One of the obsessions of PCP fiction is to explore the edges of this “end” of history, and if possible, to see beyond it.
form
So far we have spoken of cyberpunk primarily in terms of content, and CP was indeed sparked by an attempt to bring content into science fiction that was being ignored by the sf of the early 1980s.
But part of the force of Cheap Truth was also the aggressiveness of its anti-art stance. Vincent Omniaveritas had little use for the pieties of literary culture and traditional values of well-made fiction. A lot of early CP gained verve from a conscious rejection of the New Wave and the New Wave’s reaching after high modernism’s literary pretensions.
Whereas the New Wave brought stories like, for instance, Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head that drafted Joycean stream of consciousness into science fiction contexts, Cheap Truth mocked science fiction writers who too obviously adopted literary approaches. But CP was just as self-consciously aware of its ancestors. Where humanist writers might claim Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin as theirs, CP called on Alfred Bester and William S. Burroughs. Both sides claimed J. G. Ballard. Both sides, consciously or not, were expressions of postmodernism.
In abandoning “well made story values” in favor of oddness, visionary speculation, and the breaking of realist codes, CP was expressing a postmodern sensibility. Literary critics like Larry McCaffery, who edited one of the earliest critical books on cyberpunk, Storming the Reality Studio, recognized the postmodern underpinnings of CP. What the critics saw in cyberpunk was not always in accord with the Cheap Truth party line, but they were right in observing that science fiction puts quotes around the word “reality.” Science fiction is “pre-deconstructed” through the ways that writers consciously encode information that must be read out of the work. In much cyberpunk, no matter how grim, there was a sense of play. Play with content — ideas, technological developments, extrapolations — but also with genre tropes, expectations built up over generations of pulp science fiction since Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories.
As PCP writers began to react to and incorporate CP visions, the urge to playfulness grew. Perhaps the more literary interests of humanist science fiction writers had an influence. Or maybe the writers who were never part of the Movement with a capital M no longer felt bound to foment CP’S revolution. Twenty minutes after Vincent Omniaveritas declared victory in Cheap Truth, cyberpunk began to suffer from an inevitable genrefication. The moves that had seemed so daring in 1982 began to look a little stilted. The leathers were by now scuffed and stained; there were scratches on the mirrorshades. The PCP writers had to try something different or else take their places behind the glass in the display cases at the Science Fiction Museum. In the final analysis the CP writers went to war so that the PCP writers could be free to experiment with new forms.
present future
The idea that the physical, mental, and moral structures that most of us live by are radically contingent is at the heart of science fiction. It is evident throughout the history of the form, from H. G. Wells through John W. Campbell through Philip K. Dick and James Tiptree, Jr. It pervades the New Wave, and the feminist science fiction of the 1970s.
All cyberpunks, pre-, classic-, and post-, know this. Perhaps cyberpunk’s greatest contribution to the genre was its uncanny ability to broadcast this science fictional idea to the culture at large. It’s an understanding that, caught in whatever historical moment we write from, is all too easy to forget. We long for permanence, although we grow older with each tick of the clock. We proceed from the assumption that the world is comprehensible, even as we reel from its dizzying complexity. There are no guarantees; tomorrow we maybe uploading ourselves into cyberspace or drowning off the coast of Nevada.
This understanding is the reason why science fiction, if it rises to its own challenge, can be the literature of the twenty-first century. Our hope is that the post-cyberpunk fiction here assembled will point the way for the readers and writers to come.
“To shake people awake, one needs the conceptual ability to grip and squeeze. I would hope that my rhetoric was a catalyst — that my remarks will challenge some writers to reassess and refine their own thinking. The cake IS stale and decorations aren’t enough; we need to re-bake everything from scratch. And bake it thoroughly this time — not half-bake it. People should not be afraid to undertake this work. It’s necessary. It’s the karma of our generation in SF.”
— Sterling to Kessel, 22 August 1986
1 The term “postcyberpunk” was first used by writer Lawrence Person, in an essay titled “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto” published in the critical magazine Nova Express in 1998. Person’s essay points toward some of the same developments we are pursuing in this anthology, but we do not use the term in exactly the same way that he sets it forth. As we go to press, Person’s essay is still available at the URL http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml.
Sterling-Kessel Correspondence
IN THE WAKE of the publication of Neuromancer in 1984 there was a lot of talk about something called “cyberpunk” and a scurrilous fanzine called Cheap Truth, which apparently (I had never seen a copy) had been taking potshots at a number of writers I admired. In the spring of 1985, I wrote a letter to Bruce Sterling asking what all the fuss was about. Did he really detest the kind of fiction I liked as much as I had heard?
Well, yes…he did, sort of.
The correspondence got out of hand. For several years we hammered at each other back and forth through the postal service (this was before the Internet took off). Bruce’s energy was immense, his fertility of imagination imposing, his conviction of his own rightness daunting. I had my own moments. It was the most stimulating conversation of my writing career, and given my age and who I am today, I don’t think (to my regret) that it will ever come again.
As a means of giving a context to the stories collected here, and as a window into some of the thinking that went on behind at least one of the originators of the form, and the reactions of one of it readers, we have scattered brief quotes and exchanges from these letters through the anthology.
Our sincere thanks to Bruce for allowing us to quote from this correspondence.
—John Kessel
Bicycle Repairman
Bruce Sterling
Accompanying CP’S fascination with the “street” came the assumption that, outside of middle-class social structures, new things can be done. Here Chairman Bruce himself observes that the middle class exerts its pull and the outsiders move toward the ordinary. Ten years after the conclusion of this story Lyle will be running a business and Deep Eddy will be a media commentator, both married (and probably divorced) with children.
This PCP story consciously reverses many cyberpunk clichés: it abjures sex and gives the hero a mother. Most amusing of all, Sterling dismantles the myth of the ninja black ops secret agent, a character helpless here in the face of a streetwise community and a social worker.
Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.
Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday’s grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.
Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he’d collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.
Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.
More banging. Far below, a uniformed delive
ry kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle’s spot-welded doorknocker.
Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters’ flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.
Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.
Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.
The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid’s cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What’s up, zude?”
“Hard night, Lyle?”
“Just real busy.”
The kid’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin’ a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”
“Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”
The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”
Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can’t sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy’s in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven’t seen Eddy in ages.”
The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.
“I’ll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It’s gotta be worth something, Lyle. It’s a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”
Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let’s have a look at it.”
The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.
Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.
“You gonna sign, or not?”
“Yeah.” Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike. “You oughta get that front wheel trued.”
The kid shrugged. “Got anything to send out today?”
“Naw,” Lyle grumbled, “I’m not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it’s too complicated and I get ripped off too much.”
“Suit yourself.” The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.
Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest of Dertouzas’s stuff.
The can’s lid wouldn’t close. Deep Eddy’s junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself. Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy’s road jaunts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyte-age out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.
Eddy used Lyle’s bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled the shop’s electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access-crawlspace of Floor 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the aluminum roof of Lyle’s cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy’s was paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of organized authority.
During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale thumping, heaving, grappling progress was an embarrassment to witness. Under the circumstances, Lyle wasn’t too surprised that Eddy had left his parents’ condo to set up in a squat.
Eddy had lived in the bicycle repair shop, off and on, for almost a year. It had been a good deal for Lyle, because Deep Eddy had enjoyed a certain clout and prestige with the local squatters. Eddy had been a major organizer of the legendary Chattanooga Wende of December ′35, a monster street-party that had climaxed in a spectacular looting-and-arson rampage that had torched the three floors of the Archiplat.
Lyle had gone to school with Eddy and had known him for years; they’d grown up together in the Archiplat. Eddy Dertouzas was a deep zude for a kid his age, with political contacts and heavy-duty network connections. The squat had been a good deal for both of them, until Eddy had finally coaxed the German woman into coming through for him in real life. Then Eddy had jumped the next plane to Europe.
Since they’d parted friends, Eddy was welcome to mail his European data-junk to the bike shop. After all, the disks were heavily encrypted, so it wasn’t as if anybody in authority was ever gonna be able to read them. Storing a few thousand disks was a minor challenge, compared to Eddy’s complex, machine-assisted love life.
After Eddy’s sudden departure, Lyle had sold Eddy’s possessions, and wired the money to Eddy in Spain. Lyle had kept the screen TV, Eddy’s mediator, and the cheaper virching helmet. The way Lyle figured it—the way he remembered the deal — any stray hardware of Eddy’s in the shop was rightfully his, for disposal at his own discretion. By now it was pretty clear that Deep Eddy Dertouzas was never coming back to Tennessee. And Lyle had certain debts.
Lyle snicked the blade from a roadkit multitool and cut open Eddy’s package. It contained, of all things, a television cable settop box. A laughable infobahn antique. You’d never see a cablebox like that in NAFTA; this was the sort of primeval junk one might find in the home of a semiliterate Basque grandmother, or maybe in the armed bunker of some backward Albanian.
Lyle tossed the archaic cablebox onto the beanbag in front of the wallscreen. No time now for irrelevant media toys; he had to get on with real life. Lyle ducked into the tiny curtained privy and urinated at length into a crockery jar. He scraped his teeth with a flossing spudger and misted some fresh water onto his face and hands. He wiped clean with a towelette, then smeared his armpits, crotch, and feet with deodorant.
Back when he’d lived with his mom up on Floor 41, Lyle had used old-fashioned antiseptic deodorants. Lyle had wised up about a lot of things once he’d escaped his mom’s condo. Nowadays, Lyle used a gel roll-on of skin-friendly bacteria that greedily de
voured human sweat and exuded as their metabolic byproduct a pleasantly harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.
Back at his workbench, Lyle plugged in the hot plate and boiled some Thai noodles with flaked sardines. He packed down breakfast with 400 cc’s of Dr. Breasaire’s Bioactive Bowel Putty. Then he checked last night’s enamel job on the clamped frame in the workstand. The frame looked good. At three in the morning, Lyle was able to get into painted detail work with just the right kind of hallucinatory clarity.
Enameling paid well, and he needed the money bad. But this wasn’t real bike work. It lacked authenticity. Enameling was all about the owner’s ego—that was what really stank about enameling. There were a few rich kids up in the penthouse levels who were way into “street aesthetic,” and would pay good money to have some treadhead decorate their machine. But flash art didn’t help the bike. What helped the bike was frame alignment and sound cable-housings and proper tension in the derailleurs.
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology Page 2
