making guest-lectures and writing up reports on what he finds. Of the beats and the cyberpunks, it is Ginsberg and Sterling whom one sees most often on television.
Not so well-known as the other beats, Corso is a poet with a keen ear for ecstatic strophes and ranting invective. Corso also has the cachet, the bonus, of being the only one of the four still alive. A reasonable match for the dark, zany and strangely healthy John Shirley.
For myself, as the oldest of the cyberpunks, I claim the role of Burroughs, with his wise, dry voice of hallucinatory erudition and his rank, frank humor.
But but but—Gibson doesn’t center his books upon himself, like Kerouac did. And Sterling writes about future technology, not about mystical perceptions of everyday reality. And Shirley is a novelist, not a poet. And I’m a professor, not a junkie. And cyberpunk isn’t really mainstream literature, is it? Perhaps my comparing the cyberpunks to the beats is like the sad but true tale of Jacqueline Susanne comparing herself and Harold Robbins to the Lost Generation writers. “I’m the Fitzgerald of the group and Harold’s the Hemingway…” Ow!
And, hmm, what about Lew Shiner? Well, he can be John Clellon Holmes, the Beat who drifted from the movement after his book, Go .
Okay, my analogy is just a Procrustean mind-game, a little wise-acreing for the swing of thought, something to get this essay rolling and with a generous dose of self-aggrandizement thrown in. Why not? Onward.
What I want to do here is to go into specific comments about three cyberpunk novels, and to gloat over some of the good bits with you. The books happened to come out within about a month of each other in 1996. It felt like getting letters from home. The three books to hand:
William Gibson, Idoru , G. P. Putnam’s, New York 1996.
Bruce Sterling , Holy Fire , Bantam Books, New York 1996.
John Shirley, Silicon Embrace , Mark V. Ziesing Books, Shingletown CA 1996.
William Gibson in 1983.
Like his Virtual Light , William Gibson’s novel Idoru has two main characters, a young man and a young woman, with the narrative told from their alternating points of view. The girl is a teenage fan of a rock musician named Rez, and the boy is a technician hired by Rez’s managers because he has “a peculiar knack for data-collection architectures.” In a more traditional kind of fiction, this structure would be a setup for a happy boy-meets-girl ending, but that’s not what happens in Virtual Light or in Idoru . None of the characters are really out for romance. Except for Rez.
The Idoru of the title is an artificial woman who exists as a holographic projection generated by a largish portable computer. Rez—Rozzer to his friends—is in love with her. “Man,” says Rez’s blind drummer at a dinner party, “Rozzer’s sittin’ down there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.” The drummer’s synthetic eyes don’t register holograms; he sees through to the core of the idoru hardware.
The first mention of Rez and his partner Lo is in this sentence describing the bedroom of Chia Pet McKenzie, the teenage fan: “The wall opposite Chia’s bed was decorated with a six-by-six laser blowup of the cover of Lo Rez Skyline, their first album.” In a subtly associative way, this image evokes the now-famous first sentence of Gibson’s smash first novel, Neuromancer , “Over the port, the sky was the color of television.” Kind of the same, no? Gibson’s so smart, he’s playing with deep structure.
Chia is worried about Rez’s rumored infatuation with the idoru, and she flies to Japan to try and bring him to his senses. Half of the chapters are from Chia’s point of view; Gibson has somehow mastered the knack of writing the thoughts of teenage girls, their enthusiasms, their slang. One of the words Chia uses is “meshback.” A meshback is what we currently call a redneck, a low-income person who wears unfashionable clothes and whose thoughts are
Not so well-known as the other beats, Corso is a poet with a keen ear for ecstatic strophes and ranting invective. Corso also has the cachet, the bonus, of being the only one of the four still alive. A reasonable match for the dark, zany and strangely healthy John Shirley.
For myself, as the oldest of the cyberpunks, I claim the role of Burroughs, with his wise, dry voice of hallucinatory erudition and his rank, frank humor.
But but but—Gibson doesn’t center his books upon himself, like Kerouac did. And Sterling writes about future technology, not about mystical perceptions of everyday reality. And Shirley is a novelist, not a poet. And I’m a professor, not a junkie. And cyberpunk isn’t really mainstream literature, is it? Perhaps my comparing the cyberpunks to the beats is like the sad but true tale of Jacqueline Susanne comparing herself and Harold Robbins to the Lost Generation writers. “I’m the Fitzgerald of the group and Harold’s the Hemingway…” Ow!
And, hmm, what about Lew Shiner? Well, he can be John Clellon Holmes, the Beat who drifted from the movement after his book, Go .
Okay, my analogy is just a Procrustean mind-game, a little wise-acreing for the swing of thought, something to get this essay rolling and with a generous dose of self-aggrandizement thrown in. Why not? Onward.
What I want to do here is to go into specific comments about three cyberpunk novels, and to gloat over some of the good bits with you. The books happened to come out within about a month of each other in 1996. It felt like getting letters from home. The three books to hand:
William Gibson, Idoru , G. P. Putnam’s, New York 1996.
Bruce Sterling , Holy Fire , Bantam Books, New York 1996.
John Shirley, Silicon Embrace , Mark V. Ziesing Books, Shingletown CA 1996.
William Gibson in 1983.
Like his Virtual Light , William Gibson’s novel Idoru has two main characters, a young man and a young woman, with the narrative told from their alternating points of view. The girl is a teenage fan of a rock musician named Rez, and the boy is a technician hired by Rez’s managers because he has “a peculiar knack for data-collection architectures.” In a more traditional kind of fiction, this structure would be a setup for a happy boy-meets-girl ending, but that’s not what happens in Virtual Light or in Idoru . None of the characters are really out for romance. Except for Rez.
The Idoru of the title is an artificial woman who exists as a holographic projection generated by a largish portable computer. Rez—Rozzer to his friends—is in love with her. “Man,” says Rez’s blind drummer at a dinner party, “Rozzer’s sittin’ down there makin’ eyes at a big aluminum thermos bottle.” The drummer’s synthetic eyes don’t register holograms; he sees through to the core of the idoru hardware.
The first mention of Rez and his partner Lo is in this sentence describing the bedroom of Chia Pet McKenzie, the teenage fan: “The wall opposite Chia’s bed was decorated with a six-by-six laser blowup of the cover of Lo Rez Skyline, their first album.” In a subtly associative way, this image evokes the now-famous first sentence of Gibson’s smash first novel, Neuromancer , “Over the port, the sky was the color of television.” Kind of the same, no? Gibson’s so smart, he’s playing with deep structure.
Chia is worried about Rez’s rumored infatuation with the idoru, and she flies to Japan to try and bring him to his senses. Half of the chapters are from Chia’s point of view; Gibson has somehow mastered the knack of writing the thoughts of teenage girls, their enthusiasms, their slang. One of the words Chia uses is “meshback.” A meshback is what we currently call a redneck, a low-income person who wears unfashionable clothes and whose thoughts are
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