Collected Essays (7 page)

The canonical Beat writers are four in number: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. Taken as I am with the concept of a Beat/cyberpunk correlation, I occasionally muse over who matches whom.

Kerouac is the most wonderful writer among the beats, and surely the one who sold the most books. Gibson is a natural fit for this role. He writes like an angel, and everyone knows his name. Without Kerouac there would have been no Beat movement, without Gibson there would be no cyberpunk.

Ginsberg is the most political and most engaged—here I think of Sterling. At the beginning of cyberpunk, it was Bruce who was the indefatigable pamphleteer and consciousness-raiser with his
Cheap Truth
zine. His
Mirrorshades
anthology defined cyberpunk in many minds. Like Ginsberg, Sterling continues to roam the planet, making guest-lectures and writing up reports on what he finds. Of the beats and the cyberpunks, it is Ginsberg and Sterling whom one sees most often on television.

Not so well-known as the other beats, Corso is a poet with a keen ear for ecstatic strophes and ranting invective. Corso also has the cachet, the bonus, of being the only one of the four still alive. A reasonable match for the dark, zany and strangely healthy John Shirley.

For myself, as the oldest of the cyberpunks, I claim the role of Burroughs, with his wise, dry voice of hallucinatory erudition and his rank, frank humor.

But but but—Gibson doesn’t center his books upon himself, like Kerouac did. And Sterling writes about future technology, not about mystical perceptions of everyday reality. And Shirley is a novelist, not a poet. And I’m a professor, not a junkie. And cyberpunk isn’t really mainstream literature, is it? Perhaps my comparing the cyberpunks to the beats is like the sad but true tale of Jacqueline Susanne comparing herself and Harold Robbins to the Lost Generation writers. “I’m the Fitzgerald of the group and Harold’s the Hemingway…” Ow!

And, hmm, what about Lew Shiner? Well, he can be John Clellon Holmes, the Beat who drifted from the movement after his book,
Go
.

Okay, my analogy is just a Procrustean mind-game, a little wise-acreing for the swing of thought, something to get this essay rolling and with a generous dose of self-aggrandizement thrown in. Why not? Onward.

What I want to do here is to go into specific comments about three cyberpunk novels, and to gloat over some of the good bits with you. The books happened to come out within about a month of each other in 1996. It felt like getting letters from home. The three books to hand:

William Gibson,
Idoru
, G. P. Putnam’s, New York 1996.

Bruce Sterling
, Holy Fire
, Bantam Books, New York 1996.

John Shirley,
Silicon Embrace
, Mark V. Ziesing Books, Shingletown CA 1996.

William Gibson in 1983.

Like his
Virtual Light
, William Gibson’s novel
Idoru
has two main characters, a young man and a young woman, with the narrative told from their alternating points of view. The girl is a teenage fan of a rock musician named Rez, and the boy is a technician hired by Rez’s managers because he has “a peculiar knack for data-collection architectures.” In a more traditional kind of fiction, this structure would be a setup for a happy boy-meets-girl ending, but that’s not what happens in
Virtual Light
or in
Idoru
. None of the characters are really out for romance. Except for Rez.

The
Idoru
of the title is an artificial woman who exists as a holographic projection generated by a largish portable computer. Rez—Rozzer to his friends—is in love with her. “Man,” says Rez’s blind drummer at a dinner party, “Rozzer’s sittin’ down there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.” The drummer’s synthetic eyes don’t register holograms; he sees through to the core of the idoru hardware.

The first mention of Rez and his partner Lo is in this sentence describing the bedroom of Chia Pet McKenzie, the teenage fan: “The wall opposite Chia’s bed was decorated with a six-by-six laser blowup of the cover of Lo Rez Skyline, their first album.” In a subtly associative way, this image evokes the now-famous first sentence of Gibson’s smash first novel,
Neuromancer
, “Over the port, the sky was the color of television.” Kind of the same, no? Gibson’s so smart, he’s playing with deep structure.

Chia is worried about Rez’s rumored infatuation with the idoru, and she flies to Japan to try and bring him to his senses. Half of the chapters are from Chia’s point of view; Gibson has somehow mastered the knack of writing the thoughts of teenage girls, their enthusiasms, their slang. One of the words Chia uses is “meshback.” A meshback is what we currently call a redneck, a low-income person who wears unfashionable clothes and whose thoughts are completely controlled by lowest-common-denominator media manipulation. The name comes from—the meshbacked high-hat gimmie caps that meshbacks like to wear. A great new word like this jumps right off the page and into your daily language. I can’t wait for the next opportunity to say, “Oh wow, let’s get out of this place, it’s totally full of meshbacks.”

Speaking of great new words, Chia hooks up with a Japanese Lo/Rez fan club member who happens to mention that her brother is an
otaku
. Chia’s automatic translator renders “otaku” as “pathological-techno-fetishist-with-social-deficit.” Chia gets the picture instantly. “It’s a
boy
thing, right? The otaku guys at my last school were into, like, plastic anime babes, military simulations, and trivia. Bigtime into trivia.”

Idoru
is set in the same future as
Virtual Light
, and some of the tone is the same as well. We’re so far into the future here that characters are totally lacking some of the basic knowledge we take for granted, e.g. the meaning of the swastika. There is “…a fast-food franchise called California Reich, its trademark a stylized stainless-steel palm tree against one of those twisted-cross things like the meshbacks had drawn on their hands in her class on European history.” Bill knows meshbacks!

The boy character in
Idoru
is named Laney; he’s a little strange because he was given an experimental drug called 5-SB as a child, not that he likes to admit it, due to the long-term sociopathic effects it’s reported to have—5-SB “…makes folks want to stalk and kill politicians…” When quizzed about it, Laney suggests that maybe he’d only had a placebo. “You don’t mistake 5-SB for any placebo, son, but I think you know that.” A perfect Burroughs touch, crowned by the fact that the main somatic side-effect of 5-SB is this: “In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.”

Idoru
continues to touch up Gibson’s vision of cyberspace, which is now becoming a fairly definite science fictional setting, something as standardized as the lunar colony domes and the generation starships of ‘50s and ‘60s SF. Today’s cyberspace is a huge, shared Virtual Reality which individual users can enter via small computers that they carry with them. Certain parts of cyberspace are difficult to enter, as they contain valuable information. You may encounter other users in cyberspace, and you may also encounter artificially alive software agents.

Although today’s World Wide Web is somewhat conspicuously lacking the effortless speed and Virtual Reality immersion of science fictional cyberspace, the Web’s difference from SF cyberspace is now only one of degree. Looking back, it’s hard to remember how radically new an idea this was when Gibson first wrote about it, lo these fifteen or so years gone. To a significant degree, the reputability of cyberpunk rests on this one visionary extrapolation. Jules Verne may have predicted the submarine, but William Gibson envisioned the explosive growth of the Web.

So it’s a special delight to see our Founding Father adding new touches to his vision. Here’s a funny description of something Chia see while in cyberspace with an otaku boy.

Something chimed. She glanced at the door, which was mapped in a particularly phoney-looking wood-grain effect, and saw a small white rectangle slide under the door. And keep sliding, straight toward her, across the floor, to vanish under the sleeping ledge. She looked down in time to see it rise, at exactly the same rate, up the edge of the striped mattress and over, coming to a halt when it was in optimum position to be read…It said “Ku Klux Klan Kollectibles,” and then some letters and numbers that didn’t look like any kind of address she knew.

Another chime. She looked at the door in time to see a gray blur scoot from under it. Flat, whirling, fast. It was on the white rectangle now, something like the shadow of a crab or a spider, two-dimensional and multi-legged. It swallowed it, shot for the door…

“What were those things?” Chia asked…

 “An advertisement…and a sub-program that offered criticism.”

“It didn’t offer criticism; it ate it.”

“Perhaps the person who wrote the sub-program dislikes advertising. Many do. Or dislikes the advertiser.”

Idoru
has several hooks to
Virtual Light
, and can be thought of as the second in a new series of Gibson novels.
Idoru
’s ending promises more to come. It seems like Rez and his supernally intelligent “software dolly wank toy” are going to find a way to reproduce, perhaps biologically. With just a little DNA nanomanipulation it could be done. Although predicting the final somatic effect of a change in a fertilized egg’s DNA is a rather radically difficult problem in the analysis of algorithms, I’m sure that the child will turn out most wonderfully hale and gnarly.

Here’s a toast to the alchemical marriage of man and machine!

John Shirley’s
Silicon Embrace
is so strange and shaggy a magpie’s nest that it must needs be published by a smaller press.

Someone unfamiliar with the field might expect that science fiction novels would tend to be about the kinds of weird science you see in mass media such as TV shows and supermarket tabloids. You might expect, in other words, that there would be a lot of SF novels about aliens and UFOs. In point of fact, most SF writers are too persnickety to want to write about the repetitious fever dreams of the mass public mind.

In
Silicon Embrace
, Shirley boldly goes where few writers have gone before, and gets right down to nuts-and-bolts UFOlogy, complete with the canonical little aliens. “It was a Grey, the classic Grey described in close encounters, an alien…with improportionately big oval eyes of whiteless onyx, and something that might have been a nose, and the slit of a mouth, and no hair, and holes for ears…” But this is not going to turn into some cloying, conning UFO-nut miracle tale. Shirley’s aliens aren’t devils and they’re not Disneyland mummers in shiny masks. They’re businessmen, and they like to smoke cigarettes, which make them terribly intoxicated.

One of the more satisfying aspects of the hit movie
Independence Day
was the way in which it incarnated and elaborated our tabloid myth about the Roswell UFO that allegedly crashed and was preserved by government agencies—who performed an alien autopsy and who have a few alien pilots in suspended animation.
Silicon Embrace
delivers the same thrill, but in a more artistic way. Here’s that government-owned UFO: “There was a frightening smell about the saucer, though Farraday could smell nothing…It was as if the saucer gave out an irritating sound, though it was soundless; it was as if it glared a painful light into his eyes, but it glowed not at all.”

The book has lots of other threads besides the aliens. For some of the first hundred pages, Shirley goes off on a fairly bloody tangent, perhaps the effect of his having spent so much time in the airless, flickering caves of Hollywood, where troglodyte producers mistake sentimental violence for deeper truth. But soon, thankfully, Shirley’s violence busts out of this box and exfoliates into the bizarro territory of underground comix and Grande Guignol:

Anja opened the back of the van, and…pressed channel 7 on the remote clipped to her jacket; responding instantly, Sol came roaring out and sank his teeth into Noseless’s neck…and in a few minutes more Sol had pulled his head right off. Anja patted her ex boyfriend on the head as Sol knelt over the body, shaking, mouth streaming blood. “Good boy. Good boy.”

Sol has a chip in his neck, you wave.

As well as the Grey aliens,
Silicon Embrace
features a higher, nobler kind of alien, a crystalline life-form known as the Meta, one of the Metas’ avatars is a traditional lab-built mutant creature known as a land octopus or prairie squid. “It looked like an independently motile scrotum with human eyes and the legs of a human toddler interspersed with octopal tentacles,” and it speaks in a sweet, ingratiating voice. Later we learn that the humble prairie squid is in fact none other than a resurrected form of that greatest Meta alien of all, our Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Yes,
Him
. “Crucified, this time, in disfigurement; in the dislocated shape of a land octopus. Jesus in a prairie squid. Christ in a cephaloped.” Here an extra element of deep funniness derives from the fact that the “prairie squid” is an icon of the Church of the SubGenius, a half-serious mock religion in which John Shirley is a high-ranking official.