Rudy Rucker – Space Canon http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon A Life In Science Fiction Wed, 12 Feb 2014 20:58:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Introducing OMNI Reboot http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2013/08/12/introducing-omni-reboot/ http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2013/08/12/introducing-omni-reboot/#respond Mon, 12 Aug 2013 23:30:24 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/?p=974 Continue reading ]]> omni-screen

Big news: yours truly has been tapped to become the Editor-in-Chief of a rebooted version of OMNI, the classic science and science fiction magazine upon which yours truly cut her very own teeth. The chain of events leading up to this appointment is so strange and circuitous that I recommend you read my entire article on the subject over on Vice.

For an autodidact science fiction head, this is the equivalent of being given the keys to the palace. Preparing for the launch of the magazine over the last few months has been the most terrifying and ecstatic experience of my career. After a million emails and as many pots of coffee, however, I’m so proud to have kicked off OMNI Reboot with new fiction from Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, two of my all-time favorites, along with a heady mix of nonfiction and aesthetic inquiry.

A lot of people have been asking me how the world has changed since the original OMNI went out of print. At 28, I’m too young to have bought the magazine when it was on newsstands; my initiation came much later, when I found old copies and fell in love with their voice, which seemed so similar, in many ways, to my own. For me, looking at old OMNIs has always been an exercise in paleofuturistic archaeology: what did the future look like to clever, eccentric thinkers 20 years ago? Did those visions end up manifesting themselves in reality? The disconnects are often more telling than the accuracies.

In a 1987 OMNI feature, a young Bill Gates imagined a world database at our fingertips by 2007, while David Byrne dismissed computers as “just big or small adding machines,” adding that “if they can’t think, that’s all they’ll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won’t help in the creative process.” We all know how wrong that is. But it gives the reader a very evocative peek into the specific mindset of that time, a time where computer scientists could be more visionary than artists.

OMNI came onto the scene at the dawn of the computer age. In suit, its tone, when discussing technology, was by and large hopeful–it predicted all manner of cybernetic enhancement, innovative leisure, high-tech sensuality. Its advertisements hawked hi-fi systems, computers, cars, liquor, and self-help tapes. OMNI believed in a better tomorrow, and  think it inspired a generation of dreamers because of that. But that’s not our world–there were unforeseen consequences. Now we have a different relationship to technology. We ask ourselves what it’s doing to our society, what deleterious effects it might have on culture, how it has changed our children.

Ideally, I’d like OMNI Reboot to consolidate those two visions of the future–to be pragmatic and even cynical, but hopeful, too. After all, our idea of the future, like Gates and Byrne’s varyingly accurate predictions of the Internet, says more about who we are than who we hope to become.

Check out OMNI Reboot and follow us on Twitter to keep abreast of our updates. We’re going places–all of us.

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What Happened to Cyberpunk? http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2012/06/05/what-happened-to-cyberpunk/ http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2012/06/05/what-happened-to-cyberpunk/#respond Wed, 06 Jun 2012 03:36:36 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/?p=731 Continue reading ]]>

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.

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Semiotext(e) SF http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2010/09/20/semiotexte_sf/ http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2010/09/20/semiotexte_sf/#comments Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:53:00 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2010/09/20/semiotexte_sf/ Continue reading ]]>

“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.

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