Cyberpunk Appendix N Part 5: Hardwired!

Another season, another instalment of the Cyberpunk Appendix N, all about cyberpunk, post cyberpunk and sorta-maybe-inspiring-perhaps-maybe? cyberpunk. Once again, the subject of this column isn't what I claimed it would be at the end of the last Appendix N post. I've decided just to give up on making plans for this series. 

The last Appendix N post covered the magical realist tendency in the genre. Today we return to hard, burnished chrome.

This post is about two novels that concern pilots and their futuristic machines. If you're a fan of Shadowrun's rigger class, you want to know all about Hardwired. If your rigger came into eight million nuyen and used it to buy bleeding-edge drones, making you and the rest of the team utterly obsolete, Yukikaze might reflect your mood. Either way, this post is going to be all about jet turbines and heat seeking missiles.

"But he's called himself a citizen of the free and immaculate sky too long to accept the notion that his world of air has bars on it."

When people talk about the Cyberpunk genre - the 1980s literary movement, that lasted roughly a decade from Neuromancer through to Snow Crash - they tend to discuss a canon of classic novels. Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan's Synners, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (and Rudy Rucker's Software and John Shirley's unjustly forgotten Eclipse and George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, before I get angry emails...).

Hardwired even got a classic (some people would argue the best) Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook, written by the same author. It's a great gaming resource. It put me off reading the novel for years.

The sourcebook made Hardwired seem generic. It had a lead character called "Cowboy" who teams up with a cyber'd up female assassin. The cover made them look like extras in Cherry 2000. In my head I built up Hardwired to be the ur-source of every generic B-movie and bad cyber-hacker-samurai novel to crowd the second hand bookshop shelves where I spend too much of my time. 

The sourcebook had all sorts of neat stuff in it. New "realistic" firearms and armour rules. New "realistic" hacking rules. Some interesting adventures. And maybe a page about Panzerboy smuggling, the subject matter that makes Hardwired into something really special.

Cyberpunk Appendix N Part 4: The Magical Realists

This series is all about novels to inspire your cyberpunk games. The last entry was all about spies and spooks! This post is going to cover the magical realist tendency in cyberpunk, and traverses some strange territory.

Science fiction has alternated between inner space and outer space for decades now. In the 1960s the British New Wave - Moorcock, Ballard, etc - reached for the inner space of the mind, accessible through drugs or fringe psychiatry. Twenty years later, a new more technological inner space provided the backdrop for Cyberpunk: cyberspace. The British New Wave and Cyberpunk achieved their final synthesis in the Vurt.

I'm just going to come out and say it. Jeff Noon's Pixel Juice is my favourite short story collection ever, above Burning Chrome, above Cyberabad Days and Vermillion Sands and Ribofunk and even the unjustly ignored Mammoth Book of Future Cops. I read it when I was 15, when half my friends were into rave music and hour long electronic mixes shared over MSN Messenger, when I was discovering all pop culture in a rush, soon after I discovered Cyberpunk 2020 and most of the other nonsense on this blog. I brought it along with a copy of Naked Lunch in a railway station in Prague or Dresden or Berlin or somewhere else mitteleuropean, because the English language sections of foreign railway station bookshops are the best fiction bookshops anywhere.

I've made a semi-conscious decision never to read it again, because it can't possibly be as cool now as it seemed when I was a teenager. 

Neuromancer's amphetamine snare

"It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo." - Neuromancer

"[When I was a teenager] there was a kind of literary war underway between the British New Wave people and the very conservative American science-fiction writers—who probably wouldn’t even have thought of themselves as very conservative—saying, That’s no good, you can’t do that, you don’t know how to tell a story, and besides you’re a communist. I remember being frightened by that rhetoric. It was the first time I ever saw an art movement, I suppose." - William Gibson

William Gibson's Neuromancer was a wildly influential novel by any standard, arguably the most significant science fiction novel of the late twentieth century. Published in 1984, it determined the language people would use to describe and define the internet over the following two decades. It established so many tropes that a reader coming to it context free, after The Matrix and Inception and a thousand other blunt emulators, might be forgiven for thinking it was just a particularly well written list of clichés. Fans of the novel in the media like to wear their influence on their sleeve - look in the credits of any science fiction film and you're bound to discover that thug#4 just happened to be named Corto...

Other cyberpunk classics like Hardwired and Schismatrix have largely disappeared into obscurity, with only two real exceptions - Pat Cadigan's Synners still has a literary reputation which will keep it in (limited) print for years to come, while Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) was taken as a kind of ideological manifesto by the Silicon Valley techno-libertarian crowd (they're literally still trying to build the Metaverse). So my question is this - if astonishing novels like Islands in the Net and Vacuum Flowers are destined to little more than a forgotten half life in my memory, why has Neuromancer lived on?

I could natter about the prose, or the simple timing of a hacker novel about 20 seconds before computer hacking became a thing people had heard of, or the revolutionary way it treated the "infodump." I could spend even more time talking about cyberpunk's genre swagger; how it had an incredible propagandist in the form of 'my intellectual and literary hero' Bruce Sterling, how he managed to propagate the patently false idea that all science fiction in the early 1980s was crap and Neuromancer had come to save it...

Instead i'm mainly going to make a case about narcotics. Also teenagers. Teenagers on narcotics, in some cases. Nerdy teenagers being accidentally exposed to the whole wide world of transgressive fiction...

Appendix N part 3: the indignity of labour!

This is the third part of my Cyberpunk gaming Appendix N series. It was going to be about Leggy Starlitz and Bruce Sterling, buuut... look, I never made any claims to consistency! I'll get around to him.

Anyway:
Part 1 was all about Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and the 1950s noir that influenced it.
Part 2 deals with cyberpunk inflected spy stories - Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy, Don Delilo, John Le Carre...

Part 3 will be all about novels about work. About employment or professional life, as something other than a spy or soldier or criminal. Or, for that matter, an artist (or a journalist). Novels where work forms the basis of the plot. 

Given how much time the average person spends at work, you'd think more literature would cover the subject. And yes, I meant literature, not just "genre fiction". There's Revolutionary Road and... 

There are clear hurdles to writing this kind of novel. Every profession comes with its own metalanguage, which can be opaque for the reader as well as the researching writer. There are difficulties in plotting - no padding the novel out with gun battles and meteor impacts (probably)! There are even difficulties in finding a readership - escapism is half the reason for reading fiction, and people don't necessarily want to read a novel that sounds like it might be about work. I'm sure genre publishers are scared of it. So the arrival of a novel like this ought to be treasured.

In the swirling world of post-cyberpunk Cory Doctorow is the writer most associated with novels about labour, so we'll start with him!

Cyberpunk Appendix N Part 2: Spooks!

"The Intersection of Paranoia and Technology"

(This series is all about cyberpunk literature and how it can inspire games. The last post covered Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and 1950s noir. This one is all about espionage!)

The difference between a cyberpunk novel and a technothriller is the social dimension - the awareness of how technology filters down to the streets and is re purposed and reinvented by the society that uses it.

Or to put it another way, imagine the story after Dale Brown's superbombers have landed, been stripped for spare parts, their ECM systems reused in videogame software, the copper wiring ripped out and used to string illegal power connections between slum houses in the bomb craters...

Many - most, even - of the most famous cyberpunk stories are essentially espionage thrillers where the state-funded Bonds and Ryans have been retired or replaced by freelancers. Inspired both by the wave of corporate espionage stories in the 1970s and noir archetypes, these characters possess a very similar skill set to earlier spy characters, but drop the patriotism and jingoism in favour of punk cynicism (in the earlier stories) or a damaged idealism.  

William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy starts with a literary game: Pattern Recognition. A character with a name pronounced "Case" pursues Marly's subplot from Count Zero using a version of Colin Laney's nodal sense seen in All Tomorrow's Parties.  The major elements of 1980s science fiction fit seamlessly into a present day narrative. Gibson wasn't the first cyberpunk writer to write an almost doctrinaire genre story outside the science fiction genre, just the most prominent. 

Pattern Recognition also introduced the coolhunter into common parlance, and was one of the first books to really deal with viral marketing. The coolhunter relates to the modern pop culture landscape like an adventurer in a dungeon. One day I would love to run a game around the concept, although i'm not sure how it would work in practice. Certainly the GM shouldn't be the arbiter of "cool!"

Spook Country follows a group of spies and journalists through a dangerous search for a maguffin of deep political significance. The characters in Spook Country are older and wiser than Neuromancer, or else more conditioned. The centrepiece of the novel is an intricately described collision between underground factions, where rival ideologies express their differences through tradecraft. I've always been attracted to fanatical or highly trained characters, and Tito's group of interstitial "illegal facilitators" provides wonderful inspiration.

A Cyberpunk Appendix N (Part 1)

Appendix N was the suggested reading list in the back of the original D&D rule book, and my inner (and outer) obsessive book nerd is demanding I write something similar for cyberpunk gaming. This isn't going to be a list of cyberpunk genre novels - you can find that anywhere - but a list of novels which provide specific inspiration for the kind of games I've tried to run: urban, international, criminal... drenched in style and sweat.