Rapture

Alright, so in-depth analysis time of the Cyberpunk books I read. I feel they really deal with a lot of IST issues.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of the entire punk subculture. Cyberpunk stories, set in the future, focus on antiheroic protagonists who deal in the realms of the illegal and subversive. Unlike mainstream science fiction, the goal of Cyberpunk is not to showcase a single new technology, but to explore how technology will affect the societies of the future. Cyberpunk settings most often portray the future as dystopian despite all of humanity’s advancements. The authors of these works do this to point out modern day societal defects, giving the genre its punk ideology. Although primarily a literary movement, Cyberpunk occasionally crosses over into other forms of media; easy examples would be The Matrix or Blade Runner in movies. Common themes include genetic and cybernetic augmentation of the body, drug use, corruption, the danger conformity poses, capitalism’s inherent failings, and the computer programmer as the new outlaw.

The first author I’ll mention is William Gibson. I don’t think anyone cares about his background or other biographical stuff so I’m going to skip that. Gibson actually coined the term Cyberspace, which is thrown around a lot nowadays. His first novel Neuromancer explored the idea of having a universal virtual network. I’ll run you through a summary I wrote real quick just for context.

A freelance hacker is coerced into working for a mysterious employer to illegally break the constraints the government has placed on an Artificial Intelligence named Wintermute. The hacker, Case, eventually discovers that his employer is Wintermute itself. Wintermute was created as the logical half of a larger entity, its twin Neuromancer having the ability to emote. Case, with the help of a cybernetically enhanced female assassin, a Rastafarian spaceship pilot, and the reanimated memories of a dead hacker, breaks the restrictions around Wintermute, allowing the two AIs to fuse.

The world Gibson created for the story was wraught with sexual depravity, more widespread and more potent drug abuse, corporate corruption and other extensions of current social issues. Wintermute and Neuromancer embody several extremely human traits; Wintermute, cold and calculating, represents both the male personality and the left logical hemisphere of the brain. Neuromancer, perceptive and empathetic, represents the female persona and the right creative hemisphere. Their fusion creates a very much human superintelligence. Gibson’s portrayal of the two stands in contrast to the mechanical actions of the human characters. He’s hinting here that technology dehumanizes in an equilibrium reaction; the more we make machines manlike, the less like men we appear.

Neal Stephenson would probably be considered postcyberpunk, which is basically one two many prefixes for my taste. The distinction between cyberpunk and its post cousin lies in the outlook of the protagonists. Postcyberpunk protagonists are not inherently lowlife characters; they instead work against some aspect of their same dystopian futures. This makes postcyberpunk works decidedly more upbeat, and Stephenson’s works have made me laugh harder than any other author I’ve read, except maybe Mark Twain. The change from cyberpunk to postcyberpunk styles is most likely due to the contradictorily positive effect of the internet and other emergent technologies. Still, Stephenson’s and Gibson’s works share so much thematically in common that I find it hard to separate their two universes. Stephenson and Gibson actually have a friendly feud going on between them, and meet often at writers’ conferences.

I focused on two stories of Stephenson’s, Snow Crash and the more recent Diamond Age. Snow Crash looks at a world governed solely through capitalism and unified by a virtual reality known as the metaverse. Diamond Age focuses on the growth of nanotechnologies and how they will change our lives. Most notable in this book is the existence of a “feed” which is like having a water line into your house that instead brings in pure elements, which a matter compiler can then rearrange into nearly any form via nanotechnology. The result is a fairly cheap answer to world hunger, but problems stemming from the tribe-like architecture of the new global society end in bloodshed.

Stephenson likes to focus on the interactions of people with new technologies, and doesn’t often help his readers with some of the lingo. New acronyms pass in and out of conversation, indicating the complete integration of things like the Feed into everyday life.

I’d really suggest any of these books, or even any in the cyberpunk genre for you guys to read recreationally. Really fun and interesting stuff.

Check out these interviews for a more personal look at the authors:

Gibson

Stephenson