What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This post first appeared in 2013.
In this year’s SXSW closing speech, futurist Bruce Sterling enumerated disrupted technologies that have been supplanted, or are soon to be, by the latest wave of GoogleGlass-era living. He gave longform blogging five years to live, in the face of microblogging.
As future shock morphs into present shock, the cyberpunk fiction for which Sterling was first known is no longer the way to tackle envisioning the future, he says. Why write a story about future living – why not just participate in it and create it right now?
There really is something about science fiction that’s lost its currency and place in the zeitgeist. I recommended cyberpunk as a theme month to my book club and – to a man – they didn’t get it. So I went back to my old copy of Neuromancer and had the most disturbing experience: not only did I not get into it, I could not parse the sentences. It’s like I’ve had a Gibson-specific stroke.
I daren’t return to other favourites of my adolescence, like Nancy Kress’s Beggars series – in which the cure for sleep is developed – for fear of finding the gates of Narnia closed to me forever.
But just as the dead live on in our memories, science fiction’s influence reigns as long as the generations raised on it are creating. My endless hours in Ottawa’s House of Speculative Fiction had such a formative effect on my thinking and interests that it almost doesn’t matter the era of input is over.
Kress’s trilogy sparked in me a decades-long passion for conscious life-extension through reducing the need for sleep. As for cyberpunk, it taught me to see dirty beauty. Its lesson: all that’s gold does not glitter.
Image: Shutterstock is good people
It’s because Neuromancer was never that good. 🙂
Ohh! Them’s fightin’ words.
I used to subscribe to OMNI magazine in the 70s and 80s and had a huge collection of issues saved. When I decided in 1983 to get rid of them I sat down with them to see if there were any I wanted to save. There were a few short stories I really remembered liking so I sifted through dozens of issues only to find that nearly all the ones I remembered liking were from William Gibson, whose name I was completely unfamiliar with. So I saved them. And the next year I was in a bookshop and discovered Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, based on oneof those short stories, and I snapped it up, loved it, still have it.
I too tried getting back to it recently and while I found some of the descriptions and milieu clever and fascinating the book itself turned out to have been a simple alternating-chapter-POV thriller with futuristic elements, and a too-complicated storyline, with character-names that were sometimes shout-outs to earlier SciFi (eg Gibson’s Lupus Yonderboy recalling John Brunner’s Lucas Yonderboy from the 1968 ‘Stand On Zanzibar’).
Stand on Zanzibar — yes, that was another one. Kind of fragmented and experimental as I recall, but brilliant.