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I've been spending a lot of time reading on a decrepit red couch in a dusty room situated in an apartment complex which can best be described as a series of rickety, identical boxes with some of the most technologically complicated marvels ever created by humans.
Incidentally, what I've been reading are cyberpunk novels.
If there's a weak link in Gibson's newer Blue Ant trilogy, then Zero History ain't it. It's a lot snappier then Spook Country, and ties in more smoothly to Pattern Recognition then Spook did. Gibson's a much more sophisticated writer now then he was over twenty years ago, and it's hard not to take that into account, so instead I'll just mention John Clute's note that Gibson has more or less stopped writing something that can be called traditional science fiction because traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from..."*
I think it's probably stretching it to say that it's impossible. It's definitely more difficult.
Sci-fi, in any environment, is a reference to a future, though. That's different then cyberpunk which is more of a movement then it ever was a genre. And when you've got Stephenson writing something like Snow Crash in 1993, where he's pretty much lampooning the movement (at the same time he tells a pretty compelling story), well, I feel like the writing was already on the wall.** It's hard to write with the tropes we're familiar with being attached to cyberpunk in the modern age, because we've currently subsumed those very same tropes into our daily life.
We're a smart phone grafted to our skull away, and really, we've already got bluetooth, so fuck it. We generally don't like those guys anyhow, so I guess the question isn't 'how' but 'how much do we want it'? Followed shortly by 'and how much are you willing to pay?'
This cyberpunk shit is pretty much not what we envision it being anyhow. Seriously, it's not. We think chrome and mirrorshades and I guess whatever Lady Deathstrike crap the Molly Millions crammed into her fingernails, but on reading up, a lot of it was just sci-fi in a near future environment populated by people with poor personal skills. So, actually, the critical part of cyberpunk is probably the -punk suffix; something that we haven't been able to culturally nail since we sold it to Hot Topic for mass distribution, followed by sound mocking.
*^ Clute, John. "The Case of the World". Excessive Candour. SciFi.com. Archived from the original on October 30, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071030090441/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue305/excess.html. Retrieved 2007-10-14. Shameless stolen from Wikipedia.
** This is honestly a little disingenuous, because the lampooning seems to be rooted in how seriously some of the cyberpunk movement took the grimdark of their prospective 80's settings at a time when we were coming into the Clinton 90's. As a younger guy, I remember reading a Wired article speculating how the tech bubble might never burst, so how's that for your ridiculous optimism?
Incidentally, what I've been reading are cyberpunk novels.
If there's a weak link in Gibson's newer Blue Ant trilogy, then Zero History ain't it. It's a lot snappier then Spook Country, and ties in more smoothly to Pattern Recognition then Spook did. Gibson's a much more sophisticated writer now then he was over twenty years ago, and it's hard not to take that into account, so instead I'll just mention John Clute's note that Gibson has more or less stopped writing something that can be called traditional science fiction because traditional science fiction is no longer possible "in a world lacking coherent 'nows' to continue from..."*
I think it's probably stretching it to say that it's impossible. It's definitely more difficult.
Sci-fi, in any environment, is a reference to a future, though. That's different then cyberpunk which is more of a movement then it ever was a genre. And when you've got Stephenson writing something like Snow Crash in 1993, where he's pretty much lampooning the movement (at the same time he tells a pretty compelling story), well, I feel like the writing was already on the wall.** It's hard to write with the tropes we're familiar with being attached to cyberpunk in the modern age, because we've currently subsumed those very same tropes into our daily life.
We're a smart phone grafted to our skull away, and really, we've already got bluetooth, so fuck it. We generally don't like those guys anyhow, so I guess the question isn't 'how' but 'how much do we want it'? Followed shortly by 'and how much are you willing to pay?'
This cyberpunk shit is pretty much not what we envision it being anyhow. Seriously, it's not. We think chrome and mirrorshades and I guess whatever Lady Deathstrike crap the Molly Millions crammed into her fingernails, but on reading up, a lot of it was just sci-fi in a near future environment populated by people with poor personal skills. So, actually, the critical part of cyberpunk is probably the -punk suffix; something that we haven't been able to culturally nail since we sold it to Hot Topic for mass distribution, followed by sound mocking.
*^ Clute, John. "The Case of the World". Excessive Candour. SciFi.com. Archived from the original on October 30, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071030090441/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue305/excess.html. Retrieved 2007-10-14. Shameless stolen from Wikipedia.
** This is honestly a little disingenuous, because the lampooning seems to be rooted in how seriously some of the cyberpunk movement took the grimdark of their prospective 80's settings at a time when we were coming into the Clinton 90's. As a younger guy, I remember reading a Wired article speculating how the tech bubble might never burst, so how's that for your ridiculous optimism?
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