As a rule, I avoid judging the quality of a science fiction novel by the success of its predictions. For one, it’s too easy. And I inherently distrust any method of judging literature as cleanly qualitative as “did this invention end up being true”?

Although science fiction’s role isn’t necessarily to be prophetic, it often fulfills its own predictions. The predictive quality of the genre is how you sell science fiction to neophytes: did you know Arthur C. Clarke invented the geosynchronous communications satellite? Jules Verne the modern submarine? Granted, when writers have imagined 10,000 different futures, a few of them are bound to be true–monkeys at typewriters and all that. Still, some form of prescience, whether it pans out or not, is an essential dimension of science fiction, and a variable completely absent from almost all other literature. For that reason, it’s interesting.

A creative approach to future-making isn’t just a burden of conceit. It can actually alter the future; new ideas, presented via radically dissociated future-scenarios in literature, can help us realize the prevalence of old ones, and shock us into perception. This is to say that a strictly pragmatic, humanist, or scientific approach to understanding history (and I include the history of the future in that statement) is not often the most accurate. The unexpected happens continually in the history of science, as in the history of humankind; ideas that seemed like nutty fantasies in the heyday of early science fiction look cute now, because the future is explosive and manifold and strange. Sometimes the best way to predict the future is to make outlandish projections, imaginative assumptions, and intuitive guesses–all the purview of artists.

The great science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, in the preface to his epic evolutionary future history Last and First Men, explained it this way:

We are not set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

I love this idea of selecting “a certain thread” from a tangle of possibilities; to me, it really speaks to the complex, simultaneous, and utterly subjective experience of “future” and “futuristic” things. We often confuse futurism, of course, with the high-tech experience; after all, the present day was once the future, and there are plenty of people living on the Earth who live day-to-day much as their ancestors did, unchanged.  For a writer to suss out a thread from such an uneven present in this way and draw it to narrative extrapolation–what the literary critic Robert Scholes calls a “projected dislocation of our known experience”–they need a sense of the tangle, they need to be able to see the larger picture, the context, to see which threads throb with importance and which are just uselessly snarled, going nowhere.

This, to actually get to the subject of this review, is William Gibson’s genius. He often writes about people who are able to cut through webs of information, sensing patterns. Like his characters, the data cowboys, he can see interwoven threads and pull them in just the right place, elegantly displaying the nature of the knot. To wit, he once compared himself to Colin Laney, the protagonist of his 1996 novel Idoru, whose peculiar talent lies in sieving “nodal points” of relevance from vast fields of data:

Laney’s node-spotter function is some sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell you how; it’s a non-rational process.

Like Stapledon said, it’s not a science. As a non-rational process, the results have the effect that art has. But because it plays with interpretations of reality, and because reality is often irrational, the results can–especially when the node-spotting ability is strong–incant elements of the real future.

Idoru centers around Rei Toei, an artificial intelligence embodied as a Japanese idol singer. She manifests holographically, draws deeply from the public web, and is a multiplicity of things to different people. There are as many versions of  Rei Toei as there are fans, with each fan constructing her identity, performance, and form based on their preference. There are some truly beautiful descriptions of her shimmering iteration, coded with icy imagery in shards, the hologram only a visible manifestation of some unthinkable volume, “an Antarctica,” of information. Consistently described as cold, as snow, she moves unhindered from the world to to the web, changing form, like a ghost. The central crisis of the novel is that an important man wishes to marry her: an unholy union of the flesh and the digital.

I’m certainly not the first to draw this parallel, but the fictional Rei Toei was computer grandmother to Hatsune Miku, a real-life digital idol, a blue-haired avatar that is the biggest pop star in Japan. Like Rei Toei, she is an empty shell for the creative impulses of her fans, who write her songs on  Vocaloid 2, a “singer in a box” software platform designed by Yamaha. In a sense, Hatsune Miku is even better than her fictional forebear, because (despite being owned by a technology firm called Crypton Future Media) the songs, illustrations, videos, and sundry visual fanfic that make up her multifarious identity are all collectively authored by her millions of fans. She doesn’t just present herself uniquely to each user; instead, each user uniquely makes her. In concert, in front of millions of screaming fans toting glowsticks, she is conjured from the web into a massive pony-tailed hologram flanked by a live band. Each song performed is the result of a massive pool of user-noodling on the Vocaloid software, perfectly synthesized and on-pitch, belonging to everyone while simultaneously being unachievable for anyone.

It’s uncanny that, in 1996, Gibson could spot the cresting twin vertices of Japanese pop-idol culture and the democratization of mass-media, infer their ultimate collision, and give us Rei Toei. But it’s the particular skill of the science fiction writer to draw those threads; this strange hybrid of digital pop culture was undoubtedly a long time coming.

And stranger things await us still, if we know where to look.

Image by Dream Beam.

Any regular reader of Space Canon knows my fondness for cyberpunk; Gibson, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling have all received breathless passes on these pages. Cyberpunk at its peak–before the movement was co-opted by 90s ‘netsploitation flicks and video games–was sexy, prescient, fiercely countercultural, and absolutely the medium most fit for our impending technological milieu.

Still, even an old head like me knows that cyberpunk today is associated more with rollerblades, bad computer animation and mirrored sunglasses than any intellectual subculture of note. For most people, it’s basically a joke: ha ha, let’s rent Hackers! And yet, we live in a world where crypto-anarchic hacker cabals launch decentralized attacks on megacorporations and governments, where institutional intrusion into the Internet threatens our privacy, where even the most milquetoast norm lives half their life online. Which is to say, shouldn’t the issues raised by cyberpunk fiction be more relevant than ever?

Basically, what happened? Where did cyberpunk go? Well, the question piqued me so much that I wrote a long piece on the subject for my favorite blog, Motherboard. In the process, I managed to get essentially every major cyberpunk author, ranging from the O.G. participants to those who have (for better or worse) inherited their legacy, to contribute their thoughts on the question. Rudy Rucker offered this, “If nobody’s pissed off, you’re not trying hard enough. I’ll never stop being a cyberpunk.” William Gibson, on the other hand, was less rough-and-tumble; “Cyberpunk today,” he noted, “is a standard Pantone shade in pop culture.”

Want to know what Neal Stephenson said? Or Charlie Stross? Check out all ten cyberpundits’ contributions at “It Evolved Into Birds: Ten Science-Fictional Thinkers On the Past and Future of Cyberpunk.” And don’t miss the original essay, “What Happened to Cyberpunk?” And if that’s your thing, it’s blowing up on Reddit right now.

Virtual Light is the first book of William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, in which an nonfunctional, shanty-town Golden Gate bridge is a major feature. Like his previous “Sprawl” trilogy, it leans low and hard into its dystopian city-scape, positing a completely probable slumification of the modern metropolis — one which has developed laterally, growing in spontaneous density, rather than upwards into the mega-skyscrapers and glass-domed arcologies of standard gung-ho futurism.

Unlike the Sprawl books (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), however, Virtual Light doesn’t take place in the future, not really; with a time-stamp of 2006, it’s an alternate present rather than a straight science-fictional tomorrow, although the effect is the same. While stories that unfold in the future give us an extrapolative shock, Gibson seems to understand that in an urbanized world of mediated digital communication — a climate of instantaneity — the distinction between “now” and “tomorrow” is irrelevant. Reality fluctuates wildly from individual to individual depending on his or her point of perceptual entry, and hence Gibson’s dystopian 2006 is as real as the person reading it.

As with many Gibson novels, the most compelling thing about Virtual Light is its atmosphere. The environment of the novel, essentially an archetypical cyberpunk milieu, is dizzying: a California divided into two nation-states, jacked up on privatized security thuggery, pocketed with anarchist utopias of organic provenance. Data pirates, security cops, hackers, and televisual evangelists war over hardware; namely, a pair of “Virtual Light” glasses, a virtual (today we might say “enhanced”) reality device that ratchets directly into the optic nerve, overlaying any number of data points seamlessly onto the visual plane.

This book is about architecture and perception. The crux of the plot is that the virtual light glasses, when worn to gaze upon the city of San Francisco, reveal a plan by overseas developers to restructure the city. The plan, to plant nanomachines in the downtown that self-construct into buildings — buildings that “just grow” — is presented as being so fundamentally repulsive and unnatural that the hacker underground is galvanized to prevent its implementation without any encouragement.

That’s because architecture, here, is a metaphor for class: the rich, in Virtual Light, live in planned corporate megaplexes — giant glass domes, gargantuan malls — while the poor live in organically-generated slums, which are portrayed as being vibrant, warm, human communities, beautiful in their senselessness. Gibson’s tenderness for the slum is manifested through the character of Shinya Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist studying the community of the Bridge.

“The integrity of its span was as rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic.”

The Bridge, which Yamakazi describes in his notebooks as an “accretion of dreams,” something with “magic and singularity,” a “pointless yet curiously artlike feature of the urban landscape,” is the home (physical and spiritual) of Virtual Light‘s most likable protagonists, those fighting the nano-urbanization of San Francisco. There’s a clear binary here. On one side, the wealthy, whose urban environment is intentional, architectural, built, technological, clean, and corporate. On the other, the poor, whose practical ingenuity has cumulated in a massively dense, anti-technological, piecemeal construction that somehow reflects the best qualities of the human spirit, of a community of individuals fighting against the compartmentalized alienation of the modern city. On the Bridge, everyone lives on top of everyone else, in an interconnected system functioning entirely outside of the matrix of the law.

The Bridge, Gibson clearly iterates, is real life — sweat, filth, and color.

The Bridge, as represented (poorly) in the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, which was written by William Gibson.

The city, on the other hand, is Virtual Light: it’s data. It’s glass and steel. It’s businesslike efficiency, robot maids, and stringent rules. And it has no right to impinge on the Bridge’s natural quality of growth — it simply can’t, in Gibson’s world, share any qualities whatsoever with the people’s Temporary Autonomous Zone-esque urbanism. The rich just mustn’t implement technologies that mimic the organic development of the slums. It would be a perversion, a co-opting of the underground.

The takeaway, it seems, is that the poor — i.e. the nontechnological — are the only truly connected people. Technologies like Virtual Light, or the complex computer systems that monitor the security of the wealthy, only serve to alienate people from one another. A clapboard house constructed bit by bit from hand tools, a bicycle, a slum full of cultures woven into a hallucinatory puzzle: these are the real connective technologies. It’s obvious (to me) that Gibson is often mislabeled as a cyberprophet, a digital zealot. He’s quite the opposite: not a luddite, but certainly an advocate of that human je-ne-sais-quoi that seperates us from machines.

Occasionally, I pick up a book without knowing a thing about it — because it looks interesting, because I’ve heard about the author, or because it’s a handsome edition. After my Id-devastating experience with Semiotext(e) SF, I was eager for anything by Rudy Rucker, the only one of the book’s editors I’d never heard of, so I grabbed a used copy of Realware from my local bookseller. Rucker was some kind of important early cyberpunk — that’s about all I knew going into it.

Anyway, I read Realware in its entirely before I realized that it was the fourth book in a tetralogy and that all the things I thought were purposely oblique and esoteric were actually carried on from the other books. Characters I thought were popping in and out of the narrative like fragments of Latin in a T.S. Eliot poem were simply friends and descendants of other Ware tetralogists. The first two novels in the series won Philip K. Dick awards and are generally highly-commended; Realware seems like it’s for die-hards, a rompy catch-up with the world of Ware.

I almost want to read the entire tetralogy backwards, so that I end up at the beginning meeting the characters who spawned the grandchildren that run around the last book. This is a pretty sci-fi way to read sci-fi; skipping to the distant future of an environment and encountering events that even the author didn’t anticipate when they were setting out. Time travel! Imagine reading Chapterhouse: Dune before Dune! Not to mention that the deeper into a series, the more an author assumes a level of prior knowledge about the premise; it reaches a point where a book can actually become unintelligible to outsiders. Sometimes reading a Dune sequel is like trying to decode the Book of Kells over a weekend, or guess Braille. Without the previous tomes for context, it’s like being handed just the hieroglyphic part of the Rosetta stone: “this is a really good story if you know what it’s about.”

This issue is specific to genre fiction. Realist novels don’t often have sequels; there’s no Great Gatsby 2. Writing a book series is a trade-off: you sacrifice accessibility and mainstream literary “legitimacy” for the freedom to develop a multi-tiered, complex universe populated with its own culture and an independent timeline. You exchange the world for a world of your own design. You trade the moment for the Long Now; a good science fiction book series is a sprawling, sometimes decade-spanning narrative that evolves and changes as the author ages (and sometimes even dies). Still, by nature, it’s an adventure in egotism, an exercise in exclusivity.

But that’s interesting, right? Especially when it comes to Rucker. In 1983, he wrote a pithy little piece about genre, “The Transrealist Manifesto,” in which he argues that although reading is linear, writing is not. He compares writing a novel to drawing a maze:

A good maze forces the tracer past all the goals in a coherent way. When you draw a maze, you start out with a certain path, but leave a lot a gaps where other paths can hook back in. In writing a coherent Transrealist novel, you include a number of unexplained happenings throughout the text. Things that you don’t know the reason for. Later you bend strands of the ramifying narrative back to hook into these nodes. If no node is available for a given strand-loop, you go back and write a node in (cf. erasing a piece of wall in the maze).

Realware is actually a great example of this facet of “Transrealism:” strands of ramifying narrative seem to hook long distances backwards into earlier story lines. Characters flippantly refer to events that transpired long before the actual book takes place, for example. Genealogy plays a major role; there are a lot of asides like, “oh, your grandfather was the computer scientist who invented those moon robots!” Pieces of the maze-walls give way here and there to glimpses into the geneses of characters and earlier narrative — all evidently from the earlier novels.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if this idea could be implemented to the extreme? A real Transrealist series would actually entail modifying original books in the series to suit new changes and developments in the later sequels. Of course, this would be impossible with a traditional book series of individual novels published years apart — the result would be some Borgesian nightmare of re-printed editions and annotations. And yet it could work now, electronically, as a digital book that “refreshes” over time; perhaps a single ever-changing novel could replace the series, as a concept, entirely. Rucker writes that “The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work,” that a book should be written with no clear idea of its outcome; as in life, the future is unknown until you broach it.

Once the future is written, then the maze can be rearranged, lines erased and pencilled in, to make room for the lateral — and nonlinear — growth of a fictional world. Until then, we can read books backwards.

Supplemental Materials:

The entire Ware Tetralogy is available as a Creative-Commons distributed PDF on Rudy Rucker’s website. Read it here if you have the eyes for it.
Ridiculously interesting Rudy Rucker interview with Stephan Wolfram.
Rucker’s science fiction webzine, FLURB.
Rudy Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto”

“What’s the most cyberpunk Photoshop filter?” “Oh, definitely Find Edges.”

[Before I even begin, let me say this.

BUY THIS BOOK

BUY THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW!

Honestly, if you’re not willing to drop $20 on a piece of pure, actual counterculture, get out of here. Semiotext(e) SF is an arcane book! Even in 2010, it feels like a relic from the future history of a parallel world where thieves, gnostic shamans, and cyberpunks were set free to run things. It’s like Again, Dangerous Visions, except instead of Harlan Ellison it’s Robert Anton Wilson (and Rudy Rucker and Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson), and instead of “dangerous” it’s “probably against existing obscenity laws” and instead of Way Bwadbuwy and Tewwy Carr it’s William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Philip José Farmer at their weirdest. I hold Semiotext(e) SF in my hands and I can’t believe the authorities aren’t knocking down my ceilings and walls, flakes of plaster flying everywhere as the sun spills into my darkened room, to come take it away. Semiotext(e) SF feels the same way about itself. In its own pages, it lovingly refers to itself as a “fucking crazy anthology” exploring the “lunatic fringes” of science fiction.]

When I saw Transformers 2 last summer, I marveled at its visual complexity. The proportions were inconceivable: millions of shards of metal, each individually rendered in gleaming chrome, assembling at impossible speeds into loathsome erectile machine-men, whipping the sands of the actual world around them into fluff. I wondered, if I had trouble even identifying what was happening in front of me, what if some person from the 1800s were teleported into this movie theater? Would they even be able to see anything? Wouldn’t the overwhelming visual stimulus just be an undifferentiated slop to them?

I became somewhat obsessed with the idea of being blinded by modernity. To understand the future, you can’t just be transported into it without reference — it would be meaningless and terrifying. A man born in 1790 is no less neurologically equipped than I am to operate an iPad, but his lack of familiarity with the incremental developments in technology that led to such a thing would render him gaga. Most science fiction doesn’t alienate the hell us because it tends to have an extrapolative quality: we recognize the present day, strung through time to some strange conclusion. Good science fiction takes us far away while still leaving us crumbs of context; bad science fiction is fantasy.

Ergo:

a) I think Semiotext(e) SF would just be carbon-based runes on paper to someone without context for it.
b) This is a cyberpunk anthology, and as such is almost more about the present than the future.

Cyberpunk — which this book is all about — is science fiction that doesn’t point up, up, and away; rather, it’s science fiction that spreads out laterally, in layers of increasing density. The crumbs of context, if you will, are piled up into rotting mounds all around us. This is SF of the visceral now, the encroaching slums, the increasing integration of biology and technology, the degradation of flesh, vacuity, political corruption, the corporatization of the world, social disorder, dark alleyways, new drugs, etc, etc.

The earnest (and archaic) belief that science holds the keys to a rational future — which permeates “Golden Age” science fiction — was shattered by the cyberpunks, because they realized that technology was only getting more populist, more ubiquitous, and more personal. “Science,” in this anthology and in so much cyberpunk writing, doesn’t belong to authorities or professionals; it’s found in secret sex clubs and experimental drugs, abandoned artificial intelligences, personal software and filthy hacker warrens. It may still be the most viable framework for discussing our the dark perimeters of our world — the medium most fit for the moment.

This cybernetic sex joke plays out along the bottom corner of each page, flip book-style.

In other words, as Bruce Sterling wrote in the introduction to his celebrated Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, “for the cyberpunks…technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.”

Hence the Ballard story which details, with clinical precision, Jane Fonda’s boob job. And the stories about de-evolution, Frankenpenises, cyborg sex clubs, televisual grotesque, erotic space colonization, re-programmed minds, brain parasites, and techno-psychedelic scrying, too. Stories with titles like, “I Was a Teenage Genetic Engineer” and “Gnosis Knows Best.” If any one adjective could sum up this mad compendium, it might be “physical,” but the kind of physical that can’t exist without its opposite, transcendence — because that’s what a merger of technology and humanity is essentially about, wires that lead to abstract space. Hardware and software. Wet and dry.

There is a kind of fucked hope in this. Yes, modes of being are being profoundly altered by hacked software and unnatural invasion of machinery into the human body, but at least the individual has control over their subjective reality. It’s liberation through modification of the individual. Mind over matter, right? At least in Semiotext(e) SF, this is cause for joy because it’s truly and totally anti-authoritatian to refuse everything but your own cybernetic pleasure — and to build a literature of the future that is good and blinding for everyone but those living right in the middle of it.

“Science fiction is liberation. Reality in the old Aristotelian sense is a crutch for those who are afraid to walk alone on their own feet, above the Abyss that yawns when we begin to break our mental sets and pause to wonder–really wonder.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, “ever eager for new dimensions of insanity,” from the Introduction

Supplemental Materials:

Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty
Full text of J.G. Ballard’s Report on an Unidentified Space Station, a kind of Borgesian Big Dumb Object tale
Rudy Rucker’s envy-inducing recollection of the early days of cyberpunk
Full Archives of Bruce Sterling’s early cyberpunk zine, Cheap Truth
“The Future of Sex,” a 1975 article for Oui by Robert Anton Wilson
Book: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Book: Semiotext(e) U.S.A.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984. It’s so absurdly dense and riddled with cryptic terms which have since become commonplace, that it must have been virtually hieroglyphic at the time. Part of the experience of Neuromancer is this incredible recent-history disconnect: to know that the course of 24 years have brought us a substantial step closer to Gibson’s world than we might have anticipated, that it would make concepts like “cyberspace” and “matrix” the stuff of pop-culture movies and general, undisputed understanding. Is that the ultimate litmus test of science fiction, that it starts to come true while it’s still fresh in the memory of its readers? Or maybe it’s because of Neuromancer that any of these things happened. Either way, it’s almost shocking to see how heavy-handedly the novel’s themes have been borrowed over the years: The Matrix took most of it and tossed in some plagiarized Baudrillard, Blade Runner took Chiba, took Case, the look of the book and its the self-loathing antihero.

Whatever, I suppose that’s selling Gibson short: reading Neuromancer in the light of its descendants is hardly fair, and the book isn’t about extrapolation or future-conjecture anyway. It lacks the earnest explanatory nature of many “hard” sci-fi books or even the Popular Mechanics-zeal of Arthur C. Clarke, who always seems to be tugging on your t-shirt and whispering, “It could happen, and I’m going to kind of bore you with the details!” Gibson is just…already there, and he has little intention of drawing a reassuring point from A to B. In a way, that’s what advances him beyond the genre, and why it makes sense that he’s writing regular fiction now: he has nothing to prove. The world is fucked up and he knows it.

It’s hard to talk about how good it is without feeling like I’m two decades late to a party I forgot to go to.

Here is a really awesome Neuromancer-related art project, in the works, from Brody Condon, which is a really cyberpunk kind of name, if you ask me.

NEXT TOME: ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S IMPERIAL EARTH.