The state of Cyberpunk
A really nice interview with Cory Doctorow in Strange Horizons, contains loads of interesting stuff, including this very good summary of what’s happening in computer oriented science-fiction today:
“I think if you look at cyberpunk fiction, you’ll see that computers are primarily a metaphor for lots of other things, and that they’re rarely treated mimetically, and so they’re never really come to grips with. So we have gods in the machine, we have the Loa of Gibson’s [Sprawl trilogy], and we have viruses that are completely technically nonsensical, but are kind of a metaphor for how bad ideas spread and so on. And by treating computers and the Internet as metaphors, I think that we have foreclosed our imagination. I think it would be interesting to find some of the science fiction writers of the generation that came before the generation that I’m part of, to turn their hand to writing rigorously and mimetically about computers, and treating some of the technology that’s further out, like nanotech and biotech, metaphorically.
I think that would be a very interesting thing in fact, and obviously there are some writers who are doing this. Charlie Stross is certainly a master of this, and Rudy Rucker and Rudy Rucker Jr. had a story this morning on the Infinite Matrix that is pretty damn mimetic about computers, and Sterling is actually pretty mimetic about computers, but there’s still a lot of very, very metaphorical stuff, including the new Gibson novel — which is brilliant, but treats watermarks in a way that is completely at odds with how watermarks really work. [The novel] uses them as this great and daring metaphor for the unconscious intention of the artist and so on — but really turned out to be as a work of speculative fiction . . . kind of flat, at least in respect to this watermarking stuff, because it was ill-informed about this. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to give the impression that Pattern Recognition was a bad book or a failure of a book or even a deeply flawed book, but it wasn’t the book I would’ve hoped for, given the elements that Gibson marshaled, which are brilliant. Gibson can still write circles around 99% of the people writing today, so I certainly don’t want to give that impression.”