by Rob Latham;
It was in those bright days—in 1941, to be precise—that I discovered the science fiction magazines. Ten years later, I could still re-read every story I’ve mentioned here, and a good many more, with almost undiminished renewal of experience: I know this, because I had cause to reread them, critically, when I began editing “theme anthologies” in 1952 (reading for reprint, you do not allow rosy memories to haze over the actual words). And by that time, there was some impressive new work to compare it with—some of it by the same authors, some by the next flood of new names of the early fifties—generally so much better written as to place great strain on the acceptability of the earlier work.
The stories I have mentioned did stand up to—that—re-examination. I tried some of them again recently, and will probably not do so again. They were every bit as good as I remembered—but it was not the prose (however good it looked by comparison at the time) or the characters; it was the ideas that were vivid and memorable—and they remain so; re-reading adds nothing. (There is not much of what we now consider good characterization in Beowulf, either. Idea-fiction, like pure myth, seems to work as well with solidly constructed prototypes—and there is a difference between a player’s mask and a cardboard cutout, between Everyman and no-one-at-all. But when did you last re-read Beowulf?)
By comparison with the new work of the early fifties, the best of the 1940-period stories survived; they still do—on their own terms. But their terms have no more to do with today’s science fiction than—let us say, The Red Badge of Courage has to do with Gone with the Wind.
* * *
I said earlier that Campbell’s specific limitation was his “engineering mind,” and that I thought this had been useful to him and to s-f. I think it was useful—indeed essential—for the role he played in his first years as editor; I think it was almost as useful—to the field as a whole, though not to his own position in the field—in its second phase.
A few months ago, I participated in a late night radio talk-program, on which John Campbell and two professors of physics from local schools were co-panelists. To everyone’s surprise (particularly the M.C.’s) we got into a hot-and-heavy discussion of objective-vs.-subjective reality. In the course of one exchange, I accused Campbell of confusing logic with hardware. He replied that there is no logic without hardware.
I do not believe Campbell would have said this twenty years ago. And I offer it here, not in definition of what I mean by “engineering mind,” but of what happened to Campbell’s attitude—and thus to American science fiction, which, in the late forties, he dominated almost entirely.
An engineer is a man who converts scientific reasoning into functioning technology. (If the word “technology” confuses anyone if applied to the social sciences, I offer my apologies—but I know no more appropriate term. I do not mean machines, and I do not mean “hardware”—artifacts. I mean useful constructs derived from scientific concepts, but not requiring scientific training or understanding to use. Geometry is part of our technology, and so is algebra—and so is symbolic logic, and so are the “tools” of psychometrics—and the generally less tangible tools of psychoanalysis. Learning theory is part of the body of scientific knowledge and inquiry; teachers’ colleges offer education courses consisting of the technology, the techniques, and the catalog of materiél, which apply learning theory to the teaching process. It is irrelevant whether the theory is sound or the technology is well-designed; the definitions are the same.)
The way a good engineer works is first to absorb the theory applicable to his job; then to investigate the technology already available for the purpose; determine what is useful to him, and what he needs, to design specifically for the job; try out (as much as possible on paper or in his mind—perhaps in model form) as many ideas as possible to find out what will work best to do the job—what offers the best combination of economy, durability, adherence to specifications, ease of operation, etc.; and then construct a pilot model embodying the most of the best of what he has learned. His objective is not learning-for-learning’s sake, but the accomplishment of a particular utilitarian goal.
There is today a field called “human engineering,” and when the first School of Human Engineering is opened, John W. Campbell will be entitled to the deanship; I doubt that the full extent of his influence, once or twice removed (through his own writing and that of the authors he attracted to what amounted to a “movement” in those early years of Astounding-and-Unknown), will ever be fully tabulated. Campbell did not originate the ideas; he did not stimulate the emergence of the field; he was one of its earliest and most productive engineers.
And as it happens, the first phases of an engineering job are almost indistinguishable from scientific research; the only significant difference is that side-tracks are less likely to be followed for any length. There may be something interesting at the end of one or another of the by-lanes, but as soon as it becomes apparent that what lies that way does not concern this particular job, it is set aside, or referred to the man who is working on that aspect.
Because Campbell thought like an engineer, because there was a specific kind of information he was after, rather than knowledge-in-general, he was able to give shape and direction to the science fiction of the forties, and it was precisely the shape and direction it most needed. Because he was a good engineer, he kept his mind entirely open about the nature of the answers he would find, except that he wanted things that would work in practice.
Problem: Human nature is such that it has changed the natural environment of humans and is continuing to do so at an accelerating pace. How to adapt human nature to its new environment?
It was when Campbell began to think he had found the answers that the “Golden Age” of Astounding was over. (I think, in retrospect, that Dianetics was the line of demarcation. There have been several other Answers since then, but from (at least somewhere about) that time, he has been in the second phase of the engineering job.) He stopped asking questions and examining the available equipment, and started making designs and building models. Astounding, quite appropriately, eventually became Analog; but long before that, Campbell had lost his real impact on the field. He remains the honored Senior Editor; most of the “big name” s-f writers of today started by selling, or trying to sell, to Campbell. Most of the younger writers, in America at least, grew up on Astounding and Unknown, and on the reject-overflow into other magazines. Mrs. Williams’s characterization of John Campbell as “father-figure” is, I think, exact and precise.
But there is beginning to be—there already is, in England—a body of writers at work who are conscious of no debt at all to Campbell—indeed, know him only as the didactic and “increasingly magisterial” (Mrs. Williams’s phrase) figure of the past ten or fifteen years. It is these writers, on the whole, who are making the new science fiction of the sixties, and what they are doing will prove, I think, a more radical and more exciting—intellectually and artistically—departure than anything up till now.
What they “grew up on” was the specialty s-f of the fifties, and the increasing bulk of s-f writing from “outside” sources.
At the end of World War II, Astounding was the only monthly in the field; Amazing, Fantastic, Weird, and Famous Fantastic Mysteries were bi-monthlies; Planet, Startling, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, quarterlies—four magazines a month altogether.
Bit by bit, the paper—and author—shortage came to an end. By the summer of 1949, Amazing and Fantastic were monthly, Startling and TWS bi-monthly. There were three new titles: Fantastic Novels (bi-monthly), Avon Fantasy Reader (three issues a year), and Forrest J. Ackerman’s “semi-pro” Fantasy Book (once or twice a year)—seven magazines a month.
Then the Boom began. It seems appropriate to date it from the first issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Fall, 1949, as The Magazine of Fantasy—bi-monthly from January, 1951, monthly in August, 1952). Galaxy started one year later, a monthly from the beginning.
Other Worlds came November, 1949, Imag
ination, October, 1950. If, Infinity, Science Fiction Stories, followed shortly. Through the first half of the decade, new titles kept appearing, old-new ones dropping out. Publishing schedules fluctuated wildly on the second-string regulars; it worked out to between eight and ten magazines a month, on the average. (There were now four s-f magazines in England.)
But the American specialty magazines were no longer an index of the health or popularity of the field. Science fiction was appearing, infrequently, but regularly, in such places as Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Blue Book, Good Housekeeping, Ellery Queen. Above all, there were books.
Before 1948, there were six anthologies of science fiction in print, all published during the forties: Phil Stong’s Other Worlds, Wollheim’s Pocket Book of Science Fiction and Viking Portable Novels of Science Fiction, Julius Fast’s paperback, Out of This World, the Healy-McComas Adventures in Time and Space, and Conklin’s The Best of Science-Fiction. In 1948-49, there were six more, including the first of the Bleiler-Dikty Best Science Fiction Stories annuals. There were at least another six in 1950. 1951 was when the Book Boom began. (22 anthologies alone, if memory serves.) The same thing was happening with novels and short story collections. By 1950 or 1951, Doubleday, Simon and Schuster, Pellegrini and Cudahy, as well as most of the paperback houses, were all firmly in the science fiction business, and there were half a dozen specialty houses.
Those were the surface manifestations of a transformation inside s-f which was, within a few years, to make the genre, in the special form in which it had existed for thirty years, moribund.
5
Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Bruce Sterling
This book showcases writers who have come to prominence within this decade. Their allegiance to Eighties culture has marked them as a group as a new movement in science fiction.
This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group.
But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one has stuck: cyberpunk.
Scarcely any writer is happy about labels—especially one with the peculiar ring of “cyberpunk.” Literary tags carry an odd kind of double obnoxiousness: those with a label feel pigeonholed; those without feel neglected. And, somehow, group labels never quite fit the individual, giving rise to an abiding itchiness. It follows, then, that the “typical cyberpunk writer” does not exist; this person is only a Platonic fiction. For the rest of us, our label is an uneasy bed of Procrustes, where fiendish critics wait to lop and stretch us to fit.
Yet it’s possible to make broad statements about cyberpunk and to establish its identifying traits. I’ll be doing this too in a moment, for the temptation is far too strong to resist. Critics, myself included, persist in label-mongering, despite all warnings; we must, because it’s a valid source of insight—as well as great fun.
Within this book, I hope to present a full overview of the cyberpunk movement, including its early rumblings and the current state of the art. Mirrorshades should give readers new to Movement writing a broad introduction to cyberpunk’s tenets themes, and topics. To my mind, these are showcase stories: strong, characteristic examples of each writer’s work to date. I’ve avoided stories widely anthologized elsewhere, so even hardened devotees should find new visions here.
Cyberpunk is a product of the Eighties milieu—in some sense, as I hope to show later, a definitive product. But its roots are deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modem popular SF.
The cyberpunks as a group are steeped in the lore and tradition of the SF field. Their precursors are legion. Individual cyberpunk writers differ in their literary debts; but some older writers, ancestral cyberpunks perhaps, show a clear and striking influence.
From the New Wave: the streetwise edginess of Harlan Ellison. The visionary shimmer of Samuel Delany. The free-wheeling zaniness of Norman Spinrad and the rock esthetic of Michael Moorcock; the intellectual daring of Brian Aldiss; and, always, J. G. Ballard.
From the harder tradition: the cosmic outlook of Olaf Stapledon; the science/politics of H. G. Wells; the steely extrapolation of Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein.
And the cyberpunks treasure a special fondness for SF’s native visionaries: the bubbling inventiveness of Philip Jose Farmer; the brio of John Varley, the reality games of Philip K. Dick; the soaring, skipping beatnik tech of Alfred Bester. With a special admiration for a writer whose integration of technology and literature stands unsurpassed: Thomas Pynchon.
Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, the impact of SF’s last designated “movement,” the New Wave, brought a new concern for literary craftsmanship to SF. Many of the cyberpunks write a quite accomplished and graceful prose; they are in love with style, and are (some say) fashion-conscious to a fault. But, like the punks of ‘77, they prize their garage-band esthetic. They love to grapple with the raw core of SF: its ideas. This links them strongly to the classic SF tradition. Some critics opine that cyberpunk is disentangling SF from mainstream influence, much as punk stripped rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies “progressive rock.” (And others—hard-line SF traditionalists with a firm distrust of “artiness”—loudly disagree.)
Like punk music, cyberpunk is in some sense a return to roots. The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical “hard SF”—extrapolation, technological literacy—are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.
In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows limping in its tracks. Before the era of labels, cyberpunk was simply “the Movement”—a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers, who swapped letters, manuscripts, ideas, glowing praise, and blistering criticism. These writers—Gibson, Rucker Shiner, Shirley, Sterling—found a friendly unity in their common outlook, common themes, even in certain oddly common symbols, which seemed to crop up in their work with a life of their own. Mirrorshades, for instance.
Mirrored sunglasses have been a Movement totem since the early days of ‘82. The reasons for this are not hard to grasp. By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. Mirrorshades, preferably in chrome and matte black, the Movement’s totem color appeared in story after story, as a kind of literary badge.
These proto-cyberpunks were briefly dubbed the Mirrorshades Group. Thus this anthology’s title, a well-deserved homage to a Movement icon. But other young writers, of equal talent and ambition, were soon producing work that linked them unmistakably to the new SF. They were independent explorers, whose work reflected something inherent in the decade, in the spirit of the times. Something loose in the 1980s.
Thus, “cyberpunk”—a label none of them chose. But the term now seems a fait accompli, and there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.
This integration has become our decade’s crucial source of cultural energy. The work of the cyberpunks is paralleled throughout Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo. This phenomenon, this dynamic, has a global range; cyberpunk is its literary incarnation.
In another era this combination might have seemed far-fetched and artificial. Traditionally there has been a yawning cultural gulf between the sciences and the humanities: a gulf between literary culture, the formal world of art and politics, and the culture of
science, the world of engineering and industry.
But the gap is crumbling in unexpected fashion. Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.
And suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident: an integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity, and street-level anarchy.
The counterculture of the 1960s was rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech. But there was always a lurking contradiction at its heart, symbolized by the electric guitar. Rock technology was the thin edge of the wedge. As the years have passed, rock tech has grown ever more accomplished, expanding into high-tech recording, satellite video, and computer graphics. Slowly it is turning rebel pop culture inside out, until the artists at pop’s cutting edge are now, quite often, cutting-edge technicians in the bargain. They are special effects wizards, mixmasters, tape-effects techs, graphics hackers, emerging through new media to dazzle society with head-trip extravaganzas like FX cinema and the global Live Aid benefit. The contradiction has become an integration.
And now that technology has reached a fever pitch, its influence has slipped control and reached street level. As Alvin Toffler pointed out in The Third Wave—a bible to many cyberpunks—the technical revolution reshaping our society is based not in hierarchy but in decentralization, not in rigidity but in fluidity.
The hacker and the rocker are this decade’s pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice. Some find the results bizarre, even monstrous; for others this integration is a powerful source of hope.
