Fraser Simons's Blog, page 2

Pat Cadigan's Fools Asks If You're As Paranoid As You Need To Be

“In all the complexity born of sheer duration…that’s what ultimately belongs to me, to anyone: beauty, and loss.”

Coming off some earlier cyberpunk works such as Mindplayers and Synners, Pat Cadigan’s Fools, while not placed in the Mindplayers series of books (labeled Deadpan Allie), feels like it takes place within the same world. The most exciting elements of Mindplayers can be found in it. Most predominate are memories as a commodity, the consumption of which comes with a high akin to drugs, so long as the memory is relatively new to the mind. Cadigan extrapolates societal paranoia and deliberately conflates it with individual, subjective memory. Years later Strange Days poses the same question: are you paranoid enough? Only in Fools, when you can buy memories along with the pop culture you’re consuming, it’s perhaps an even more terrifying thing to consider.

“How about you, madam? You may think you’re paranoid. But are you paranoid enough?”

The main character is at the crux of an intriguing exploration regarding a personal identity and how much of it is entangled in their memories. Especially if those memories do not belong to that person. Fools keeps the reader guessing. You’ll never be 100% sure who the main character actually is.

She may be an actress who downloads characters, embodying them for a time and then expels them from her mind. She could also be a memory junkie, addicted to the high. And, possibly, the actress is just one such collection of memories, a persona. While the junkie is the “real” person.

“What’s that old saying? Art is long. But life is short. And memory is my past that changed.”

Just when you think you’ve got a hold on what is going on the rug is pulled out from your feet. Again and again, with each part of the story as it unfolds, a new twist is introduced that brings into question what you thought you knew.

As the main character, as I’ll refer to her as, since who knows her real name or persona at any given time, is coming to grips with what may be happening within her own mind, she is also being pursued by people who have their own relationships to the people occupying her mind. It’s a very satisfying, twisting story that reveals more of what happened gradually. Introducing more complexity to the story at just the right times, so it is never overwhelming when it easily could be.

Fools navigates different areas of the city in riveting fashion. Surfacing each persona in the main character in a fish-out-of-water type situation that the reader can easily identify with. As she flounders, so do you. Personhood and embodiment are explored at a different angle than previous works. The reader taken along for the ride.

“You looking for truth?…Or just keeping a secret?”

Cadigan also continues to show distinction from other authors at the time by not putting poverty and marginalization tourism, as well as hyper-sexualization—things typically associated with cyberpunk during this time—at the forefront of her work. There is also no love interest central to the character. There is no giant megacorp with the boot of the neck of the impoverished for shock, either.

“People who mouthkiss are capable of anything.”

Instead, low life aspects feel more authentic and engaging. Each new notion regarding marginalization parallels a direct experience from the character. Even when one of the personas is an escort, and beauty is definitely depicted as a commodity being leveraged by those with power, it isn’t shown in a male gaze way. It’s merely a fact of life for people and something tied to the identity of the main character(s).

Cadigan occupies a beguiling, at times, intersection of cyberpunk because while she is often called “The Queen of Cyberpunk” and is sometimes in academia thumbed for not being directly feminist—she is also undoubtedly, never really invoking tropes typically associated with masculine authors in the genre. Her characters are competent. They are not defined by gender and are not sexually liberated and non-monogamous. Sex takes a back seat and never used solely to depict marginalization. The exploration of the idea is what matters principally in her cyberpunk works.

“Truth is cheap. Information costs. Can you afford information? Or only the truth”

Another device used to significant effect is the changes to how the text is presented. It is changed up to help the reader with the transitions from the different identities surfacing in the main character. Fonts change. Sometimes they are in bold; sometimes italicized. Even still, however, this is a much more complex narrative than the typical cyberpunk books. It will challenge you, as it uses these changes in the story to drive forward the plot at a much more frenetic pace. The changes also work to further ground the reader in the headspace. It’s clever and fun. The cadence of each character’s “voice” adapts to the textual switch ups, really driving home the differences in each one.

Unfortunately, some of my favorite elements of the plot need to be kept mysterious because they reveal some of the plot. Make no mistake, Fools is one of the most compelling cyberpunk novels. Even more so when you consider how unique it is for the year it was released: the same year, in fact, as the release of Snow Crash, 1992.

Ironically, Fools was another fantastic addition to a plethora of books that prove the sub-genre was just hitting its stride. Some of its very best contributions began just when the founders of the sub-genre declared the cyberpunk movement—not the sub-genre—was dead upon the release of the satirical, post-cyberpunk Snow Crash. At the time, it seemed to mark the commodification and absorption of cyberpunk into “mainstream” science fiction and pop culture. Read the two side by side, however, and you’ll find none of the elements in Snow Crash that were satirized.

In hindsight, various, typically more marginalized, authors met with limited commercial success at the time were already busy iterating on cyberpunk. Fools is illustrative of that fact, and appropriately titled.

“Funny how that works, how you can lose someone by finding her.”

 

Ruse Continues A Compelling, Intersectional Young Adult Cyberpunk Story

CW: Spoilers for Want, the prequel to Ruse.

Ruse is a continuation of Want, which I’ve written about before. This novel picks up right after Want, where the fallout of their heist against Jin Corp is felt amongst the group in different ways.

All grieving their friend in different ways, all fractured by the loss—they are given little time to cope. When Lingyi flies to Shanghai to helps an estranged childhood friend, the gang becomes embroiled in another corporate plot that centers Jason’s, now a girlfriend of sorts, Daiyu.

This culminates into a mystery with Jin corp somehow at the center, placing Daiyu in a situation where her loyalty and familial bonds are tested. Her father is up to no good yet again, and before the crew is able to heal fully, they must pull together to protect each other and, hopefully, deal another blow to Jin.

The move to Shanghai is compelling and a breath of fresh air (ha!), except not really, as it’s similarly polluted. Jin corp is building a superstructure meant to help with that pollution…. while also making a lot of money, of course. Storefronts and filters that clean the air, as well as new, high-end real estate, means that Jin and his company is poised to more than recoup their losses.

It’s another fun and subversive young adult story for cyberpunk, and, as the cover suggests, it centers some other characters, which was welcome. Lingyi and Iris are a bit more fleshed out as a couple, their dynamics more integral to the story. There are some heart strings being played, their identities, including being a same sex couple, are never performative or fetishized. My only lamentation is not having more time spent with them, in fact, as the story kept jumping back to Jason and Daiyu drama after the initial setup.

Cindy Pon knows her characters well, and they spill onto the page nicely. It’s a page-turner that fits in some critical questions about the environment while maintaining teenage drama and more heists, hijinks, and middle fingers to systemic oppression.

How The Rest Of Cloud Atlas Transforms The Cyberpunk Novella Within It For The Better

Cloud Atlas is a collection of stories that are bound together in so many ways that a unified theme was not clear to me until the unique format begins to unfold the latter half of each individual novella. Its unique presentation builds up a series of short stories as novellas. Each one is not only a different genre but also ends up introducing the start of the next novella; creating a loose link between stories becomes more solidified as you read on. Then, after the last story is introduced and built up, you transition to continuing the previous stories endings in the same order they were introduced.

One such story is a cyberpunk corporatocracy which mass produces clones made to do every undesirable form of work in a futuristic Seoul, Korea. Neocapitalism has kicked it into overdrive, forcing the scared, huddled populace into purchasing products to be good citizens. Inundating them with propaganda that promises that the Korean superstate is doing well, so long as people buy, buy buy! Despite the rest of the world in collapse, this population appears to be thriving.

Sonmi-451 is a clone indentured to an eating establishment that feels like an extrapolation on what fast food and customer service might look like when serving is done by dehumanized, fetishized slaves. Clones eat different food—called soap—live on the premise, and only know a life in which they wake up and serve customers and then sleep; the cycle repeating every. Single. Day. No rest. All of them sharing in an unverifiable dream supplied by their employer that after a number of years of work, they are to be sent to live in a paradise for their service.

Sonmi-451 begins to question the nature of her reality when a fellow clone expresses a will that goes beyond their programmed existence, she ends up discovering what the world is actually like, as the notions she had about the globe are supplanted with a far more grim world than the service workers were educated with, suggesting a level of intelligence thought to be impossible from clones like her.

The resistance against the oppressive regime recruits her in their struggle with the hope that she might be the linchpin to a plan that could wake up the citizenry. Sonmi-451 ultimately must decide what her path forward will be. Her newfound agency parallels the massive amounts of knowledge she’s consuming, incidentally revealing the contours of a truth that not even the resistance seems to be aware of.

While the cyberpunk novella is exceptional in the way it conveys the depth and depravity of rampant capitalism and excels in world building, in general, the story becomes more interesting to me when the context around the story is considered.

Every novella compiled in Cloud Atlas carries similar themes. The characters, bound to one another across time, encounter some form of oppression. Even for those characters that “do the right thing,” we move on from to the next story, ultimately never learning what that impact may have had on the world overall. But we do learn what the impact is on the characters of each story.

I find it intrinsically hopeful that the cyberpunk story is not the last one being told. Life after post-capitalism exists in some form, implying the things we do now also have a ripple effect on people. Something we sometimes feel. Despite the presence of oppression. Insidious characters begin anew, their souls are given other circumstances, and those ripples are also felt throughout time. There is a true clashing of humanity that a single story could never convey.

There are also genuinely moving moments to be felt due to the decisions by each of the characters. There is no paragon, no perfect figure. People screw up, and alacrity stretches through genres and time. But so does love.

Within this broader context that Cloud Atlas draws, when all the stories build up to in a crescendo and cascade down to in a satisfying conclusion, the cyberpunk story could also be considered a solarpunk story or maybe even a hopepunk story, even. It feels explicit that every single action that is taken to stamp out oppression is meaningful and rooted in a love that reaches across a divide that no human can really fathom.

Years after reading Cloud Atlas the story of Sonmi-451, however short in its length, has stuck with me; even growing more pronounced with a re-read and re-watch of the movie (the two more futuristic novellas having story beats quite different than the book, mind you). This context around that story’s themes and motifs impact the entire text significantly, just as all the other novellas impact one another. They turn, for me, a good cyberpunk story into something wholly unique and more interesting than it could have been standing on its own.

In This Cyberpunk Novel, Truth Is In The Eyes Of The Mindplayer

 

“You’ve got to look while it’s happening…Otherwise you miss seeing it the way it should be seen.”

With first wave cyberpunk in full swing in 1987, Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers represents somewhat of an anomaly. While cyberspace was the predominate playground for most cyberpunk at that time, there are no runners traversing digital lines into some corporations' information vaults lined with protective ICE. Instead, a kind of cyberspace exists only to facilitate mind-to-mind contact, lucid dreaming, and mind-altering substances.

Allie is a mind criminal who uses a number of banned substances and illegal devices before she's actually busted by the mind police. When a friend named Jerry steals a mindcap and convinces her to use it, her mind is left with lasting damage. He dumps her off to get help but they both get snatched, starting their very separate journeys.

“Does all of this really mean that much to you? It’s just stuff. Jerry. It’s just expensive stuff. You’re risking your - your self for a goddamn nouveau couch?”

Turns out instead of serving time, you can become a mindplayer—encompassing several disciplines that people use to alter their state of consciousness. Roughly, these services are kind of forms of therapy, though there are also neurosis peddlers too, so who knows. Rather than go to jail, Allie decides to become a mindplayer.  After all, if you mess yourself up enough then they can just scrub your mind, at least, ostensibly you can. No big deal, right?

Mindplayers is at its absolute best when its exploring ideas around psychosis and how the people who meet and interact with one another, mold and shape each other; with or without their knowledge. This is taken to extremes when people meet mind-to-mind, navigating the contours of one another's consciousness. Opening the flood gates and exposing this contact for all sorts of allegories.

Thankfully, with subject matter like this there is no poverty tourism or fetishization, or even hyper-sexualism that is often present in this wave of cyberpunk books. Instead, the judiciary system decides Allie is a criminal and her best option as presented to her, is to assimilate into the system that labels her a threat, or else suffer extreme repercussions. While she may have been on a dangerous trajectory, as it's implied that she had been using a lot of other mind-altering illegal substances, but not mindcaps, to be in a continual altered state, it's interesting to me that in this story, the omnipresence is actually something systemic. There is no "evil" corporation. It's just the state. It analyzes her, determines she has value due to her brain chemistry, and immediately commodifies her.

“Anyone’s capable of developing delusions under the right conditions.”

The majority of the story is Allie undergoing this training and the obstacles she faces, which change her mind in unexpected ways. And the situations she's put in with her clients in order to work off this debt are inherently dangerous and each of them leaves an "after taste" on the mind. People's fetishes, violent desires, and neurosis become weaponized, physical forces in a medium like mind-to-mind contact. So in an effort to commodify her she is also dehumanized and risks losing her sense of self. With the alternative being jail. It’s a compelling and different. To connect mind-to-mind you use technology that attaches to the optic nerve (typically, though there are exceptions), which means peoples’ eyes are removed. They sometimes need to purchase new ones when the old ones wear out, and they can become status symbols when people buy cats eyes or ones associated with different gem stones. Though a bit on the nose, it leads to both of these kinds of people not being able to see things for what they truly are, whether oppressed by the system or apart of it.

The only downside to a narrative exploring this kind of subject matter is that it necessarily feels quite loose, and dreamy, which is not indicative of a genre generally known for frenetic pacing. I could see it being off putting to people reading the sub-genre frequently. While most of the subversions of masculine cyberpunk are welcome, this did make it hard to get invested in. I wanted to get to the next exploration of the waking or subconscious mind. While the story came to a satisfying conclusion, and the format for which it's presented in makes sense, the pacing was hindered by it.

“Do you know there are no longer any actors alive today who still have their own eyes?…It seems strange. Drawing on life and looking at it through artificial eyes.”

On another positive note, though, another welcome subversion indicative of Cadigan's work is how she writes her protagonists. I mentioned that there is no hyper-sexualization, but it's more so that sexuality doesn't play much of a role in the story at all. While Allie has relationships with others, the story rarely if ever focuses on the physicality of anything. It’s on point for the story being told and contributes to its uniqueness.

Additionally, masculine cyberpunk and feminine cyberpunk tend to be most different with how embodiment is handled. Masculine leans toward mind over body; feminine gives far more weight to a persons' body comprising their overall identity. Mindplayers falls somewhere in the middle. Later, in Synners, Cadigan has made up her mind about this. But here mind-to-mind contact is more of extrapolation between people's interactions in real life. In that way, embodiment matters. But it always feels like a medium, with not much weight really being attributed to it beyond that. Allie is simply not a physical person, she continually reiterates that she has always had an active mind and been in her head, rather than a busy social life. The minor details of her life, from her perspective, truly fall away in the story. For good and, sometimes, at the expense of a more thematically tight narrative. It’s compelling to see the starting of a throughline that would ultimately lead to Synners, which feels like it benefited greatly from this this against the grain tale.

“Not a single thing that’s passed between us has been real and yet you’ve been hunting me like the hound of heaven.”

 

The Girl Who Was Plugged In Is Must Read Proto-Cyberpunk

“It’s a lucky girl who can have all the fun she wants while doing good for others, isn’t it?”

Published in 1973, James Tiptree Jr may not have created cyberpunk, but pretty much wrote cyberpunk. The only major thing missing is the injection of The New Frontier trope. Full on cyberspace found in Neuromancer isn’t present. When people discuss proto-cyberpunk fiction this short fiction piece should be a major component, especially when looking for non-masculine works within the-subgenre that don’t get put on must read lists as much as they ought to (I’m working on mine presently, by the way).

In just 36 pages, it tells the story of 17-year-old P. Burke in the near future who makes a suicide attempt that is denied by a bureaucracy. Instead, she is offered a job presented as the opportunity of a lifetime. She is to be a remote, broadcasting her consciousness into a 15-year-old clone with receivers built into it, but otherwise completely devoid of sentience. This body is crafted into the ideal image for the consumers who will be watching her on a feed. The job? Simply live her life, entertaining the consumers glued to their feeds, what are explicitly drawn to her as a desirable commodity, even though we know as the reader her job is essentially Sex Sells.  Her actual objective is to use selected products she’s supposed to like so that others may see them and buy them. After all, they are the best products if she likes them.  

“And here is our girl, looking—

If possible, worse than before. (You thought this was Cinderella transistorized?)”

It’s capitalism as we know it with one major difference: there’s no ads. They’ve been banned. Kind of. The neon tinged fever dream-like streets we’ve come to associate with cyberpunk focuses on the way in which people living in capitalism become consumers in unsuspecting ways. Although there are no ads exactly, this only means companies have adapted, creating new ways of getting people to buy. Most predominantly: product placement. I imagine this might just be starting as a thing in 1973, but I couldn’t speak intelligently on that. Turns out it was a reasonable anxiety to have back then; go figure.

These new gods of society, as they are called often, are fickle; moving from new fad to new fad so quickly that companies cannot cash in well enough. And so they need their own god, controlled by them.

The Girl Who Was Plugged In is both explicit and stark in its condemnation of the ways in which society dictates every acceptable action a woman may take to accrue some modicum of power. Even when Delphi—the persona which was created for the real live P Burke, described as being an ugly woman and is kept in a basement somewhere—accrues said power, temporarily becoming indispensable because she is a taste maker—her power is only a loan, and as fleeting as the masses interest; never truly accrued and earned and kept like the puppeteers behind the scenes truly benefiting from societal structures. And it also has very real limits, as we find out.

“Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll have people behind you whose job it is to select the most worthy products for you to use. Your job is just to do as they say. They’ll show you what outfits to wear at parties, what suncars and viewers to buy, and so on. That’s all you have to do.”

When she meets a young man who falls in love with her, his desire is linked to her body only. Even though he is the son of the man who owns the company and described as essentially woke and awake of the ways in which the system preys upon the weak. He does not know that a remote exists. He never actually sees the woman behind Delphi, even though everything beyond her presentation is present as well. He doesn’t want to know her mind. His rage is tied to his ability to own his notion of what a free Delphi is, never asking her what she wants or needs. The comfortable feeling that what he wants to consume is in front of him parallels the damage well-meaning allies, that are actually just a part of the same system of control, visit on people tied up in systemic oppression is disturbingly articulate.

A biting critique throughout, and a through line for non-masculine cyberpunk works, it’s a formative piece of literature for the sub-genre. One that does not feature some of the more problematic aspects first wave cyberpunk often is critiqued for.

“Every noon beside the yacht’s hydrofoils darling Delphi clips along in the blue sea they’ve warned her not to drink. And every night around the shoulder of the world an ill-shaped thing in a dark burrow beasts its way across the sterile pool.”

While the world is brutal to the protagonist, like pretty much all cyberpunk, the marginalization of and fetishization of P. Burke, as she is referred to in the text, is the entire point of the story, serving to critique societal structures. Even with this critique present, there is also no feeling of the male gaze perforating the short fiction. It some ways it is as large a contrast between some of the more typical first wave cyberpunk and the non-masculine works found in the sub-genre. Certainly nothing could surpass it in this condensed a demonstration of the contrast, anyway.

It becomes even more unsettling in its presentation, which feels very much as though you’re a viewer of a program yourself, being taken for a ride that is exciting and supposed to be acceptable. Watching P. Burke’s rise and fall written like a program written you’re going to enjoy when you ought to feel sick.

“…showbiz has something TV and Hollywood never had—automated inbuilt viewer feedback. Samples, ratings, critics, polls? Forget it. With that carrier field you can get real-time response-sensor readouts from every receiver in the world, served up at your console. That started as a thingie to give the public more influence on content.

Yes.

Try it, man. You’re at the console. Slice to the sex-age-educ-econ-ethno-cetera audience of your choice and start. You can’t miss. Where the feedback warms up, give ‘em more of that. Warm—warmer—hot! You’ve hit it—the secret itch under those hides, the dream in those hearts. You don’t need to know its name. With your hand controlling all input and your eye reading all the response, you can make them a god…and somebody’ll do the same for you.”

You can find The Girl Who Was Plugged In in a collection of James Tiptree Jr’s short story collections called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

History Repeats Itself In Caprica

So often the simulacra trope is used in cyberpunk to provoke or underline philosophical underpinnings. It is always a pale imitation that makes us think about what is real. If we are real.

Caprica, to me, suggests that the simulacra of the main character is both as real as the original and, at the same time, the construction of this insinuated perfection, kept off-screen, does not matter. We only know that she was made in the same image as the original and that is enough. Her humanity is, of course, questioned throughout the show by others, but the audience doesn’t get the alibi of seeing her creation. When the main character dies in the early moments of the show what is predominately “real” is only the digital self that remains.

The father is the head of a megacorporation and designing a prototype. So far, this prototype is drastically underperforming. But the death of his daughter and the questions surrounding her death linger, tipping him over the edge and unraveling his composed, privileged life.

He ends up attempting to understand the simulacra of his daughter trapped on the holobands, cyberspace; which was, ironically, created by him.

Anyone who has watched Battlestar Galactica knows what the eventuality of this story is, though: the cylons as we know them are created. Somewhere down the line a new kind of people are made from these moments here.

The series is very short but has a couple interesting ideas. The main character being a digital person of some kind, shrouded in mystery, clearly the impetus of the story we know. Also of note to me was the world, too.

It is regressive, indicative of a society that actually followed through with the notion that turning back time would fix most everything. A conservative idea that refuses to acknowledge that the same events would simply play out; the same problems present at a foundational, societal level would force the same cancerous results. But, of course, they are happy to pretend. The ‘50’s aesthetic is a neat literalization of this. Something pretty you know will end terribly.

Lastly, the hubris that created Cylons and denied them their rights; later the attempt at dehumanization in order to commit genocide—all stem from a father attempting an act of love that is curdled dead by his drive to succeed in overt capitalism. He only knows how to be toxic, destroying things he can’t rule, and his daughter refuses to be ruled. The product he would produce in such a society being a Cylon, it is marked as the largest advance in human history, no doubt. Human advances and horrific events are often striped of intention. This isn’t allowed to be.

Existence As Rebellion In Orphan Black

Relevancy is not generally a problem for cyberpunk. While some aspects of it have aged and the undergrowth, when picked at, reveals notions rooted in old fears that have bruised ugly. Some of which, fans of the sub-genre tend to frame in static moments with the fugazi moment when it was decreed dead. The more relevant motifs aren’t to be contained, though.

Biopunk, for instance, resuscitates tired tropes in cyberpunk trappings and shows them in a new, more interesting light. Orphan Black ends up being, I’d argue, even more relevant than when it first aired, due to its expressly queer themes, characters, and politics. Right now, we believe human clones aren’t possible…but if they were…who would have the resources to create them, other than corporations?

In Orphan Black there are many, many clones dating back many, many years.

When Sarah witnesses a woman who looks exactly like her jump in front of a train, she assumes the identity of the dead woman. It’s an unconventional biopunk story. One that takes its time grounding itself before introducing the cyberpunk/biopunk tropes.

The megacorporation spying on them all to nefarious ends, seemingly with infinite resources being the biggest. In the shadow of this specter, the lives of Sarah and her clones are relevant because they parallel identity politic conversations today. With growing steam, the debate surrounding them is The issue right now. People are still trying to define what they even are and what the boundaries of the discussion are, compared to how people have thought voted in politics all along.

The clones struggle to survive despite the manipulations of those with more power than them, their bodies commodified in a world that doesn’t believe that their existence is possible. The show is fiercely punk. Each one of the clones’ original DNA is predetermined but their identities vary widely. Some are gay, some bisexual, some explicitly trans. The multitude of possibility is endless as the show progresses and feels subversive, transgressive, and creative. Often times in other visual media clones are depicted as the same people., used as a simulacra. Their likes and interests inextricably intertwined, unable to see where one ends and the other begins. While they tend to think like one another and look like one another. That notion is discarded, replaced with one far more inclusive and representative of intersectional lived experiences people have been voicing for some time.

As it progresses the plot gets a bit convoluted. But it never loses that fundamental aggressive rebelliousness and creativity around the expression of identity. Something the sub-genre has needed in order to feel like it is giving voice to the marginalized people who actually live in the fringes cyberpunk wants to be representative of. There is no sub-culture on display as a form of poverty tourism, for instance. Almost all of the characters are political statements in some way, and they resonate in a time when trans rights and social progress is being rolled back in the U.S.

The clones’ very existence as intersectional and varied identities are an act rebellion in of itself, bucking against many conservative notions around these identities. And this act of dissent is the most important to be facilitated in biopunk, and by extension cyberpunk, yet.

The Commodification Of Hope In Hardwired

“HOPE IS OUR BUSINESS”

Returning to the roots of the sub-genre is often not so much more than an exercise in consuming the most common motifs of the genre being invoked. Hardwired is this to me… but it also couples the familiar with military fiction. While these beats are largely uninteresting to me because I don’t like military fiction, it ends up presenting moments I very much enjoyed. One of the strengths of Hardwired, I found, is the richness of the fiction when the two main characters lose themselves to their private, innermost thoughts. When the introspection ends up being cyclical it ends up being surprisingly satisfying. The answer to a recursive thought that becomes a final ringing tone which fades to black.

Thunder explodes over their heads and Sarah sees the silver sheet of water pouring down outside the broken barn door, Cowboy slumped against the wall with a rueful smile, the buttons in his head reflecting the lightning in blue-white pattern, silver and turquoise, like eyes gazing inward, into his head. Sarah feels a sweep of sadness for Cowboy, the dispossessed panzerboy, his boots leaving tracks in the dust above which he once flew with his mind flicking at the speed of light.

Sarah is a victim of many kinds of abuse which are used to parallel the loss of agency suffered in capitalistic systems, grinding down those without money like her down; tethered to a destroyed and destructive earth. This loss of agency is subverted with cybernetics, as one might expect in cyberpunk. A cybersnake dwells in her throat. A weapon only effective for intimate encounters that make them cringe at the kind of abuse she is a survivor of. Her dream is to leverage her skill set and agency to get a ticket off of earth for her and her brother, Daud.

Lucky Cowboy and his clean hands. By chance you had a talent somebody wanted, and now you're able to afford principles. Good for you.

Orbitals, the megacorporations above the earth, is the nebulous Thing on the horizon for her and most people, it seems. Those who remain are “in the mud”. But of course, the joke is on them because to get up there, to get the amount of money to purchase your ascension—you invariably end up becoming a part of the system of oppression you’re struggling to leave. They only allow the few to get there, money is damned, and the things asked of those who leave invariably stain their character, drawing a line in the sand: sell out and rise…or dwell in the mud, broke. Ironically far more clean in the mud than those in orbit, of course. Having never engaged in the depravity everyone with this true power is synonymous with.

“They’re up here, and they’re lost. Once their obedience to Earth gave them meaning, and then their struggle against it, but now they don’t know what to do. They’re too distracted by their structures. They got their independence, but they don’t know what it means, and they’re looking for the things that will give it meaning.”

To bridge Sarah and her dream there is Cowboy. A panzerboy who interfaces with cyberspace (or the interface, or ‘face) and his tank in a new frontier, having barely survived the old one. Before the tank, he flew planes, but the orbitals put a stop to that. They put a bullet in the wild wild west of the skies and threw him, and those like him, in the dirt. No more sky. His dream is the same as the one Sarah seeks to purchase: freedom, or some form of it. Sarah looking up to find it, Cowboy only catching it in an approximation from nostalgia when making a run in his tank through danger, dodging authority.

“…that’s what the Orbitals don’t understand, what their crystal world models can’t figure. That we’d have run the Alley for nothing. Because it was a way to be free.”

All this culminates into Sarah executing a score that requires her to literally reshape her body. But when the client turns on her, attempting to eliminate her and her dream, by proxy. They end up accidentally all but killing her brother. To pay for his medical bills, the technology that can actually give him his broken anatomy back to him. Flesh and bone that erases the mistake but not so far as to put him back together as he had sculpted himself for his clientele as a sex-worker. Sarah has no choice but to take a job she otherwise wouldn’t have risked. That job puts her on a collision course with Cowboy.

In true cyberpunk fashion, nothing is what it seems and it is far more lethal than both of them suspected. The goal shifts—as it often does in capitalism—from striving for a dream…to pure survival. Which asks the ‘punks to pull the trigger on those attempting to do the same.

What appears to be luck or chance concerning who lives or dies is instead more like resource management for those people who can actually see what is happening from a better vantage point.

“…he has a feeling he can work it somehow, flick a switch and things will turn out that way, if he just knows what switch and when.”

In the end, their hope becomes a commodity that has to be purchased like everything else. Instead of money as currency, though, the system asks for something else from Sarah and Cowboy. What of their humanity are they willing to strip from themselves? Who’s hope matters more? Your own or those people you care for because you can’t have both.

It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals...Where it's clean, Daud...Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street...It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer.

You should see your eyes when you say that...Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it.

Advertisements aptly break up the switches of perspective from Sarah to Cowboy, each a subvocalization of the system that slowly communicates a message: in order to “win” you have to buy. And the cost, of course, is pulling the trigger on your own agency. The value proposition is only concerned in dealing with a sacrifice that shapes you into its own image.

The introspection the two characters often partake in is refreshing because it is constantly steeping this theme in real pain and various conflicting emotions they feel and glimpse in one another but are blind to themselves. Like recognizes like because the system has scarred their bodies.

“Sarah knows she's walking behind a man who's about to lose his first, his biggest war. She feels the dry, cool fingers of sadness touching her. No way to win without becoming one of them.

Sarah wonders if he knows it, if he's just playing on because it's all he knows how to do, or if he really thinks he has a hope. In a strange way she wants him not to know, to keep believing in his own star for a while longer, so as not to lose it all at once, all he ever worked for or dreamed....She knows too well how that feels.”

But even those who are seemingly broken can stop the commercial if they can manage to point the gun at the system instead of the many appendages that further its agenda. 

It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

 

On Using Culture As Language In Last Tango In Cyberspace

“THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace makes culture a character to be explored in equal measure as the main character. Lion, an empathy-tracker, or em-tracker for short—uses his unique talent to consume curated content provided by clients and extrapolate a future; not at an individual level, mind you, rather as a glimpse at the cultural significance regarding the content in the future. It’s an amalgamation of genetic drifts which hardwires an em-trackers’ pattern recognition. Hacking their intuition to do a sort of cultural prognostication.

“A small robot standing on a busy city street corner, looking around. I SEE HUMANS BUT NO HUMANITY.”

Em-trackers methods vary with the person and there are very few known trackers, at least in so far as ones operating in the same capacity of Lion, doing this very niche work for a living. A very good living at that.

Lion, in particular, is rigged to make these deductions from words and logos, though it’s gestured that each tracker would be completely different. He processes the content he’s given, reacts, and tells the client if he sees a future or not. It’s usually a binary answer; a “yes” or a “no.”

“His journalism days are behind him. No longer does he get paid for the plot. Now, he’s paid for saying yes or no—the sum total of his contractual obligations. His work in the world reduced to one-word responses. When, he wonders, did his life get so small?”

Superficially, this book is about Lion being contracted by a major corporate entity to take a look at a crime scene and apply his talents… but this is a very unorthodox application of his gifts and one which ends up taking him down a rabbit hole. Ostensibly it’s a murder mystery wrapped up in noir trappings, something people might expect from cyberpunk. This is where the clear iterations from the sub-culture come into play, however. Within the tropes of a pleasurable whodunit, there’s much more to be consumed.

“You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.”

A specific trope that follows noir elements in cyberpunk, the investigator in over their head, is a unique vernacular used. There is typically a colloquial dialect that is foreign to the reader and makes them feel a fish out of water. The reader interprets what these cultural elements are in the future with the remix of certain words or the use of completely fictional words, from time to time. Interestingly, the dialect used in this novel is pop culture itself. Not in the very limited sense of Ready Player One, where games, gamers, and gaming is the language—but in landmark moments in cinema and literature that is reasonably absorbed into the general intellect of society. The most common being the novel Dune. Lion carries it with him all the time and is the cornerstone for the explanation of Lion’s gifts and poly-tribalism, a central component to the way Lion looks at culture in the story. People are intersectional beings with complex identities. Tracing the identity back to its origin is possible with technology these days. Appealing to particular facets of the identity can be a predictor for if something is to be successful and thrive or be consumed by another identity that dominates it.

'“Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.”

I think this approach both hinders and helps Last Tango in Cyberspace. For one, it’s an interesting use of the trope which proved satisfying to read for me, personally. I had never read Dune but it is explained as needed. I never felt lost. However, I could see some people who had read the book and disagree with the cultural impacts asserted in the text having a problem with most of the book, as it draws from it heavily at a personal level for Lion, as well as a fundamental shorthand for what is happening in the plot; ingrained in the theme and a permanent fixture.

“Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”

The frenetic pacing that accompanies cyberpunk literature is replaced with a sort of artificial acceleration with the structure of the book. Lots of very short chapters, in other words. This allows for expounding on the cultural aspects that are conveyed during the text. You notice what Lion notices. These details becoming foundational to the extrapolations he draws on later. What this means though, is the pacing is somewhat sacrificed in order to get the reader to do the same types of pattern recognition Lion does during the book. It’s clever, but a slow burn.

”Hybridization, he figures, is destined to become one of the ways this generation out-rebels the last generation. How we went from long-haired hippie freaks to pierced punk rockers to transsexual teenagers taking hormones.”

For me, the slower pace made it feel reminiscent of Takeshi Kovach in Altered Carbon. Envoys in that novel “soak up” culture in order to fit in and navigate foreign cultures. Lion’s talent feels like it takes that idea and explores it more thoroughly, engaging with it more, and this method allows you to soak up the information as well. If it were frenetic some of the details would be lost, I feel.

“Lion glances back at the pigeons. Sees a flicker he didn’t notice before. Remembers that the de-extinction program was a failed effort, realizes he’s looking at a light-vert. An AR projection of an almost. The bad dreams of a society disguised as a good time.”

A concept continually being reiterated in the novel is “living the questions.” Something that also subverts first wave cyberpunk, the characters of which are generally on the spectrum somewhere, unlikeable and/or anti-social, and live on the fringes of society in a sub-culture of some kind.

Lion, however, is an embodiment of empathy. He is in stark contrast to those protagonists, relating to most everyone and so can assume their point of view. To the extent, in fact, he resolves to not use his talents on other people.

“We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.”

Last Tango in Cyberspace feels like a love letter to cyberpunk while updating it. In Neuromancer, for example, Gibson’s Rastafarians were a source of major critique. They are also featured in this novel but the author instead traces the cultural aspects and importance of Rastafarian influences on western mainstream culture. It felt as though it was making a point to correct the caricature found in the original source material. Whether or not it succeeds I leave up to someone who’s more educated on that and can speak to it—but the intent is clear.

“the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.”

This led me to the only thing I didn’t like about the novel and a personal pet peeve of mine: authors phonetically using foreign language in dialogue. It’s usually done as a form of cultural appreciation and authenticity, I’m sure… but it results in the author needing to clarify what is being said regardless and it just feels uncomfortable. It’s pretty much always from a Western perspective on a minority culture and usually is the default assumption of what the culture sounds like. Lion is able to converse with them for plausible reasons, often not the case when this is encountered, but it’s always left me feeling squeamish. Just tell me they have an accent, placing them in whatever area if that is relevant.

“…what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.”

As Lion navigates the mystery and ping-pongs about the globe consuming the clues surrounding the mysterious death the reader, too, is engaging in this meta-language. Both in terms of how it subverts or remixes cyberpunk tropes, as well as the cultural context and information Lion imparts as his process. All of which is given weight. Hooking the plot into these details down the line as it comes together.

Most interestingly of all perhaps, the author goes out of their way to state that all of the technology exists in the world today, or is in a lab somewhere being worked on, at the very least.

“The car sees emotions. Signals have been pre-programmed, down to the basement level, below Ekman’s micro-expressions, getting to the core biophysical: heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels. And all from pointing a laser at a tiny vein in the human forehead. The car sees emotions, yet feels nothing. So morality too has to be pre-scripted into the code. Aim for garbage cans and not pedestrians; aim for solitary pedestrians rather than large groups. Empathy programmer, he’s heard it called, someone’s job now.”

This makes the future we are presented with prescient in the same way Neuromancer did with the advent of the Internet and the rise of technology in the ’90s. But where technophobia is firmly rooted in first wave cyberpunk. Last Tango in Cyberspace is making a virtue of humanities peculiarities, some of which we barely grasp. While the Internet is not something we may understand, so too are we learning the same of our own minds. Empathy, after all, is not something we gained from modernity.

“Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that?”

And empathy seems to be the thing we desperately need right now, rather than the consensual hallucination that allows us to connect to others while, at the same time, enabling us to dehumanize each other.

“Last tango in cyberspace…the end of something radically new. Copy that.”

“Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.”

Thanks to Netgalley for providing the unedited version ahead of time. in exchange for an honest review. You can find Last Tango in Cyberspace for purchase here.

Processing Trauma In Bone Dance

“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future's controlled by others. There's powerful people playing with it. You're gonna have to fight to get it back...this is the country of truth. There the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In this country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn't your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods--they've got the say in what happens to you.”

Content warning for talk about sexual and physical abuse and minor spoilers for Bone Dance.

In a city gripped by a single man with a monopoly on energy, Sparrow is what I’d call a Nostalgist. They find old curiosities and sell them to people who can afford to collect remnants of the past in a future that only serves the wealthy and privileged.

“Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that's out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don't have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.”

After a big deal, Sparrow remembers nothing of the night before, waking up with a killer headache. Turns out it isn't booze. A horseman took her body for their own and now powerful forces are coming for Sparrow. It's harrowing and heavy material and not for the faint of heart.

“Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn't there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn't left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn't bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.”

I say “them” because, in this young adult cyberpunk novel, fantasy elements are bolted on; often to great effect. The story goes that years back these horsemen created by the government were made to be perfect weapons. They can infiltrate anyone’s mind, pushing their consciousness down—sometimes long enough to kill them outright. They made political changes and shaped the future, engaged in social engineering, topples empires from the inside. But their lives also cultivated a kind of insanity within them. The Big Bang. A horseman turned a key and detonated a nuclear bomb, ushering in a dystopia.

This same government also created androgynous bodies supposedly devoid of thought that were to be used by these horsemen. One of the main points of tension is the origin of Sparrow however, because bodies such as theirs are meant to be empty and waiting. They pass for male or female depending, generally, on the people they’re around at the time. Sparrow leveraged this to fade into the background and make a life in the shadows. They don’t really have close friends and their life, ironically, is in their media collection, which is massive and references pop culture from before the book was made. This past is the only thing they care about. Not their own; the history of others.

“Her skin was translucent pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock.”

But that anonymity is no longer an option as they get embroiled in a plot that puts them at a crossroads with horsemen at the other ends.

As the story unfolds, we learn about Sparrow as they learn about themselves. Often painfully. Cyberpunk often puts marginalized on display but this time it’s embodied fully in Sparrow. Performing gender, unfair power dynamics, and forces and powers people really don’t understand but are none-the-less leveraged for their own selfish ends, are placed front and center in the fiction.

“The origin of my body and my mind didn't matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I'd pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.”

A major component to the fantasy elements in Bone Dance is Voodoo. The perception of nature parallels the discovery Sparrow goes through as they have to confront their past and rely on others for help in a way they’ve never allowed themselves to do before. Humanity’s view on supernatural forces, specifically in terms of Tarot and its subjectivity, is similarly paralleled. The major chapters are even introduced with tarot cards. But those answers rely on an interpretation which is flawed for the reader (at least, in my own experience) because of the power dynamics we’ve created with capitalism; so this information often acts as misinformation.

“From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead--relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.”

Bone Dance is also filled with some of the best prose I’ve read. A character that is unique and intersectional. One in which feels like the handling around gender identity is done well, though I can’t speak to that much. I’m not one for fantasy usually, but this, as with other genre mashups I’ve read lately, has some of the very best work in cyberpunk I’ve consumed. Published in 1991, it’s interesting that there is another example of intersectional cyberpunk that is more progressive than most of what was coming out in that space at that time (and discards some of the problems in the first wave) and was released 2 years before it was declared dead with Snow Crash, no less.

While Sparrow discovers themself, they also have to confront their place in the world via these themes around nature because their body doesn’t fit the societal norms. This is tethered to the notion around popular spirituality being polluted by the environment we’ve created. How can we really have a grip on a truth that might be held in spirituality and spiritualism when our reality is rooted in capitalistic notions that conflict with and destroy nature. It’s also about trauma and how Sparrow chooses to process theirs. And the marks it leaves under the skin, forever.

I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.