tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post7528455318642733739..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: Thoughts on CyberpunkAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-62636532735040350912020-07-02T02:53:17.174-07:002020-07-02T02:53:17.174-07:00That's a great review! And it has the added ad...That's a great review! And it has the added advantage of leading me to your blog, which I have now bookmarked. Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-52778682522674425352020-07-02T02:27:37.477-07:002020-07-02T02:27:37.477-07:00At the risk of committing yet another faux pas the...At the risk of committing yet another faux pas then, here's the review of Altered Carbon I wrote 2 years ago. I flatter myself our styles are not that dissimilar (though mine is infinitely less published) so if you ever find yourself excessively and pandemically idyll, it might amuse: <br />https://one-way-mirror.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-carbonist-manifesto-now-with-added.htmlDubble Ghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09349729729919925516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-53314325096580646362020-07-02T01:24:34.362-07:002020-07-02T01:24:34.362-07:00Not gauche at all! Thanks for your comment. I thin...Not gauche at all! Thanks for your comment. I think you're right about the style angle and you're certainly right about the Japanese context, and the sense of how invasive online living has become.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-68004267350337210772020-07-02T00:34:34.981-07:002020-07-02T00:34:34.981-07:00Just found this post through your Twitter account....Just found this post through your Twitter account. Is it gauche to reply to a post this old? Probably committing some social media faux pas, but nevermind, we press on: Just wanted to say thanks for the enjoyable and insightful piece! <br /><br />I think the ongoing popularity of the genre probably owes more to aesthetics and fashion than anything else. Black never goes out of style.<br /><br />At the same time, while I agree some of the more literal predictions of cyberpunk have not come to pass, perhaps the root cause of cyberpunk's unease is still with us: Our growing dependence on technology in every aspect of our lives, and the consequent atomization of society. <br /><br />All I might add here is that perhaps the Japanese iteration of cyberpunk also merits study. I think it has both influenced, through Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and in turn been influenced by Western cyberpunk. Particularly the issues it raises of the invasiveness of technology feel relevant today. While we don't literally fear our minds and bodies will be hacked, I think there is a definite sense that we have lost control of our personal information online, and thus by extension some important aspect of ourselves and our identities. Dubble Ghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09349729729919925516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-78021956348355430622020-01-30T11:51:19.304-08:002020-01-30T11:51:19.304-08:00I'm so sorry your comment got exterminated! Wo...I'm so sorry your comment got exterminated! Wordpress/blogspot is a bit crap.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-5319731414451446502020-01-30T03:13:40.832-08:002020-01-30T03:13:40.832-08:00I wrote a long reply but your site deleted it and ...I wrote a long reply but your site deleted it and I can't think it through again. TLDR Cyberpunk is an extension of the desire to escape the body - inheritance of religion/intellectual repulsion etc etc. Justina Robsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12320115891268044710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-37775271837190520392020-01-30T00:11:00.824-08:002020-01-30T00:11:00.824-08:00I would certainly welcome such a book!
It's m...I would certainly welcome such a book!<br /><br />It's my impression that there's a strange split in research on genres. There's genre theory with very elaborate models and there's genre history which often simply ignores the theoretical insights (that's not directed at you, btw). I guess one reason for this is, as I have already indicated, l that if we take genre theory seriously, genre history becomes a much more complex and laborious undertaking which has to go beyond the mere text.<br /><br />I am not an expert in Russian formalism either, but it's interesting that in almost every text I've read by one of its proponents, that they aren't as formalistic as we might think. Meaning: Most of them were very well aware that literature does not happen in a vacuum and that the outside world has influence on the text.<br /><br />The Tomashevskij piece I was referring to is available in « Formalism: History, Comparison, Genre» edited by L. M. O'Toole and Ann Shukman, Oxford 1978.simifilmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10638715853134709545noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-9453271026636901212020-01-29T23:45:52.515-08:002020-01-29T23:45:52.515-08:00That is funny! Don't know Tomashevskij, and sh...That is funny! Don't know Tomashevskij, and should check him out, clearly. I sometimes think that it would be of better service to SF criticism (certainly better than writing speculative critical histories of the whole of SF) to write a short book about genre theory more broadly, and how it might relate back. I'm not actually that much of a Derridean; although there are things of his I do rate highly.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-62973206900832281432020-01-29T23:10:45.198-08:002020-01-29T23:10:45.198-08:00Talk about coincidences – literally the moment you...Talk about coincidences – literally the moment you wrote this (give or take a few hours) I was preparing Derrida's text for my students.<br /><br />I think Rick Altman's semantic/syntactic/pragmatic approach does a pretty good job of unifying the formalist and the discursive approach, although, if taken seriously, it means that research into genres must always include (historical) research beyond the pure text (as a side note: this approach isn't as alien to the formalist program as is often suggested. Boris: Tomashevskij already wrote in the late 1920s that genres ultimately require a descriptive approach, and Jurij Tynjanov emphasized the historical context in which a text is produced).simifilmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10638715853134709545noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-15771932953728669512020-01-29T05:12:51.911-08:002020-01-29T05:12:51.911-08:00Well I'd certainly agree that a lot of SF fans...Well I'd certainly agree that a lot of SF fans, and even some SF crtics, use the term "genre" in a way largely innocent of the way genre theory has developed its critical discourse. Which isn't a problem, by and large, although it does mean the word is used both as a shorthand for SF or Fantasy (or crime or whatever) as such, and as a way of grouping certain texts by similarities ('space opera', 'time travel' and so on). I'd only suggest, mildly I hope, that there's more to genre as a piece of critical and theoretical terminology than that. Derrida's "Law of Genre" essay is good on this I think, linking the question of "why are there genres instead of just Literature?" to questions of, for instance, gender, a concept he thinks not only etymologically but substatively connected to it (does the fact that we only now recognise, let's say, transwomen and transmen mean that the occasional, sometimes fleeting, glimpses of non-cis individuals in history don't belong in that narrative?). Derrida's point is to interrogate the division of genre theorists into formalists, who construct schemas of textual similarity and pigeonhole texts within them, and critics who see genre as a purely discursive category constructed by readers. The first group might see <em>Beowulf</em> and <em>The Terminator</em> as belonging together, since they tell basicaly the same story (call it: overcoming the monster); the latter group would consider them generically different. Derrida doesn't prioritise one of these two groups over the other, and doesn't try to as it were dialectically combine them, but instead he notes that they are, as it were, two genres <em>of</em> genre, and that that recursive element is very interesting. How many genres of genre are there?Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-47958258750982973332020-01-29T05:12:19.116-08:002020-01-29T05:12:19.116-08:00I think cyberpunk adds the 'capitalism' pa...I think cyberpunk adds the 'capitalism' part of 'surveillance capitalism'.Jonathan Walkerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16129441891226278101noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-28095539726550440752020-01-29T03:01:23.951-08:002020-01-29T03:01:23.951-08:00My problem with your approach is not the genealogy...My problem with your approach is not the genealogy you construct, but simply the fact that you talk about a genre called science fiction. I am probably just a pedant, but my main beef is the term "genre". As far as I am able to tell, your history does make sense. But while the texts you talk about may have had an influence of what became later known as sf, they are by no means part of the genre because there was no genre.<br /><br />What you describe may have very well fed into the genre, but so did many other things. I think you really have to distinguish between the moment where a genre exists as an entity which is recognised by its 'users' (and be it only in the way of "book a and book b are similar") and the developments leading to this moment.simifilmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10638715853134709545noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-59706331963989408862020-01-29T03:00:55.420-08:002020-01-29T03:00:55.420-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.simifilmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10638715853134709545noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-88053326547839507502020-01-29T02:09:14.854-08:002020-01-29T02:09:14.854-08:00You can take the capital-C from my cold dead hands...You can take the capital-C from my cold dead hands, Sales.<br /><br />Good point re: the Movement, and the masculinist bias of Cyberpunk more broadly. On Fantasy: I disagree, but you'd expect me to. Tolkien was drawing on pre-scientific systems (exploded ideas now, but believed-in once upon a time) of magic and magicians when he wrote his Fantasy realm; this was hardly authorial fiat. Le Guin's Earthsea magic is based on a kind of magical nominalism that, again, precedes her by many centuries. FTL is SF not Fantasy bc the universe that <em>needs</em> FTL (because it is so extraordinarily vast) is a SF universe; a Fantasy universe is always human-scale, more or less, as per C S Lewis's <em>Discarded Image</em>. That's because the former drives out God, where the latter is hospitable to numinous enchantment. But we can, you know: agree to disagree.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-15667201457684550062020-01-29T02:01:36.545-08:002020-01-29T02:01:36.545-08:00[A comment from my friend Ian Sales, who's bee...[A comment from my friend Ian Sales, who's been having difficulties getting blogspot to load it (indeed he suggests I relocate altogether from blogspot as a platform, for this and other reasons)]:<br /><br />A couple of points:<br /><br />Any discussion on the origins of cyberpunk (no need for init caps, btw) really needs to mention The Movement, which was framed as a deliberate antidote to the 1970s bloated over-privileged child of the can-do super-competent sf of the 1950s and 1960s, but in the process managed to erase feminist sf and pretty much every female sf writer except Le Guin. Cyberpunk has a lot to answer for in its male takeover of science fiction.<br /><br />Per your distinction between science fiction and fantasy, I would say that in fantasy the novum is predicated on authorial fiat, whereas in science fiction it's predicated on universal laws or extrapolations of universal laws. Yes, FTL might as well be magic, and every space opera has its own narrative-bending means of collapsing vast distances into something which resemble those present in various historical Earthly empires... but I'd argue the "universal law" governing FTL as a trope has itself risen out of its treatment throughout the corpus of science fiction.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-42009138820916495412020-01-28T23:41:44.248-08:002020-01-28T23:41:44.248-08:00"Google Glasses" makes an excellent two ..."Google Glasses" makes an excellent two word thumbnail for my over-lengthy post.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-61785583036970385372020-01-28T07:34:12.603-08:002020-01-28T07:34:12.603-08:00First, regarding Adam's post: Hear, hear!
Se...First, regarding Adam's post: Hear, hear!<br /><br />Second, I'd like to remind everyone of the total failure that Google Glasses met with a few years ago. This surprises me still, as I though they were a good idea that was certainly predicted in SF and other sources. Why the public hated them is beyond me. Curiously, Gibson has glasses just like them in AGENCY.Paulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13312160598500487602noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-41896041028577106282020-01-28T05:32:21.155-08:002020-01-28T05:32:21.155-08:00Good points, yes. US drone operators in some anony...Good points, yes. US drone operators in some anonymous facility in Des Moines, or wherever, are one thing; facebook being bombed with targeted pro-Brexit propaganda as the deadline of the vote approaches, because it's happening in plain view, is another I suppose. Although that kind of collective social hacking is also, I suppose I'd have to concede, hidden in plain view.<br /><br />I get that people like the stubbiness of Gibson (it's a nice way of putting it); I do. Indeed I wonder, a little, at my resistance to that side of what he does. Maybe reading <em>Agency</em> will win me round a bit more. I think I have an as it were principled objection: I have issues with the Leibnizian model of SF, the argument that its various built worlds are little windowless monads (stubs, in effect) that interact with one another, and with our world, only via a magical handwave pre-established harmony. I don't like this as a model of SF. But maybe that's just me. And surely it's not fair of me to stick Gibson with it.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-81905567891255822062020-01-28T05:22:10.131-08:002020-01-28T05:22:10.131-08:00I second what Gwilym says: your Cyberpunk book doe...I second what Gwilym says: your Cyberpunk book does look amazing. And I can't disagree with much of your comment. As several people have noted, this blog doesn't do itself any favours by folding Gibsonian speculations into Cyberpunk more broadly conceived. I <em>think</em> (I'm not sure) that I have reservations about your "VR has overwritten our experience of everyday life, even if only a little" argument. I see what you mean: but I suppose I wonder if the kind of somatic reaction we have to online aggression, argument, abuse etc (which certainly is a thing) is different in kind, or even actually in degree, from someone reading a poisoned-pen letter in the 1930s, or getting a Dear John letter, or something like that. But maybe it is.<br /><br />The academic cross-pollination point is a really fascinating one: that Cyberpunk became a big popular cultural idea at around the same time that postmodernism, poststructuralism and so on because big academic ideas. Perhaps the two worked to reinforce one another, culturally. I can certainly see the argument that eg Donna Harraway's <em>Cyborg Manifesto</em> took Cyberpunk ideas (and others) and used them to rewire how lots of people thought about feminism, gender, animal studies, the whole culture/nature thing.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-28727297561459941452020-01-28T04:22:43.018-08:002020-01-28T04:22:43.018-08:00Your Routledge book looks amazing, Anna. I can'...Your Routledge book looks amazing, Anna. I can't wait to have a look.Gwilymhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-16463634468142821562020-01-28T04:17:42.772-08:002020-01-28T04:17:42.772-08:00War and surveillance occur in cyberspace, with non...War and surveillance occur in cyberspace, with non-cyberspace eversions, for example, as GPS-guided-missiles and Pokemon presenting the illusion of the non-binary. But the hardening, libertarian, liqeudating nature of cyberspace now is the new cyberpunk: not-nice and non-consensual (and all-too-real) hallucinations colonised by self-interested nation-states, troll-farms and oddly motivated individual actors. <br /><br />William Gibson is nice, and Spook Country and The Peripheral are really interesting works, about eversion, and about 'stubs'. It's the 'stubbiness' that I think makes Gibson's work (in 1984 and now) interesting: it's new-wavy, fragmented, collaged postmodern-ness is perfect for the post-Golden-Age generation. <br /><br />It's a bit like steampunk (with Gibson's own stamp on that genre too): I don't think it will go away, as a fashion, as a sub-culture, as a way of seeing the world, even if the reality of that world has (menacingly) moved on.Gwilymhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04751653480717927444noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-78711117884916180152020-01-28T02:05:18.289-08:002020-01-28T02:05:18.289-08:00See also John Varley circa Eight Worlds* - bodyswa...See also John Varley circa Eight Worlds* - bodyswapping and polymorphism à go go, but none of it's even slightly <i>queer</i>. The protagonist of one story ends up having sex with his gender-swapped but otherwise cell-for-cell-identical doppelganger; he says it was very good sex. (Just thought for a moment what Christopher Priest could have done with that premise and felt a bit dizzy.)<br /><br />Perhaps something the appeal of cyberpunk, if not necessarily the works themselves, expresses is a yearning to go beyond our actual physical bodies, but into a realm where we have as much agency - (apparently) unmediated, physical agency - as we do in meatspace; hence all the martial arts, gun fu, car fu etc in the Matrix films. And then the bodystocking question comes back: that just doesn't seem like something we actually do with computers. (Whereas using a QWERTY keyboard to serialise my thoughts - in a monospaced, faux-typewriter font! - very much is.)<br /><br />If I can start another hare, consider trolling. In 1997 - a bit later than the heyday of cyberpunk - someone I know wrote an Academic Paper about trolling, in which inter alia she explained what fun it was and gave wider circulation to the names of skilled practitioners such as Ted Franks, snopes and Kibo. Those were the days eh? (No, they were. Trust me on this.)<br /><br />The thing about trolling was that it was low-tech: everything happened in words on a screen, generally in a monospace font with eighty characters to a line. Immersive it ain't. Except that, in effect, it quite plainly is (and everyone knows which XKCD comic I'm thinking of now). Irritating a bunch of strangers in unrelated Usenet newsgroups till they can't help explaining to you patiently that, in actual fact, light <b>does</b> travel in a vacuum... well, that was some people's idea of fun, and I'm not going to tell them they were entirely wrong.<br /><br />But who, in 1995, would have bet on glove-and-goggles virtual telepresence being an amusement-arcade novelty in 2020, and words-on-a-screen trolling being universally familiar?<br /><br />*says man who rediscovers sf at cometary intervals and consequently happened to be taking an interest in the early to mid-90s, but could tell you very little about the late 90s, early 00s, etcPhilhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-76547379616913247852020-01-27T07:30:15.793-08:002020-01-27T07:30:15.793-08:00Adam, thanks for your thoughts, interesting as eve...Adam, thanks for your thoughts, interesting as ever. Given that I have the Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture out recently, it's not surprise that I think cyberpunk has had a wide-ranging impact in our cultural understanding of computers, the internet, VR, science fiction - although I would probably agree with you that, in its sense as a literary genre, it doesn't have a great number of classic books to recommend it. <br /><br />But more specifically in response to your thoughts, I think it's a mistake to say that cyberpunk was 'wrong' about virtual reality. Yes, the potential for VR has not been fulfilled, and it's unclear whether it ever will be, but the logic and the affect of the internet has, in my opinion, soaked into what we once thought of as 'reality'. We could consider this spatially (navigating our landscape via Google Maps, Trip Advisor reviews, etc.) but also emotionally and physically. We don't need to plug into the matrix - the emotions generated there are already in us, and its already changing things in other real ways. If we have fights on Facebook we shake, and the panic attacks are real. If we are 'cancelled' or 'doxxed' we might self harm or worse - to die in the 'game' can be to die in 'real life'. I think I'm with you, though, on the lack of erotics, I just don't think that the mediation of a screen really distances us from the online action. What we have isn't immersion (as imagined by cyberpunk), but rather (as Gibson put it in Spook Country) the EVERSION of cyberspace. Which isn't the same as the entry into the matrix predicted by cyberpunk, granted, but the reality ends up being the same in that we are all denizens of cyberspace.<br /><br />I would also say that the things cyberpunk 'got wrong' are worth considering in greater detail because, for better or worse, I think the cyberpunk imagination of cyberspace has informed our cultural understanding of how it works, and this can blind us to real problems. I've written about this recently in AI Narratives, referencing algorithmic decision-making and Cambridge Analytica, so that's definitely another story that I only mention here as a sidebar: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ai-narratives-9780198846666?cc=gb&lang=en& <br /><br />One further thought I had was whether the academic interest in cyberpunk has had any influence on its popular legacy. The appearance of cyberpunk at the same time as the academic interest in postmodernism made it the perfect genre for scholarly interest in the late-80s/ early-90s. I don't want to give academia too much credit for having any influence on popular tastes, but I do wonder if that interest maybe had some influence on canonising cyberpunk.Anna McFarlanehttps://glasgow.academia.edu/AnnaMcfarlanenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-84983001378838193632020-01-27T04:07:00.996-08:002020-01-27T04:07:00.996-08:00Thanks for your comment. As I say upthread, in rep...Thanks for your comment. As I say upthread, in reply to David Moles, I agree that SF isn't really about predicting the future; but I do think (I'd say) that there was a moment, in the 80s/early 90s, when much of Cyberpunk's rep was that it was coming true all around us. Otherwise (and as David M also notes) you're right that Gibson, though his name is linked with the movement, is at best an atypical example of it, and (latterly) has moved away from many of its conventions in what he writes. My blog suffers, I suppose, by starting out as a kind of reaction to the fact that Gibson's got a new novel out, before going on to discuss the Altered Carbon-y, Cyberpunk 2077-y iterations of the mode.<br /><br />The thesis of my Palgrave book is, in part, an attempt at a corrective, an intervention into the existing critical history of SF narratives, and liable therefore to a kind of over assertion. I do say, in that book, that though SF first emerges in the 17th-C it remains a very minor form of culture, marginal, and remains so until the end of the 19th-C when it starts to accumulate cultural heft (and especially in the 20th-C, when it takes off in a significant way). But there does seem to me—I mean, I would say this, wouldn’t I, but still—merit in tracing the genre back to its actual origins, not just to when its popularity began booming; not least bc it seems to me that key and recurring fascinations of today’s SF, to do with the status of the superhero/saviour figure, with atonement and transcendence, with the relationship between magic and ‘science’—are the grounds on which the Reformation fought its conceptual, and often actual, wars; that SF being "born" out of that tumult marked the genre in deep ways. But I have to accept that my thesis has been out for a decade and a half now, and has pretty much failed to find support in the academic debates about the history of SF, so it may be wrong. I don’t think it is, but you don’t have to take my word on that.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-57384245139491258622020-01-27T02:41:04.652-08:002020-01-27T02:41:04.652-08:00Although I haven't read all of Gibson's ne...Although I haven't read all of Gibson's newer novels, I think it would be wrong to call them all Cyberpunk (as you at least implicitly do).<br /><br />For my taste you put too much emphasis on the question whether "Cyberpunk was right". I understand that this is not really your argument, but the question whether sf writer x or subgenre y was able to predict developments accurately always strikes me as complete misunderstanding of what sf is really about. Again, I know that I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but sf is never about the future but always about the present. To me, Gibson is first and foremost an eminent stylist and his great strength is finding striking images and phrases for things which are happening now.<br /><br />As for the question of the birth of sf: My problem with your approach (which I know well from your «Palgrave History») is that while I can accept that what you describe as Protestant vs. Catholic approaches to fantasy may very well have prepared the ground for sf and fantasy (with capital F), this does not mean that the genres existed then. Genre to me means established tropes, shared protocols, a market category – whatever you might call it. It means that there is a group of text which producers and recipients both recognise as something distinct. And you might very well argue when this genre we now call sf came into being, but one «Somnium» or «Frankenstein» doesn't make a genre. They are forerunners or taproots text, early examples of a specific mode of writing (actually that's what I would propose – to distinguish between mode and genre), but they do not yet constitute a genre. simifilmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10638715853134709545noreply@blogger.com