Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Science fiction—at least according to its official dogma—has always been about the impact of technology. But times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined—and confined—in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.

  For the cyberpunks, by stark contrast, technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.

  Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.

  Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self.

  As Norman Spinrad pointed out in his essay on cyberpunk, many drugs, like rock and roll, are definitive high-tech products. No counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid—it came from a Sandoz lab, and when it escaped it ran through society like wildfire. It is not for nothing that Timothy Leary proclaimed personal computers “the LSD of the 1980s”—these are both technologies of frighteningly radical potential. And, as such, they are constant points of reference for cyberpunk.

  The cyberpunks, being hybrids themselves, are fascinated by interzones: the areas where, in the words of William Gibson, “the street finds its own uses for things.” Roiling, irrepressible street graffiti from that classic industrial artifact, the spray can. The subversive potential of the home printer and the photocopier. Scratch music, whose ghetto innovators turn the phonograph itself into an instrument, producing an archetypal Eighties music where funk meets the Burroughs cut-up method. “It’s all in the mix”—this is true of much Eighties art and is as applicable to cyberpunk as it is to punk mix-and-match retro fashion and multitrack digital recording.

  The Eighties are an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective. The cyberpunks aim for a wide-ranging, global point of view.

  William Gibson’s Neuromancer, surely the quintessential cyberpunk novel, is set in Tokyo, Istanbul, Paris. Lewis Shiner’s Frontera features scenes in Russia and Mexico—as well as the surface of Mars. John Shirley’s Eclipse describes Western Europe in turmoil. Greg Bear’s Blood Music is global, even cosmic in scope.

  The tools of global integration—the satellite media net, the multinational corporation—fascinate the cyberpunks and figure constantly in their work. Cyberpunk has little patience with borders. Tokyo’s Hayakawa’s SF Magazine was the first publication ever to produce an “all-cyberpunk” issue, in November 1986. Britain’s innovative SF magazine Interzone has also been a hotbed of cyberpunk activity, publishing Shirley, Gibson, and Sterling as well as a series of groundbreaking editorials, interviews, and manifestos. Global awareness is more than an article of faith with cyberpunks; it is a deliberate pursuit.

  Cyberpunk work is marked by its visionary intensity. Its writers prize the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable. They are willing—eager, even—to take an idea and unflinchingly push it past the limits. Like J. G. Ballard—an idolized role model to many cyberpunks—they often use an unblinking, almost clinical objectivity. It is a coldly objective analysis, a technique borrowed from science, then put to literary use for classically punk shock value.

  With this intensity of vision comes strong imaginative concentration. Cyberpunk is widely known for its telling use of detail, its carefully constructed intricacy, its willingness to carry extrapolation into the fabric of daily life. It favors “crammed” prose: rapid, dizzying bursts of novel information, sensory overIoad that submerges the reader in the literary equivalent of the hard-rock “wall of sound.”

  Cyberpunk is a natural extension of elements already present in science fiction, elements sometimes buried but always seething with potential. Cyberpunk has risen from within the SF genre; it is not an invasion but a modern reform. Because of this, its effect within the genre has been rapid and powerful.

  Its future is an open question. Like the artists of punk and New Wave, the cyberpunk writers, as they develop, may soon be galloping in a dozen directions at once.

  It seems unlikely that any label will hold them for long. Science fiction today is in a rare state of ferment. The rest of the decade may well see a general plague of movements, led by an increasingly volatile and numerous Eighties generation. The eleven authors here are only a part of this broad wave of writers, and the group as a whole already shows signs of remarkable militancy and fractiousness. Fired by a new sense of SF’s potential, writers are debating, rethinking, teaching old dogmas new tricks. Meanwhile, cyberpunk’s ripples continue to spread, exciting some, challenging others and outraging a few, whose pained remonstrances are not yet fully heard.

  The future remains unwritten, though not from lack of trying.

  And this is a final oddity of our generation in SF—that, for us, the literature of the future has a long and honored past. As writers, we owe a debt to those before us, those SF writers whose conviction, commitment, and talent enthralled us and, in all truth, changed our lives. Such debts are never repaid, only acknowledged and—so we hope—passed on as a legacy to those who follow in turn.

  Other acknowledgments are due. The Movement owes much to the patient work of today’s editors. A brief look at this book’s copyright page shows the central role of Ellen Datlow at Omni, a shades-packing sister in the vanguard of the ideologically correct, whose help in this anthology has been invaluable. Gardner Dozois was among the first to bring critical attention to the nascent Movement. Along with Shawna McCarthy, he has made Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine a center of energy and controversy in the field. Edward Ferman’s Fantasy and Science Fiction is always a source of high standards. Interzone, the most radical periodical in science fiction today, has already been mentioned; its editorial cadre deserves a second thanks. And a special thanks to Yoshio Kobayashi, our Tokyo liaison, translator of Schismatrix and Blood Music, for favors too numerous to mention.

  Now, on with the show.

  6

  Cybernetic deconstructions: Cyberpunk and postmodernism

  Veronica Hollinger

  If, as Fredric Jameson has argued, postmodernism is our contemporary cultural dominant (“Logic” 56), so equally is technology “our historical context, political and personal,” according to Teresa de Lauretis: “Technology is now, not only in a distant, science fictional future, an extension of our sensory capacities; it shapes our perceptions and cognitive processes, mediates our relationships with objects of the material and physical world, and our relationships with our own or other bodies” (167). Putting these two aspects of our reality together, Larry McCaffery has recently identified science fiction as “the most significant evolution of a paraliterary form” in contemporary literature (xvii).

  Postmodernist texts which rely heavily on science-fiction iconography and themes have proliferated since the 1960s, and it can be argued that some of the most challenging science fiction of recent years has been produced by mainstream and vangardist rather than genre writers. A random survey of postmodernist writing which has been influenced by science fiction—works for which science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling suggests the term “slipstream” (“Slipstream”)—might include, for example, Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar (1968), Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969), Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), Ted Mooney
’s Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News (1982), and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988).

  Not surprisingly, however, the specific concerns and esthetic techniques of postmodernism have been slow to appear in genre science fiction, which tends to pride itself on its status as a paraliterary phenomenon. Genre science fiction thrives within an epistemology which privileges the logic of cause-and-effect narrative development, and it usually demonstrates a rather optimistic belief in the progress of human knowledge. Appropriately, the space ship was its representative icon during the 1940s and ’50s, the expansionist “golden age” of American science fiction. Equally appropriately, genre science fiction can claim the realist novel as its closest narrative relative; both developed in an atmosphere of nineteenth-century scientific positivism and both rely to a great extent on the mimetic transparency of language as a “window” through which to provide views of a relatively uncomplicated human reality. When science fiction is enlisted by postmodernist fiction, however, it becomes integrated into an esthetic and a world-view whose central tenets are an uncertainty and an indeterminacy which call into question the “causal interpretation of the universe” and the reliance on a “rhetoric of believability” which virtually define it as a generic entity (Ebert 92).

  It is within this conflictual framework of realist literary conventions played out in the postmodernist field that I want to look at cyberpunk, a “movement” in science fiction in the 1980s which produced a wide range of fictions exploring the technological ramifications of experience within late-capitalist, post-industrial, media-saturated Western society. “Let’s get back to the Cyberpunks,” Lucius Shepard recently proposed in the first issue of Journal Wired (1989), one of several non-academic periodicals devoted to contemporary issues in science fiction and related fields; “Defunct or not, they seem to be the only revolution we’ve got” (113).

  * * *

  Cyberpunk was a product of the commercial mass market of “hard” science fiction; concerned on the whole with near-future extrapolation and more or less conventional on the level of narrative technique, it was nevertheless at times brilliantly innovative in its explorations of technology as one of the “multiplicity of structures that intersect to produce that unstable constellation the liberal humanists call the ‘self’” (Moi 10). From this perspective, cyberpunk can be situated among a growing (although still relatively small) number of science-fiction projects which can be identified as “anti-humanist.” In its various deconstructions of the subject—carried out in terms of a cybernetic breakdown of the classic nature/culture opposition—cyberpunk can be read as one symptom of the postmodern condition of genre science fiction. While science fiction frequently problematizes the oppositions between the natural and the artificial, the human and the machine, it generally sustains them in such a way that the human remains securely ensconced in its privileged place at the center of things. Cyberpunk, however, is about the breakdown of these oppositions.

  This cybernetic deconstruction is heralded in the opening pages of what is now considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel—we might call it “the c-p limit-text”—William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Gibson’s first sentence—“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3)—invokes a rhetoric of technology to express the natural world in a metaphor which blurs the distinctions between the organic and the artificial. Soon after, Gibson’s computer-cowboy, Case, gazes at “the chrome stars” of shuriken, and imagines these deadly weapons as “the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome” (12). Human bodies too are absorbed into this rhetorical conflation of organism and machine: on the streets of the postmodern city whose arteries circulate information, Case sees “all around [him] the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market. . .” (16). The human world replicates its own mechanical systems, and the border between the organic and the artificial threatens to blur beyond recuperation.

  If we think of science fiction as a genre which typically foregrounds human action against a background constituted by its technology, this blurring of once clearly defined boundaries makes cyberpunk a particularly relevant form of science fiction for the post-industrial present. Richard Kadrey, himself a (sometime) cyberpunk writer, recently noted the proliferation of computer-based metaphors—“downtime,” “brain dump” and “interface,” for example—which are already used to describe human interaction (“Simulations” 75). We can read cyberpunk as an analysis of the postmodern identification of human and machine.

  Common to most of the texts which have become associated with cyberpunk is an overwhelming fascination, at once celebratory and anxious, with technology and its immediate—that is, unmediated—effects upon human being-in-the-world, a fascination which sometimes spills over into the problematizing of “reality” itself. This emphasis on the potential interconnections between the human and the technological, many of which are already gleaming in the eyes of research scientists, is perhaps the central “generic” feature of cyberpunk. Its evocation of popular/street culture and its valorization of the socially marginalized, that is, its “punk” sensibility, have also been recognized as important defining characteristics.

  Sterling, one of the most prolific spokespersons for the Movement during its heyday, has described cyberpunk as a reaction to “standard humanist liberalism” because of its interest in exploring the various scenarios of humanity’s potential interfaces with the products of its own technology. For Sterling, cyberpunk is “post-humanist” science fiction which believes that “technological destruction of the human condition leads not to futureshocked zombies but to hopeful monsters” (“Letter” 5,4).

  Science fiction has traditionally been enchanted with the notion of transcendence, but, as Glenn Grant points out in his discussion of Neuromancer, cyberpunk’s “preferred method of transcendence is through technology” (43). Themes of transcendence, however, point cyberpunk back to the romantic trappings of the genre at its most conventional, as does its valorization of the (usually male) loner rebel/hacker/punk who appears so frequently as its central character. Even Sterling has recognized this, concluding that “the proper mode of critical attack on cyberpunk has not yet been essayed. Its truly dangerous element is incipient Nietzschean philosophical fascism: the belief in the Overman, and the worship of will-to-power” (“Letter” 5).

  It is also important to note that not all the monsters it has produced have been hopeful ones; balanced against the exhilaration of potential technological transcendence is the anxiety and disorientation produced in the self/body in danger of being absorbed into its own technology. Mesmerized by the purity of technology, Gibson’s Case at first has only contempt for the “meat” of the human body and yearns to remain “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix” (5). Similarly, the protagonist of K.W. Jeter’s The Glass Hammer (1987) experiences his very existence as a televised simulation. The postmodern anomie which pervades The Glass Hammer demonstrates that Sterling’s defense of cyberpunk against charges that it is peopled with “futureshocked zombies” has been less than completely accurate.

  * * *

  “In virtual reality, the entire universe is your body and physics is your language,” according to Jaron Lanier, founder and CEO of VPL Research in California; “we’re creating an entire new reality” (qtd. in Ditlea 97-98).

  Gibson’s Neuromancer, the first of a trilogy of novels which includes Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), is set in a near-future trash-culture ruled by multi-national corporations and kept going by black-market economies, all frenetically dedicated to the circulation of computerized data and “the dance of biz” (16) which is played out by Gibson’s characters on the streets of the new urban overspill, the Sprawl. The most striking spatial construct in Neuromancer, however, is n
either the cityscape of the Sprawl nor the artificial environments like the fabulous L-5, Freeside, but “cyberspace,” the virtual reality which exists in simulated splendor on the far side of the computer screens which are the real center of technological activity in Gibson’s fictional world. Scott Bukatman describes cyberspace as “a new and decentered spatiality . . . which exists parallel to, but outside of, the geographic topography of experiential reality” (45). In a fascinating instance of feedback between science fiction and the “real” world, Autodesk, a firm researching innovations in computerized realities in Sausalito, California, has recently filed for trademark protection of the term “cyberspace” which it may use as the name for its new virtual reality software (Ditlea 99). Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic commentary seems especially significant here: “It is thus not necessary to write science fiction: we have as of now, here and now, in our societies, with the media, the computers, the circuits, the networks, the acceleration of particles which has definitely broken the referential orbit of things” (“The Year 2000” 36).

  Along with the “other” space of cyberspace, Neuromancer offers alternatives to conventional modalities of human existence as well: computer hackers have direct mental access to cyberspace, artificial intelligences live and function within it, digitalized constructs are based on the subjectivities of humans whose “personalities” have been downloaded into computer memory, and human bodies are routinely cloned.

  This is Sterling’s post-humanism with a vengeance, a post-humanism which, in its representation of “monsters”—hopeful or otherwise—produced by the interface of the human and the machine, radically decenters the human body, the sacred icon of the essential self, in the same way that the virtual reality of cyberspace works to decenter conventional humanist notions of an unproblematical “real.”