association-list

The ear­li­est and most famous of cyber­punk novels, the end­lessly famous Neu­ro­mancer con­cerns the actions of a few mar­ginal, vio­lent people being manip­u­lated by forces larger than they can com­pre­hend. True, they have some agency; indeed they’d be use­less as agents for their oper­a­tors if they did not have some spe­cial skills and tal­ents that make them the best tools pos­si­ble in the sit­u­a­tion. Ulti­mately, though, they are merely tools. Gibson’s inter­est is, for the most part, on the vast forces at work, rather than the tools them­selves. His pro­tag­o­nists (who grow less mar­ginal and less vio­lent as the sprawl series pro­gresses), are more or less a lens through which the world is seen. The cul­mi­na­tion of each of these novels is the reveal, in which the tool-​​protagonist is made aware of the full scope of the drama in which they have played a small part.

This form, which of course has antecedents in older SF, detec­tive and spy novels, and numer­ous other forms, tends to be what people take away from cyber­punk, second only to its window dress­ing of aug­ments, street-​​wise tech-​​ninjas, and decades-​​old visual sym­bols of bad-​​assery (leather jack­ets, dark sun­glasses or mir­ror­shades, dusters, ass-​​kicking boots, that sort of thing).

When Gibson first wrote his novels, deep into the Reagan-​​Thatcher years, things really did look pretty bad (almost thirty years ago, now). It wasn’t entirely whacked out to pic­ture a world run for the profit of mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions who’d sub­orned the nation-​​states of the world (one could argue that that is in fact what hap­pened, although it didn’t turn out as badly as it could have). Things really did suck, and it wasn’t insane to imag­ine mar­ginal people being empow­ered by some mys­ti­cal coun­ter­vail­ing force being the only way that a little good could be done in the world.

But as time wore on and things got at least a little bit better our noir-​​loving doom­pro­phets seem to have dou­bled down on the spit and the muck, and have moved the lens from the phys­i­cally inef­fec­tual Case to everyone’s favorite sexy ninja badass, Molly Millions.

While there has been some updat­ing of the socio-​​political con­cerns that ani­mate these books, their pro­tag­o­nists have gone ever more ret­ro­grade, evinc­ing ever more car­toon­ish moral­ism and spe­cial plead­ing, while simul­ta­ne­ously grow­ing ever more stim­u­lat­ingly vio­lent. At times, it seems as if their worlds have to be dark­ened and vio­lent in order to enable any sort of engage­ment with their brutal, near-​​psychotic pro­tag­o­nists. Nyx and Takeshi Kovacs would, if intro­duced into a future that was any­thing like the present that we or their authors inhabit they’d swiftly be arrested or killed.

In lit­er­a­ture, form and func­tion are inti­mately linked. Stick­ing so hard to a genre form birthed in an extremely dark moment limits the effec­tive­ness with which you can nav­i­gate the gray time in which we find our­selves now. The easy vio­lence may sell books, and I am loathe to deny anyone their con­so­la­tory nar­ra­tives in hard times, but I feel that these sort of novels are not doing the kind of work that’s push­ing the genre for­ward or doing the sort of adap­tive think­ing and imag­i­na­tive inves­ti­ga­tion which I con­sider to be the main work of SF.