Cyberpunk Read online

  “The future is already here —

  it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

  STORIES OF

  — WILLIAM GIBSON

  Before email, before “the web,” before

  hackers and GPS and sexting, before

  titanium implants, before Google Goggles,

  H

  before Siri, and before each and every

  ARD

  one of us carried a computer in our

  W

  pockets, there was cyberpunk, and

  A

  science fiction was never the same.

  RE, S

  Cyberpunk writers — serious, smart,

  OF

  and courageous in the face of change —

  TW

  exposed the naiveté of a society rushing

  AR

  headlong into technological unknowns.

  E,

  Technology could not save us, they argued, and it

  W

  might in fact ruin us. Now, thirty years after The

  ET

  Movement party-crashed the science fiction scene,

  WA

  the cyberpunk reality has largely come to be.

  RE

  The future they imagined is here.

  , RE

  With an introduction by Victoria Blake and stories by:

  VOL

  William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Jonathan Lethem,

  U

  EDITED BY VICTORIA B LAKE

  Benjamin Parzybok, Kim Stanley Robinson,

  TION

  David Marusek, Paul Tremblay, Cat Rambo,

  Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Mark Teppo, Lewis

  AND

  Shiner, Rudy Rucker, James Patrick Kelly, John

  E

  Shirley, Daniel H. Wilson, Paul Di Filippo,

  VOL

  and Cory Doctorow

  STORIES OF

  U

  HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, WETWARE, REVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION

  TION

  WELCOME TO YOUR CYBERPUNK WORLD.

  WITH STORIES BY W I L L I A M G I B S O N B R U C E S T E R L I N G

  ISBN: 978-1-937163-08-2

  US $15.95

  JONATHAN LETHEM CORY DOCTOROW PAT CADIGAN

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON LEWIS SHINER RUDY RUCKER

  PA U L D I F I L I P P O JOHN SHIRLEY AND MANY MORE…

  www.underlandpress.com

  Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution and Revolutio n EDITED BY VICTORIA BLAKE

  Copyright © 2013 Underland Press. All Rights Reserved.

  Requests for permission to reproduce material

  from this work should be sent to:

  Rights and Permissions

  [email protected]

  Cover design by Claudia Nobel

  Text Design by Heidi Whitcomb

  ISBN: 978-1-937163-08-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Johnny Mnemonic, by William Gibson,

  Blue Clay Blues, by Gwyneth Jones,

  first appeared in Omni, 1981, copyright

  Interzone, 1992, copyright © 1992

  © Omni Publications International 1981,

  Gwyenth Jones

  used by permission of the author

  The Lost Technique of Blackmail, by Mark

  Mozart in Mirrorshades, by Bruce Sterling

  Teppo, Electric Velocipede #19, Fall 2009,

  and Lewis Shiner, first appeared in Omni,

  copyright © 2009 by Mark Teppo

  1985, copyright © Omni Publications

  Soldier, Sailor, by Lewis Shiner, first

  International 1985, used by permission of

  appeared in Nine Hard Questions About the

  the authors

  Nature of the Universe, 1990, copyright ©

  Interview with the Crab, by Jonathan

  1990 Lewis Shiner

  Lethem, first appeared in Bread #1, 2005,

  Mr. Boy, by James Patrick Kelly, first

  printed in Men and Cartoons, copyright ©

  appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June

  2004, 2012 Jonathan Lethem

  1990, copyright © 1990 James Patrick

  El Pepenador, by Benjamin Parzybok,

  Kelly

  collection original, copyright © 2012

  The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of

  Benjamin Parzybok

  Poetics, by Rudy Rucker, first appeared in

  Down and Out in the Year 2000, by Kim

  New Blood, July 1982, copyright © 2012

  Stanley Robinson, first appeared in Isaac

  Rudy Rucker

  Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1986,

  Wolves of the Plateau, by John Shirley, first

  copyright © 1986 Kim Stanley Robinson

  appeared in Heatseeker, copyright © 1989,

  Rock On, by Pat Cadigan, first appeared

  2012 by John Shirley

  in Light Years and Dark, copyright © 1984

  The Nostalgist, by Daniel H. Wilson, first

  Pat Cadigan

  appeared on Tor.com, 2009, copyright ©

  Getting to Know You, by David Marusek,

  2009 Daniel H. Wilson

  first appeared in Future Histories, 1997,

  Life in the Anthropocene, by Paul Di

  copyright © 1997 David Marusek

  Filippo, first appeared in The Mammoth

  User-Centric, by Bruce Sterling, first

  Book of Apocalypse SF, copyright © 2010

  appeared in Designfax, 1999, copyright ©

  Paul Di Filippo

  1999 Bruce Sterling

  When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory

  The Blog at the End of the World, by Paul

  Doctorow, first appeared in Baen’s Universe,

  Tremblay, first appeared in Chizine, 2008,

  2006, copyright © 2006 CorDoc-Co, Ltd.

  copyright © 2008 Paul Tremblay

  Some rights reserved under a creative

  commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license

  Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling

  Stars, by Cat Rambo, first appeared in

  Talebones, winter 2006/2007, copyright ©

  2007, 2012 Cat Rambo

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction 009 Victoria Blake

  Johnny Mnemonic 015 William Gibson

  Mozart in Mirrorshades 035 Bruce Sterling

  and Lewis Shiner

  Interview with the Crab 053 Jonathan Lethem

  El Pepenador 069 Benjamin Parzybok

  Down and Out in the Year 2000 089 Kim Stanley Robinson

  Getting to Know You 109 David Marusek

  User-Centric 137 Bruce Sterling

  The Blog at the End of the World 157 Paul Tremblay

  Memories of Moments, 173 Cat Rambo

  Bright as Falling Stars

  Rock On 191 Pat Cadigan

  Blue Clay Blues 201 Gwyneth Jones

  The Lost Technique of Blackmail 225 Mark Teppo

  Soldier, Sailor 261 Lewis Shiner

  The Jack Kerouac 273 Rudy Rucker

  Disembodied School of Poetics

  Mr. Boy 283 James Patrick Kelly

  Wolves of the Plateau 347 John Shirley

  The Nostalgist 363 Daniel H. Wilson

  Life in the Anthropocene 373 Paul Di Filippo

  When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth 391 Cory Doctorow

  INTRODUCTION

  By Victoria Blake

  “As American SF lies in a reptilian torpor, its small, squishy cousin, Fantasy, creeps gecko-like across the bookstands,” Bruce Sterling wrote in the first

  issue of Cheap Truth, a one-page, double-sided bright coal of a fan-zine first published in 1983. “Dr
eaming of dragon-hood, Fantasy has puffed itself up

  with air like a Mojave chuckwalla. SF’s collapse ha[s] formed a vacuum that

  forces Fantasy into a painful and explosive bloat . . . Short stories, crippled with the bends, expand into whole hideous trilogies as hollow as nickel

  gumballs.”

  These were fighting words, aimed directly at the bulls-eye of publishers,

  editors, critics, authors, and readers in the “smokestack” publishing-industrial complex. There was, Sterling wrote in Cheap Truth issue five, “a crying need to re-think, re-tool, and adapt to the modern era. SF has one critical

  advantage: it is still a pop industry that is close to its audience. It is not yet wheezing in the iron lung of English departments or begging for government

  Medicare through arts grants. . . . SF has always preached the inevitability of change. Physician, heal thyself.”

  The physician, in this case, was the collection of early 80s writers that

  Cheap Truth showcased as carriers of the flame—Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, et al—and the challenge was to find a new voice for a new

  kind of reader in a new kind of world. “This year’s Nebula Ballot looked like

  a list of stuff that Mom and Dad said it was okay to read,” a pseudonymous

  Lewis Shiner wrote in Cheap Truth. “I mean, this is the kind of writing that Mom and Dad grew up on, full of ‘Golly’s’ and blushes and grins. And aren’t

  those dolphins cute? . . . They’d rather hear that somebody ‘muttered an

  oath’ or came out with some made-up word like ‘Ifni!’ than be told that they

  really said ‘shit’ or ‘shove it up your ass, motherfucker.’”

  Nobody had ever read anything like what the cyberpunks were writing—

  stories and novels that were the bastard child of science fiction, with a

  common-man perspective, a love of tech and drugs, and an affinity for street

  culture. That most cyberpunk was written by white males didn’t seem to

  009

  CYBERPUNK

  ruffle any feathers. Cyberpunk was new, it was vital, it was irreverent. Most

  importantly, cyberpunk rocked.

  When Sterling and his gang of pranksters shuttered Cheap Truth in 1985, a mere eighteen issues after launch, he declared that the movement was over, it

  had become too big, and that much of the “original freedom” was lost. “People

  know who I am,” he wrote, “and they get all hot and bothered by personalities,

  instead of ideas and issues. CT can no longer claim the ‘honesty of complete

  desperation.’ That first fine flower of red-hot hysteria is simply gone.” In other words, The Movement had been changed by its acceptance into the smokestack

  machine. ( Cheap Truth had been mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone, evidence of it being swallowed whole.) When, in 1986, Sterling published Mirrorshades, the first and some say only true cyberpunk anthology, the movement was consolidated into a particular table of contents, a closed club whose membership was limited to the original cyberpunk writers. In 1991, Lewis Shiner renounced cyberpunk

  in a New York Times op-ed. When Time ran a cover story about cyberpunks, the cyberpunks themselves were outraged. Counter culture had been embraced by

  culture. “I hereby declare the revolution over,” Sterling wrote in the final issue of Cheap Truth. “Long live the provisional government.”

  Thirty years later, cyberpunk is both very much dead and very much alive.

  It is dead in the sense that the Reagan years are over, the Cold War is done,

  straight video has been replaced by CGI, and the achievement of the Xerox

  machine, once the very pinnacle of technological advancement available to

  the masses, is being outdone by 3-D printers. But it is very much alive in that cyberpunk was never really about a specific technology or a specific moment in

  time. It was, and it is, an aesthetic position as much as a collection of themes, an attitude toward mass culture and pop culture, an identity, a way of living,

  breathing, and grokking our weird and wired world.

  Anthology editing is a tricky business. On the one hand, the anthology editor

  must revere, must even do a little bit of worshipping at the foot of the statue.

  On the other hand, the editor must be removed enough to see the subject with

  clear eyes, and to offer an unimpassioned editorial read. But she must also

  bring just enough of herself to the selection to make the anthology as a whole

  useful, interesting, unique, timeless, and, hopefully, fun.

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  INTRODUCTION

  In putting together this collection, I have tried to do four things. The

  first—spurred by the worshipper within me—is to pay homage to cyberpunk

  beginnings. To that end, this collection contains reprints of cyberpunk gems

  that are now difficult to find—“Mozart in Mirrorshades” by Bruce Sterling

  and Lewis Shiner is one of my personal favorites—and it showcases stories

  by the founding or first-generation cyberpunk authors—Rudy Rucker, John

  Shirley, Greg Bear, and Paul Di Filippo among them—that weren’t in the

  original collections.

  Second, the critic in me wanted to offer an as-complete-as-possible look at

  cyberpunk themes and topics. Some of my favorites include the low-life of the

  Low Teks in William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic,” the imbedded digital brains

  of David Marusek’s “Getting to Know You,” the drugs and outlaws of Gwyneth

  Jones’s “Blue Clay Blues,” the multi-mind madness of John Shirley’s “Wolves

  of the Plateau,” the body augmentation of James Patrick Kelly’s “Mr. Boy,” and

  the environmental meltdown of Paul Di Filippo’s “Life in the Anthropocene.”

  One story from this group deserves a special explanation: “Down and Out

  in the Year 2000,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, occupies a unique position in

  the cyberpunk cannon as perhaps the solitary story to critique the cyberpunk

  reverence for “the street.” “I was living in Washington DC in the summer of

  1985,” Robinson wrote me in an email, after I requested some information

  about the genesis of the story, “hanging out in Dupont Circle park and the

  smaller park outside our apartment. Watching the people there, I began to

  think that the cyberpunks were white middle-class people like me, and they

  had no idea; ‘street smart’ was just a trendy phrase, a literary or Hollywood

  idea. So I wrote the story to express that feeling.”

  Third, the iconoclast in me wanted to move past traditional cyberpunk,

  and beyond the cast of known cyberpunk characters, to take a look at how

  the movement has developed since the end of the Cold War, and to pull the

  veil back on what the future might hold. Cory Doctorow, arguably the new

  Chairman of Tech, ends the collection by celebrating the heroic sysadmins,

  a rarely lauded group. Cat Rambo, not usually associated with cyberpunk,

  beautifully describes how relationships are changed by technology. New-comer

  Benjamin Parzybok, author of the novel Couch, contributed an original story notable for its authentic re-imagining of low life in the slums, a different kind of low life entirely from that described by the 80s cyberpunk. Jonathan Lethem’s

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  CYBERPUNK

  “Interview with the Crab” thrilled me when I read it the first time, and it

  continues to astound me with its craft. I’ve never heard Lethem described as a

  cyberpunk, but my favorite of his novels, Gun, with Occasional Music, uses the hardboiled tone common to cyberpunk, and is popul
ated by state-sponsored

  druggies, external memory devices, a virtual monetary system, and genetically

  altered animals who speak, love, have sex, and die like humans. The story

  included here takes up the themes of pop culture and fame, getting deeper into

  both by using a crustacean, the titular crab, as the prototypical hard-living,

  idiosyncratic celebrity.

  And finally, in compiling this collection, the writer in me wanted to look

  at the craft of cyberpunk, and the interesting, innovate forms some of the

  cyberpunk stories take. The prose of Pat Cadigan’s “Rock On” has a vitality

  that makes my heart beat faster. Two stories—Bruce Sterling’s “User-Centric”

  and Paul Tremblay’s “Blog at the End of the World”—co-op new kinds of

  communication, email and blogging, to weave their tales. Daniel H. Wilson

  writes what could be called a cyberpunk fairytale, and Mark Teppo pokes at

  an acronym-heavy future, all while telling a story in the very language he’s

  lampooning.

  I was five years old when the first issue of Cheap Truth came out, and only eight when The Movement was declared dead. In 1991, when Lewis Shiner

  renounced his cyberpunk membership, I was wearing neon hair bands, plastic

  shoes, and bopping my head to Cyndi Lauper. I wasn’t in any way punk, and

  I’m probably still not. But when you’re holding a hammer, everything starts to

  look like a nail, and when you’re editing cyberpunk, you realize you’re living in a cyberpunk world.

  To wit, last week, the week of Thanksgiving, 2012, as the final edits were

  being made on this collection, the following items caught my eye: On the radio

  to the airport, I heard a commentator remarking on Project Glass, the Google

  initiative focusing on wearable computers; also on the radio, I heard about

  a scientist who had discovered that jellyfish can reverse the aging process,

  and that jellyfish stem cells might possess the secret to immortality. The talk around the pre-Thanksgiving dinner table was about California legalizing self-driving cars, and about how the rich/poor income gap in America is wider than

  012

  INTRODUCTION

  it’s been since 1967. Gawker posted a story about a man on family vacation

  in Florida who found anonymous sex in a theme-park bathroom with the

  help of an iPhone app. And on Thanksgiving itself, my second cousin told me

  all about a nonprofit he was starting with a group of like-minded retirees to