>Postcyberpunk is a return to an earlier, and much >larger theme in science fiction: the future is >going to be better than the past. Earlier >Cyberpunk is the anomaly.
Well, even in the Neuromancer trilogy--pretty much the canonical cyberpunk books as far as I'm concerned--life at the top is still pretty good. Neuromancer just showed life near the bottom of the food chain, which isn't where sf usually places its concern.
(As noted, Kornbluth is an earlier counterexample to the "in sf, life gets better" theory. So is The Space Merchants. So are two stories of Fritz Leiber's, the titles of which are currently escaping me.)
It's always interesting to see people mention Brunner as one of the forefathers of cyberpunk, as his dystopia never seemed to be the same as Gibson's dystopia. Brunner's science fiction always seemed thoroughly grounded in politics (often painfully so, as in The Stone That Never Came Down, though I tend to agree with his political viewpoint myself). Neuromancer, on the other hand, seemed to step away from specifically saying how we got there from here--a war, an economic shift to Japan, but there weren't specifics.
Although The Shockwave Rider is certainly an uncle of cyberpunk--and seems to me to be less dated than The Jagged Orbit or Stand on Zanzibar--I'd have to say that it seems like something of an aberration compared to other Brunner works.
I was one of those kids in the '80s Person mentions, glomming science fiction completely unaware of distinctions between drawn by others between Heinlein, LeGuin, and Walter Jon Williams. The thing that made Gibson stand out to me--reading after the fact, when Neuromancer was already famous and a recognized Important Book--was Gibson's language. His writing was just weird compared to the workmanlike prose of, say, Heinlein. I'd say that, within the genre, Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester by way of some of the New Wave writers are his real predecessors.
I think you're making a valid point here--as more sf writers have a technical grasp of what near-future technology can make possible, we get less of the wild flights of rapturous purple prose about being in "the Crystal Wind" or what have you (which is damn hard to pull off if you can't write as well as Gibson). Will this inevitably lead to more writing about believable people and believable tech instead? Got me, but it'd be nice.
But Rucker is a mathematician and a computer scientist, and I've always considered his stuff (with the possible exception of White Light) to be the weakest written by the Big Five cyberpunks in the key period. Technological savvy alone clearly doesn't define post-cyberpunkness--Gene Wolfe is an engineer by training. Gregory Benford is a physicist and Pat Murphy works at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco.
Further, I think Williams' City on Fire, although really something of an art-deco fantasy novel, and Bear's Queen of Angels are fine examples of the supposed form, and neither author has any technical training or particular knowledge that I'm aware of. Worth thinking about. (I'll acknowledge that these are all older writers, but I don't know anything about the professional training of Ian McDonald, e.g. Perhaps there is a trend here that I'm unaware of.)
Soldiers and cops and artists might all have been Leninists, but it wasn't socialist realism that produced or maintained the Soviet empire.
How much did the Fabian Society and the eventual Shavian wing of the Labor Party actually get accomplished? I'm not a student of British labor history. I don't know, myself. I love the S.I., but I think that saying they were solely, or even largely, responsible for Mai '68 is a misreading of history.
I guess I'm worried about the "with message intact" part of the "swallowed up into Nike ads" step.
It was a pretty good line about the mob, wasn't it? That's why Bruce is a professional writer and I'm not (and more power to him--he's a damn good one). But my concern isn't entirely that I'm no longer hip for being online or using BSD or listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor or what have you. I'd be lying if I told you that wasn't part of it, but that's not the only thing. One of my friends just sent me a snippet from Viridian note #1:
Feature Number Seven. Our movement has no street credibility. We are not hip, underground, bohemian or alternative in any way. If anyone asks you, tell them you are engaged in corporate futurism and product development.
Fine. Viridian's not dangerous. No art movement in this modern age is. I agree with Bruce on that. But if the goal is to be corporate futurists and get coopted, as something else I was sent suggests, why assume that anything substantive will survive the digestion? And if being an art movement won't do it, being a mainstream political movement won't do it, being an online cultural movement won't do it, and it's not profitable like crime, how's it going to happen?
I may yet subscribe to Viridian-D, just to hear what consensus is among people actually involved in this.
Mmm. Well, rather than just bitch to my friends in email about not being able to get an actual dialogue going with Sterling, I'll throw something up here and other people can take a poke at it.
Bruce's reply to my question was very clever (it was a good interview) and neatly dismissive, but it lends itself to a followup. I realize that art isn't "dangerous" in the way that, say, arming thirteen year-old Afghani boys with machine guns is "dangerous" (or even in the way that, say, setting up a strange religious movement in Waco, TX is "dangerous"), but if there's no way to keep an artistic sensibility from getting swallowed up and regurgitated in Nike ads, what's the point of phrasing Viridian as a design movement?
Is it just because art is a good way to transmit memes? From the point of view of a non-coder, the aesthetic sensibility--elegance of the architecture--seems to be slightly behind politics as the main reason for the success of the open source/free software movement, but I'd love to hear what fellow/.-ers have to say.
Bruce: I remember reading an essay by you about Burning Man a while back; you hauled your daughter along. I thought this move, besides indicating that you were an incredibly cool dad, pretty much marked the end of Burning Man as a "dangerous" underground phenomenom. Similarly, a number of different forces are transfroming the web-centric Internet into something increasingly bland. I know you're a long-time user of the Well, which is now owned by Salon, the Newsweek of the web.
Which leads me to my question. Do you think it's possible nowadays to create a sustained, independent, and transgressive community (a TAZ, if you will) without it being co-opted by society at large? Some of your old Catscan essays (particularly the one on Jules Verne) hint at what your response to this question would have been in the past, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say now.
As one of those self-same Macoids, I'd certainly know what "grep" meant. (Admittedly, I've been using a SunOS shell account off and on since high school, but I'd know what it meant regardless.) BBEdit, the text editor I primarily use at my job (webmaster for a small publishing company), has limited regex functionality; there's a happy little checkbox that says "use grep" in the search dialogue box. It makes my life a lot easier.
There's also a few ports of grep to MacOS. "Grappler" springs to mind as the name of one of them, although I don't think I've ever used it.
We're talking about the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world. Although I'd imagine the gap has dwindled as more people get into the field (when I was at Brown, at least two professors in the math department were actively doing crypto-related research), it seems likely to me that the NSA is still at least three years ahead of the civilian research world.
Only a guess, though. The NSA knows, but they aren't telling.
Well, it's pretty extensively mentioned as an influence. Having seen it, I'd certainly say that some of the aspects of the plots of the two movies are parallel--the sniping between R2D2 and C3PO is similar to the two yojimbo (sorry, it's been a long time and I can't remember their names) in THF, e.g.--but I agree that it's an oversimplification to say that Lucas stole the whole damn thing. And if Lucas was lifting, I'd hope that he'd choose a better Kurosawa movie, although THF features one of my favorite two-line exchanges in the history of Japanese cinema. ("You stink of death!" "You make my teeth hurt.")
Now, Resevoir Dogs to City on Fire? That was outright theft. Lucas has many, many sins to atone for, but plagarism isn't one of them.
I believe this particular nuance of copyright law is the case only in the U.S.; I've seen articles by font designers lamenting the fact. (Of course, I've seen articles by font designer Chank Diesel cheering the fact, so who knows what the profession as a whole thinks?)
So in Europe, as far as I know, both a font's design and its code can be protected by copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
All Tomorrow's Parties is Gibson's new Idoru/Virtual Light crossover. In addition to being a pretty swell Velvet Underground song.
>Postcyberpunk is a return to an earlier, and much
>larger theme in science fiction: the future is
>going to be better than the past. Earlier
>Cyberpunk is the anomaly.
Well, even in the Neuromancer trilogy--pretty much the canonical cyberpunk books as far as I'm concerned--life at the top is still pretty good. Neuromancer just showed life near the bottom of the food chain, which isn't where sf usually places its concern.
(As noted, Kornbluth is an earlier counterexample to the "in sf, life gets better" theory. So is The Space Merchants. So are two stories of Fritz Leiber's, the titles of which are currently escaping me.)
It's always interesting to see people mention Brunner as one of the forefathers of cyberpunk, as his dystopia never seemed to be the same as Gibson's dystopia. Brunner's science fiction always seemed thoroughly grounded in politics (often painfully so, as in The Stone That Never Came Down, though I tend to agree with his political viewpoint myself). Neuromancer, on the other hand, seemed to step away from specifically saying how we got there from here--a war, an economic shift to Japan, but there weren't specifics.
Although The Shockwave Rider is certainly an uncle of cyberpunk--and seems to me to be less dated than The Jagged Orbit or Stand on Zanzibar--I'd have to say that it seems like something of an aberration compared to other Brunner works.
I was one of those kids in the '80s Person mentions, glomming science fiction completely unaware of distinctions between drawn by others between Heinlein, LeGuin, and Walter Jon Williams. The thing that made Gibson stand out to me--reading after the fact, when Neuromancer was already famous and a recognized Important Book--was Gibson's language. His writing was just weird compared to the workmanlike prose of, say, Heinlein. I'd say that, within the genre, Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester by way of some of the New Wave writers are his real predecessors.
I think you're making a valid point here--as more sf writers have a technical grasp of what near-future technology can make possible, we get less of the wild flights of rapturous purple prose about being in "the Crystal Wind" or what have you (which is damn hard to pull off if you can't write as well as Gibson). Will this inevitably lead to more writing about believable people and believable tech instead? Got me, but it'd be nice.
But Rucker is a mathematician and a computer scientist, and I've always considered his stuff (with the possible exception of White Light) to be the weakest written by the Big Five cyberpunks in the key period. Technological savvy alone clearly doesn't define post-cyberpunkness--Gene Wolfe is an engineer by training. Gregory Benford is a physicist and Pat Murphy works at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco.
Further, I think Williams' City on Fire, although really something of an art-deco fantasy novel, and Bear's Queen of Angels are fine examples of the supposed form, and neither author has any technical training or particular knowledge that I'm aware of. Worth thinking about. (I'll acknowledge that these are all older writers, but I don't know anything about the professional training of Ian McDonald, e.g. Perhaps there is a trend here that I'm unaware of.)
Soldiers and cops and artists might all have been Leninists, but it wasn't socialist realism that produced or maintained the Soviet empire.
./ is our friend!
How much did the Fabian Society and the eventual Shavian wing of the Labor Party actually get accomplished? I'm not a student of British labor history. I don't know, myself. I love the S.I., but I think that saying they were solely, or even largely, responsible for Mai '68 is a misreading of history.
I guess I'm worried about the "with message intact" part of the "swallowed up into Nike ads" step.
Intelligent discussion on
Err. No. Sorry.
Fine. Viridian's not dangerous. No art movement in this modern age is. I agree with Bruce on that. But if the goal is to be corporate futurists and get coopted, as something else I was sent suggests, why assume that anything substantive will survive the digestion? And if being an art movement won't do it, being a mainstream political movement won't do it, being an online cultural movement won't do it, and it's not profitable like crime, how's it going to happen?
I may yet subscribe to Viridian-D, just to hear what consensus is among people actually involved in this.
Mmm. Well, rather than just bitch to my friends in email about not being able to get an actual dialogue going with Sterling, I'll throw something up here and other people can take a poke at it.
/.-ers have to say.
Bruce's reply to my question was very clever (it was a good interview) and neatly dismissive, but it lends itself to a followup. I realize that art isn't "dangerous" in the way that, say, arming thirteen year-old Afghani boys with machine guns is "dangerous" (or even in the way that, say, setting up a strange religious movement in Waco, TX is "dangerous"), but if there's no way to keep an artistic sensibility from getting swallowed up and regurgitated in Nike ads, what's the point of phrasing Viridian as a design movement?
Is it just because art is a good way to transmit memes? From the point of view of a non-coder, the aesthetic sensibility--elegance of the architecture--seems to be slightly behind politics as the main reason for the success of the open source/free software movement, but I'd love to hear what fellow
Bruce: I remember reading an essay by you about Burning Man a while back; you hauled your daughter along. I thought this move, besides indicating that you were an incredibly cool dad, pretty much marked the end of Burning Man as a "dangerous" underground phenomenom. Similarly, a number of different forces are transfroming the web-centric Internet into something increasingly bland. I know you're a long-time user of the Well, which is now owned by Salon, the Newsweek of the web.
Which leads me to my question. Do you think it's possible nowadays to create a sustained, independent, and transgressive community (a TAZ, if you will) without it being co-opted by society at large? Some of your old Catscan essays (particularly the one on Jules Verne) hint at what your response to this question would have been in the past, but I'm curious to hear what you have to say now.
As one of those self-same Macoids, I'd certainly know what "grep" meant. (Admittedly, I've been using a SunOS shell account off and on since high school, but I'd know what it meant regardless.) BBEdit, the text editor I primarily use at my job (webmaster for a small publishing company), has limited regex functionality; there's a happy little checkbox that says "use grep" in the search dialogue box. It makes my life a lot easier.
There's also a few ports of grep to MacOS. "Grappler" springs to mind as the name of one of them, although I don't think I've ever used it.
I vote for "Hemos sucks!"
We're talking about the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world. Although I'd imagine the gap has dwindled as more people get into the field (when I was at Brown, at least two professors in the math department were actively doing crypto-related research), it seems likely to me that the NSA is still at least three years ahead of the civilian research world.
Only a guess, though. The NSA knows, but they aren't telling.
Well, it's pretty extensively mentioned as an influence. Having seen it, I'd certainly say that some of the aspects of the plots of the two movies are parallel--the sniping between R2D2 and C3PO is similar to the two yojimbo (sorry, it's been a long time and I can't remember their names) in THF, e.g.--but I agree that it's an oversimplification to say that Lucas stole the whole damn thing. And if Lucas was lifting, I'd hope that he'd choose a better Kurosawa movie, although THF features one of my favorite two-line exchanges in the history of Japanese cinema. ("You stink of death!" "You make my teeth hurt.")
Now, Resevoir Dogs to City on Fire? That was outright theft. Lucas has many, many sins to atone for, but plagarism isn't one of them.
I believe this particular nuance of copyright law is the case only in the U.S.; I've seen articles by font designers lamenting the fact. (Of course, I've seen articles by font designer Chank Diesel cheering the fact, so who knows what the profession as a whole thinks?)
So in Europe, as far as I know, both a font's design and its code can be protected by copyright.