fil@drill.me.UUCP (10/11/87)
I've heard alot recently on this net about how cyberpunk deals (or does not deal) with "low life and high tech". Well, here're my thoughts on it. If somebody asks you what cyberpunk is, you'll probably include, somewhere in your definition, the word "gritty", or "street-smart" or some such thing. The reason for that is that cyberpunk *is* all those things. You also say something about how computer technology figures into cyberpunk. And you'd be right again. But that's not the whole story. To say that cyberpunk is low life and high tech is the same as saying that the Mona Lisa is a picture of a smiling woman. In Count Zero, Gibson's sequel to Neuromancer, a good deal of the book is devoted to Andrea (gulp...I hope that's the right name!), an art dealer in Paris who got the shaft in a deal involving some forgeries. Her adventures that her through the richest and most extravagant parts of the world. Is this low life? Sure, the cancer-ridden bad-guy (I admit it this time---I haven't a clue what his name was) was a real "lowlife", but it is not unreasonable to assume that Andrea had not seen better times? Times similar to those that the bad-guy lives in now (without the cancer)? And considering the end of the novel, is it not possible that she will live well again? Is this really the low life? And from Neuromancer: what Case did would no doubt leak and with his cyber-abilities restored and such an episode behind him, he could streak to the top of cowboydom. He'd really be the best and he'd know it. He'd earned himself his spot in cowboy-history. Even if some deck-heads of the Count Zero era thought little of him. See, that certainly wouldn't have mattered to him. He'd done it, in the end, for himself (sure he had those bags of neurotoxin in him, but hell, in the shape he was in, he probably needed that sort of "incentive" to get him going again.) Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that both of Gibson's books as well as HardWired by Walter Jon Williams (another excellent book) and even Shattered Glass (I think that's right) by Peter Jeter are not about low life, but about people who are intensely alive. Their about capable people (though not supermen) who have fallen on hard times and get a chance make their comeback, to get back what they'd lost, to fight with every erg of their essence and beat the usually nameless, faceless enemy. And they win. Not the way Indiana Jones would win. But in some small, personally significant way, they win. As well, have you ever noticed how the "antagonists" are usually crazy in some way and the source of their madness is usually traceable to some symptom of a sick society. I think at least Gibson's antagonists represent to a degree the society which produced them.... Which doesn't say much about society, true. But the story is about the individual that society wants to waste, and the individual says "stuff it" and demonstrates how to. They're book about the irrepressible individuals who keep the world from turning into the nightmarish visions of depravity and subservience which haunt the pages of these books. Cyberpunk is about heroes. Low life? Nah. ...It's the High Life, if anything. Fil Salustri. fil@me.toronto.edu.......