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Mirrorshades question 5: Technology
In the preface, Sterling says:
The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world.
Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structures, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.
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.
The Eighties were a time where the transformative promise of computers and microchips became apparent. But since then, the pace of changes has, if anything, increased further. Has cyberpunk's treatment of technology stood the test of time? What's been the reaction to technology changes since then?
(This characterisation may suggest why Sterling and Gibson wrote The Difference Engine, set in another time of rampant technological change that caused widespread social change. Are there other parallels?)
And, I noticed a common trope in the book of characters with replacement eyes. What do you think is the subtext of this change? Something about the mechanisation of the windows to the soul?
Comments
But I think these cyberpunk authors were pretty visionary - they saw things I would later take fro granted. And that’s probably because they were more clued into tech than high-school and college me.
Anyway, cool idea about the eyes. I wonder though if it’s more about transcendence, like Lobsang Rampa’s third eye, allowing him to see beyond the material world (by drilling a hole in one’s skull lol).
Anyway, we had fun doing things like DOS-art for current girl-friends, or learning how to use various language constructions - my most ambitious attempt was a solar-system simulator with all nine planets (including Pluto back in those halcyon days) which of course failed completely do look like a bunch of planets, as I had no idea how to handle the widely differing timescales between the inner and outer planets. But I was very happy when at least it stepped forward some time intervals and things actually moved around
So when computers came along that one could write code easily, identify and fix bugs in real-time, and output your stuff using coloured pixels (with first 16 then 256 colours no less) it was truly transformative, and I guess this is part of the background to the authors in _Mirrorshades_ - had I been writing SF back then instead of just reading it, I'd have been thrilled at the apparent ways that ability to code might open any door and solve any problem.
Now, this collection focuses largely on the attendant problems rather than opportunities (admittedly there are opportunities there but they tend to be selfishly motivated rather than socially). and on the whole the collection comes over as rather pessimistic. I think I've always preferred optimistic fiction even if the context of a story is hard or depressing, and I didn't pick up a lot of optimism here.
Another SF contrast is with Arkady Martine's duology _A Memory Called Empire__ (which we read together) and _A Desolation Called Peace_ (which I've read a couple of times now subsequently to the first one) . These have a lot of cyberpunk tropes, and especially in the second one there's a lot about networking groups of people together for one reason or another, but the overall feel of the books is entirely different from _Mirrorshades_ . Does this represent evolution of the genre, or shifts in tech, or simply authorial preference?
And also the Stationer enclave who are a little bit like the Rebels (except more inclined to collaborate, and with less moral distinction between the two factions). Each group has some form of enhancement that the other lacks. But yes, I agree that the sense of alienation because of tech is not there, and the main themes are ones of unity rather than separation.
In the main I do not think they were particularly visionary where technology was concerned. The places where their stories contained anything like modern tech were mostly where someone read their stories and emulated it. But they understood the future was corporate. They totally got that right.
I think you're right, in that a lot of the technology ideas were around (I was an avid watcher of Tomorrow's World back in the day). These writers did see the social trends and extrapolated them. I think the confluence of decentralisation and disintermediation were things they saw, in combination with the freeing up of corporations through Reganism and Thatcherism. I'm not sure they saw the rise of the oligarchs and monopoly-pseudo-utilities we now have with Google, Facebook, and the like.
On a vaguely related note, does anyone remember a near-future vaguely-dystopian TV series from the early 1970s called Doomwatch? BBC1 I think, and I don't know if it ever got shipped overseas, so maybe Neil is the only likely person of us all. The episode I remember most vividly was when some kind of virus / bacteria / whatever developed the ability to eat plastic, and promptly consumed all the flashing around aircraft windows, with dramatic effect . (Nowadays, we'd want to have such a thing to get rid of rubbish heaps, but that wasn't in view at the time).
Obviously this was earlier than the cyberpunk we have been reading, and there was a higher tendency to trust government departments than was the case later, but there are common themes about the problems caused by tech,
Sorry, Doomwatch was a bit before my time. But there is a tradition of the British taking a rather more cynical view of technological progress than our American cousins. My favourite example is Blake's 7 being the British version of Star Trek : after all, both are based in an interstellar Federation with a happy population and a fleet of military ships that keep the peace.
What a tactful way of saying I'm older
But also, that made me think, "wouldn't it be cool to watch Blake's 7 again", only to discover it's extremely hard to find on UK streaming sites
Some relentless searching finds that the first episode of season 1 is available on YouTube
together with a whole host of short clips.
Allegedly all four series are also available through Britbox streaming, potentially via Apple TV or Amazon Prime, but some of the links I have seen are quite old and I haven't been able to confirm this.