilson, first
Pat Cadigan
appeared on Tor.com, 2009, copyright ©
Getting to Know You, by David Marusek,
2009 Daniel H. Wilson
first appeared in Future Histories, 1997,
Life in the Anthropocene, by Paul Di
copyright © 1997 David Marusek
Filippo, first appeared in The Mammoth
User-Centric, by Bruce Sterling, first
Book of Apocalypse SF, copyright © 2010
appeared in Designfax, 1999, copyright ©
Paul Di Filippo
1999 Bruce Sterling
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory
The Blog at the End of the World, by Paul
Doctorow, first appeared in Baen’s Universe,
Tremblay, first appeared in Chizine, 2008,
2006, copyright © 2006 CorDoc-Co, Ltd.
copyright © 2008 Paul Tremblay
Some rights reserved under a creative
commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license
Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling
Stars, by Cat Rambo, first appeared in
Talebones, winter 2006/2007, copyright ©
2007, 2012 Cat Rambo
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 009 Victoria Blake
Johnny Mnemonic 015 William Gibson
Mozart in Mirrorshades 035 Bruce Sterling
and Lewis Shiner
Interview with the Crab 053 Jonathan Lethem
El Pepenador 069 Benjamin Parzybok
Down and Out in the Year 2000 089 Kim Stanley Robinson
Getting to Know You 109 David Marusek
User-Centric 137 Bruce Sterling
The Blog at the End of the World 157 Paul Tremblay
Memories of Moments, 173 Cat Rambo
Bright as Falling Stars
Rock On 191 Pat Cadigan
Blue Clay Blues 201 Gwyneth Jones
The Lost Technique of Blackmail 225 Mark Teppo
Soldier, Sailor 261 Lewis Shiner
The Jack Kerouac 273 Rudy Rucker
Disembodied School of Poetics
Mr. Boy 283 James Patrick Kelly
Wolves of the Plateau 347 John Shirley
The Nostalgist 363 Daniel H. Wilson
Life in the Anthropocene 373 Paul Di Filippo
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth 391 Cory Doctorow
INTRODUCTION
By Victoria Blake
“As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands,” Bruce Sterling wrote in the first
issue of Cheap Truth, a one-page, double-sided bright coal of a fan-zine first published in 1983. “Dr
eaming of dragon-hood, Fantasy has puffed itself up
with air like a Mojave chuckwalla. SF’s collapse ha[s] formed a vacuum that
forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat . . . Short stories, crippled with the bends, expand into whole hideous trilogies as hollow as nickel
gumballs.”
These were fighting words, aimed directly at the bulls-eye of publishers,
editors, critics, authors, and readers in the “smokestack” publishing-industrial complex. There was, Sterling wrote in Cheap Truth issue five, “a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical
advantage: it is still a pop industry that is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government
Medicare through arts grants. . . . SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself.”
The physician, in this case, was the collection of early 80s writers that
Cheap Truth showcased as carriers of the flame—Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, et al—and the challenge was to find a new voice for a new
kind of reader in a new kind of world. “This year’s Nebula Ballot looked like
a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read,” a pseudonymous
Lewis Shiner wrote in Cheap Truth. “I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of ‘Golly’s’ and blushes and grins. And aren’t
those dolphins cute? . . . They’d rather hear that somebody ‘muttered an
oath’ or came out with some made-up word like ‘Ifni!’ than be told that they
really said ‘shit’ or ‘shove it up your ass, motherfucker.’”
Nobody had ever read anything like what the cyberpunks were writing—
stories and novels that were the bastard child of science fiction, with a
common-man perspective, a love of tech and drugs, and an affinity for street
culture. That most cyberpunk was written by white males didn’t seem to
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CYBERPUNK
ruffle any feathers. Cyberpunk was new, it was vital, it was irreverent. Most
importantly, cyberpunk rocked.
When Sterling and his gang of pranksters shuttered Cheap Truth in 1985, a mere eighteen issues after launch, he declared that the movement was over, it
had become too big, and that much of the “original freedom” was lost. “People
know who I am,” he wrote, “and they get all hot and bothered by personalities,
instead of ideas and issues. CT can no longer claim the ‘honesty of complete
desperation.’ That first fine flower of red-hot hysteria is simply gone.” In other words, The Movement had been changed by its acceptance into the smokestack
machine. ( Cheap Truth had been mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone, evidence of it being swallowed whole.) When, in 1986, Sterling published Mirrorshades, the first and some say only true cyberpunk anthology, the movement was consolidated into a particular table of contents, a closed club whose membership was limited to the original cyberpunk writers. In 1991, Lewis Shiner renounced cyberpunk
in a New York Times op-ed. When Time ran a cover story about cyberpunks, the cyberpunks themselves were outraged. Counter culture had been embraced by
culture. “I hereby declare the revolution over,” Sterling wrote in the final issue of Cheap Truth. “Long live the provisional government.”
Thirty years later, cyberpunk is both very much dead and very much alive.
It is dead in the sense that the Reagan years are over, the Cold War is done,
straight video has been replaced by CGI, and the achievement of the Xerox
machine, once the very pinnacle of technological advancement available to
the masses, is being outdone by 3-D printers. But it is very much alive in that cyberpunk was never really about a specific technology or a specific moment in
time. It was, and it is, an aesthetic position as much as a collection of themes, an attitude toward mass culture and pop culture, an identity, a way of living,
breathing, and grokking our weird and wired world.
Anthology editing is a tricky business. On the one hand, the anthology editor
must revere, must even do a little bit of worshipping at the foot of the statue.
On the other hand, the editor must be removed enough to see the subject with
clear eyes, and to offer an unimpassioned editorial read. But she must also
bring just enough of herself to the selection to make the anthology as a whole
useful, interesting, unique, timeless, and, hopefully, fun.
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INTRODUCTION
In putting together this collection, I have tried to do four things. The
first—spurred by the worshipper within me—is to pay homage to cyberpunk
beginnings. To that end, this collection contains reprints of cyberpunk gems
that are now difficult to find—“Mozart in Mirrorshades” by Bruce Sterling
and Lewis Shiner is one of my personal favorites—and it showcases stories
by the founding or first-generation cyberpunk authors—Rudy Rucker, John
Shirley, Greg Bear, and Paul Di Filippo among them—that weren’t in the
original collections.
Second, the critic in me wanted to offer an as-complete-as-possible look at
cyberpunk themes and topics. Some of my favorites include the low-life of the
Low Teks in William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” the imbedded digital brains
of David Marusek’s “Getting to Know You,” the drugs and outlaws of Gwyneth
Jones’s “Blue Clay Blues,” the multi-mind madness of John Shirley’s “Wolves
of the Plateau,” the body augmentation of James Patrick Kelly’s “Mr. Boy,” and
the environmental meltdown of Paul Di Filippo’s “Life in the Anthropocene.”
One story from this group deserves a special explanation: “Down and Out
in the Year 2000,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, occupies a unique position in
the cyberpunk cannon as perhaps the solitary story to critique the cyberpunk
reverence for “the street.” “I was living in Washington DC in the summer of
1985,” Robinson wrote me in an email, after I requested some information
about the genesis of the story, “hanging out in Dupont Circle park and the
smaller park outside our apartment. Watching the people there, I began to
think that the cyberpunks were white middle-class people like me, and they
had no idea; ‘street smart’ was just a trendy phrase, a literary or Hollywood
idea. So I wrote the story to express that feeling.”
Third, the iconoclast in me wanted to move past traditional cyberpunk,
and beyond the cast of known cyberpunk characters, to take a look at how
the movement has developed since the end of the Cold War, and to pull the
veil back on what the future might hold. Cory Doctorow, arguably the new
Chairman of Tech, ends the collection by celebrating the heroic sysadmins,
a rarely lauded group. Cat Rambo, not usually associated with cyberpunk,
beautifully describes how relationships are changed by technology. New-comer
Benjamin Parzybok, author of the novel Couch, contributed an original story notable for its authentic re-imagining of low life in the slums, a different kind of low life entirely from that described by the 80s cyberpunk. Jonathan Lethem’s
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CYBERPUNK
“Interview with the Crab” thrilled me when I read it the first time, and it
continues to astound me with its craft. I’ve never heard Lethem described as a
cyberpunk, but my favorite of his novels, Gun, with Occasional Music, uses the hardboiled tone common to cyberpunk, and is popul
ated by state-sponsored
druggies, external memory devices, a virtual monetary system, and genetically
altered animals who speak, love, have sex, and die like humans. The story
included here takes up the themes of pop culture and fame, getting deeper into
both by using a crustacean, the titular crab, as the prototypical hard-living,
idiosyncratic celebrity.
And finally, in compiling this collection, the writer in me wanted to look
at the craft of cyberpunk, and the interesting, innovate forms some of the
cyberpunk stories take. The prose of Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On” has a vitality
that makes my heart beat faster. Two stories—Bruce Sterling’s “User-Centric”
and Paul Tremblay’s “Blog at the End of the World”—co-op new kinds of
communication, email and blogging, to weave their tales. Daniel H. Wilson
writes what could be called a cyberpunk fairytale, and Mark Teppo pokes at
an acronym-heavy future, all while telling a story in the very language he’s
lampooning.
I was five years old when the first issue of Cheap Truth came out, and only eight when The Movement was declared dead. In 1991, when Lewis Shiner
renounced his cyberpunk membership, I was wearing neon hair bands, plastic
shoes, and bopping my head to Cyndi Lauper. I wasn’t in any way punk, and
I’m probably still not. But when you’re holding a hammer, everything starts to
look like a nail, and when you’re editing cyberpunk, you realize you’re living in a cyberpunk world.
To wit, last week, the week of Thanksgiving, 2012, as the final edits were
being made on this collection, the following items caught my eye: On the radio
to the airport, I heard a commentator remarking on Project Glass, the Google
initiative focusing on wearable computers; also on the radio, I heard about
a scientist who had discovered that jellyfish can reverse the aging process,
and that jellyfish stem cells might possess the secret to immortality. The talk around the pre-Thanksgiving dinner table was about California legalizing self-driving cars, and about how the rich/poor income gap in America is wider than
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INTRODUCTION
it’s been since 1967. Gawker posted a story about a man on family vacation
in Florida who found anonymous sex in a theme-park bathroom with the
help of an iPhone app. And on Thanksgiving itself, my second cousin told me
all about a nonprofit he was starting with a group of like-minded retirees to
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