Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology Read online

  Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

  Copyright © 2007 by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover photograph © 2007 by Patty Nason

  Design & composition by John D. Berry

  The text typeface is Freight Text, with Freight Sans and Freight Micro

  Tachyon Publications

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  (415) 285-5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  ISBN 10:1-892391-53-8

  ISBN 13: 978-1-892391-53-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition: 2007

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Introduction © 2007 by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel | Sterling-Kessel Correspondence © 2007 by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling | William Gibson quotation © 1999 from No Maps for These Territories. Used by permission of the author. | “Bicycle Repairman” © 1996 by Bruce Sterling. First appeared in Intersections, edited by John Kessel, Mark L. Van Name, and Richard Butner (Tor: New York). | “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” © 1996 by Gwyneth Jones. First appeared in Off Limits, edited by Ellen Datlow (St. Martin’s: New York). | “How We Got in Town and out Again” © 1996 by Jonathan Lethem. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 1996. | “Yeyuka” © 1997 by Greg Egan. First appeared in Meanjin, V56, #1, 1997. | “The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience” © 1997 by Pat Cadigan. First appeared in Future Histories, edited by Stephen McClelland (Horizon House: Norwood, Massachusetts). “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City” © 1997 by William Gibson. First appeared in New Worlds, edited by David Garnett and Michael Moorcock (White Wolf: Stone Mountain, Georgia). | “The Wedding Album” © 1999 by David Marusek. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999. | “Daddy’s World” © 1999 by Walter Jon Williams. First appeared in Not of Woman Born (Roc: New York). | “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” © 2001 by Michael Swanwick. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2001. “Lobsters” ©2001 by Charles Stross. First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001. | “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” © 2003 by Paul Di Filippo. First appeared in The Silver Gryphon, edited by Gary Turner and Marty Halpern (Golden Gryphon: Urbana, Illinois). | “The Voluntary State” © 2004 by Christopher Rowe. First appeared in sei fiction, May 5, 2004. | “Two Dreams on Trains” © 2005 by Elizabeth Bear. First appeared in Strange Horizons, January 3, 2005. | “The Calorie Man” © 2005 by Paolo Bacigalupi. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2005. | “Search Engine” ©2006 by Mary Rosenblum. First appeared in Analog, September 2005. | “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” © 2006 by Cory Doctorow. First appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, August 2006.|

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: Hacking Cyberpunk | James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

  Sterling-Kessel Correspondence

  Bruce Sterling | “Bicycle Repairman”

  Gwyneth Jones | “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland”

  Jonathan Lethem | “How We Got in Town and out Again”

  Greg Egan | “Yeyuka”

  Pat Cadigan | “The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience”

  William Gibson | “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City”

  David Marusek | “The Wedding Album”

  Walter Jon Williams | “Daddy’s World”

  Michael Swanwick | “The Dog Said Bow-Wow”

  Charles Stross | “Lobsters”

  Paul Di Filippo | “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”

  Christopher Rowe | “The Voluntary State”

  Elizabeth Bear | “Two Dreams on Trains”

  Paolo Bacigalupi | “The Calorie Man”

  Mary Rosenblum | “Search Engine”

  Cory Doctorow | “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”

  Acknowledgments

  WE’D LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE for advice, suggestions, and recommendations: Wilton Barnhardt, Richard Butner, Matthew Cheney, Gregory Frost, Eileen Gunn, Rich Horton, Kelly Link, and David Moles.

  Our thanks are also due to Jacob Weisman, Jill Roberts, and the other folks at Tachyon Publications who helped see this project through to completion.

  None of these estimable people are responsible for errors of judgment or taste we committed in assembling this anthology.

  Hacking Cyberpunk

  James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

  “However, I don’t worry much about the future of razor’s edge techno-punk. It will be bowdlerized and parodized and reduced to a formula, just as all other SF innovations have been. It scarcely matters much, because as a ‘movement,’ ‘Punk SF’ is a joke. Gibson’s a litterateur who happens to have an unrivalled grasp of the modern pop aesthetic. Shiner writes mainstream and mysteries. Rucker’s crazy; Shirley’s a surrealist; Pat Cadigan’s a technophobe. By ‘95 we’ll all have something else cooking.”

  —Bruce Sterling, in a letter to John Kessel, 29 March 1985

  shades

  The Hugo Award-winning editor David Hartwell tells the story of how Bruce Sterling approached him in 1983 with a proposal for an anthology of short stories which would eventually become the classic Mirrorshades. The book was to be a kind of literary manifesto for the newly emerging cyberpunk movement. David said he was indeed interested and asked how many writers Bruce expected would be in Mirrorshades. Bruce said he had five or six in mind. David replied that five or six was not enough for a movement and that Bruce would need at least a dozen. So Bruce set out to recruit writers for the movement and his anthology, even if they were not card-carrying cyberpunks. Among those he found was one of the editors of this book, who was at the time most closely associated with the humanist camp, said to be in opposition to cyberpunk.

  It is not surprising that the cyberpunk movement, so quick to sneer at other kinds of science fiction and to strike an attitude of hip self-importance, would be controversial. To its critics, cyberpunk was all borrowed surface and no substance: rock and roll Alfred Bester, Raymond Chandler with the serial numbers filed off. To the cynical, it was nothing but a marketing ploy to advance the careers of those select few who were permitted to hang their leathers in the secret Node Zero clubhouse. But as they continued to publish their innovative stories and novels, readers and — eventually — writers and critics began to acknowledge that there might be something to cyberpunk. In 1986, the pseudonymous Vincent Omniaveritas, writing in the cyberpunks’ snarky house organ, Cheap Truth, brought the classic cyberpunk era to an end. “I hereby declare the revolution over,” crowed Vince. “Long live the provisional government.”

  And then the real arguing started.

  moving on

  In the quarter century since, the debate has continued over the place of cyberpunk not only in science fiction, but in the culture as a whole. The literary discussion was complicated when some of the original cyberpunks tried to distance themselves from the movement. Naysayers seized on this to declare that cyberpunk was actually a movement of just one and his name was William Gibson. It soon became apparent that the center could not hold. However, the movement did not implode. Rather, popular culture hacked into it and turned cyberpunk to its own purposes. We saw cyberpunk music, movies, comics, and video
games. The slick magazine Wired became the Popular Science of cyberpunk. The cyberpunks had made computers and programming sexy; digital geekdom returned the favor by trying to reverse-engineer their ideas in silicon and code. But as it became more familiar, it also became tamer. Or maybe it grew up. There were cyberpunk ad agencies, cyberpunk fashion designers. Timothy Leary declared that the movie War Games was cyberpunk. The more people appropriated cyberpunk to their own uses, the fuzzier it became.

  Our genre has been largely nonplussed by the spread of the cyberpunk meme. Learned papers have been given to explain the phenomenon. Some complain that science fiction has more to offer than dark visions of disaffected loners contending with totalitarian corporations. “The street,” so central to the classic cyberpunk vision, is not the world, they say. And they are right, of course. Meanwhile, as second and third generation writers have put on their mirrorshades, they are all too often dismissed as mere imitators. Some in our genre have decided that they know what cyberpunk had to say, and, whether they agree with it or not, have consigned it to the dustbin of literary history. Cyberpunk can no longer be an ideology, they would say. It can only be a flavor.

  rewired

  In retrospect, it seems clear to us that cyberpunk was a movement. We acknowledge all the criticisms leveled against it. The hyperbole that helped launch it was unfortunate. Yes, some core cyberpunks found other things to write about or fell silent. Of course, the term’s use in common parlance is now so vague as to verge on meaningless, but our dictionary offers two definitions of movement that fit: “a. A series of actions and events taking place over a period of time and working to foster a principle or policy. b. An organized effort by supporters of a common goal.” In the heyday of Mirrorshades and Cheap Truth, the latter definition of classic cyberpunk — CP — made sense. There was a Movement with a capital M. We believe that the sixteen post-cyberpunk1 — PCP — stories in this anthology illustrate the former definition of a movement: they are events that occurred in the last decade, long after classic cyberpunk, that continue to foster its principles and policies. No, that’s not quite right. Fostering principles and policies isn’t quite the cyberpunk style, is it? What these stories share, instead, are obsessions.

  Briefly, we believe that the signature obsessions of cyberpunk are:

  Presenting a global perspective on the future.

  Engaging with developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.

  Striking a gleefully subversive attitude that challenges traditional values and received wisdom.

  Cultivating a crammed prose style that takes an often playful stance toward traditional science fiction tropes.

  The PCP stories collected here do not share all of these characteristics, but most have at least two or three. Any story that exhibits all of them just as they were used in 1985 is an instant cliché. Still, the realizations that the future will be one of intimate connections between the psyche and technology, that middle-class American values are not automatically going to prevail, and in fact, the vast majority of the world will not be like Iowa or New York, have had a profound and broad effect on science fiction published in the last decade.

  Cyberpunk obsessions have evolved over time; some writers extend them, some react against them, some take them for granted and move the basic attitudes into new territories. Our purpose here is to document these changes, which we believe have rewired CP into PCP. The writers we have chosen include some but not all of the CP founders. Some of our contributors came immediately after CP, while others were struggling to parse the subtleties of Green Eggs and Ham when Mirrorshades first appeared in bookstores. We have tried to confine ourselves to stories published in the last decade or so. Because we have limited ourselves to the short form, we were forced to leave out novelists like Melissa Scott and Richard K. Morgan and Chris Moriarty and — most difficult of all — Neal Stephenson.

  But what is the “Post” in “Post-Cyberpunk”? In the effort to understand just what PCP has to do with CP, let’s take a closer look at some of these obsessions.

  obsessions

  A major CP obsession was the way emerging technologies will change what it means to be human. Much science fiction has concerned itself with technology and changes in human culture. Indeed, the cautionary tale is a staple of the genre: if this goes on, things will get very bad indeed. But the assumption of the cautionary tale is that we have some control over the changes that technology will bring, so that if we act in a timely way, we can preserve consensus values. The cyberpunks studied the history of how humans have tried to manage change, and were not impressed. Moreover, the technologies of the twenty-first century are invasive and intimate. A key insight of CP, extended still further in PCP, is that we are no longer changing technology; rather it has begun to change us. Not just our homes and schools, our governments and workplaces, but our senses, our memories, and our very consciousness. Ubiquitous computing with access to all recorded knowledge, instantaneous communication across the entire planet, add-ons to the Human Operating System, manipulation of our genome—all are on the horizon. The changes these technologies will bring are qualitatively different than the changes caused by the automobile, or even by science fiction’s longed-for invention of faster-than-light starships. Yes, cars transformed the landscape and gave rise to the malls, McDonald’s and the suburbs. Sure, FTL will get us to the stars. But cars and starships change what we do, not who we are.

  It has been observed that the future that cyberpunks envisioned seems very dark indeed. However, dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. While we may shudder at the thought of living in some of these worlds, the fictional denizens of pep stories seldom exhibit nostalgia for the good old days of 2007. What seems grim to us is simply the world to them. Characters in these stories are too busy living their lives to waste much time wringing their hands over the subversion of our values. Why should they? Do we live in a dystopia? One can easily imagine the American Founding Fathers, even the technophilic libertine Benjamin Franklin, recoiling in horror at some of the values of our society. In pep stories, human values are not imprinted on the fabric of the universe because what it means to be human is always negotiable.

  These traits of PCP are so far mere extensions of CP obsessions. Another obsession of CP was to tell stories about the people that science fiction had traditionally ignored. Originally “the street” in CP meant the shadowy world of those who had set themselves against the norms of the dominant culture, hackers, thieves, spies, scam artists, and drug users. But for PCP writers the street leads to other parts of the world. Their futures have become more diverse, and richer for it. Asians and Africans and Latinos are no longer just sprinkled into stories as supporting characters, as if they are some kind of exotic seasoning. PCP writers attempt to bring them and their unique concerns to the center of their stories. PCP pays attention to the underclass, who do not have access to the transformative technologies that were the CP stock-in-trade.

  “I think we live in an incomprehensible present, and what I’m trying to do is illuminate the moment. I’m trying to make the moment accessible. I’m not even trying to explain the moment, I’m just trying to make the moment accessible.”

  —William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories

  punk

  In the beginning, the stereotypical cyberpunk protagonist was a disaffected loner from outside the cultural mainstream. Ultimately this proved not only tiresome but also betrayed a lack of extrapolative rigor. No future could exist in which there were only data thieves in trench coats and megalomaniacal middle managers. Someone had to be baking the bread and driving the trucks and assembling all those flat screens. Cyberspace needs electricians! Where was the middle class in the CP stories? What were the families like? Could the cyberpunks write about community and still be punks?

  The punk in cyberpunk has always been a problem. If by punk, one meant to say that the writers of the Mirrorshades generat
ion were young, well, they were — at the time. But while they were to varying degrees outsiders, very few of the original cyberpunks — or indeed, the contributors to this collection — could be said to have lived “on the street.” It is difficult to write orderly sentences if one is caught up in the chaos of a punk lifestyle. And as time passed, it became more and more of a stretch for some of the original cyberpunks to take their inspiration from youth culture.

  But the punk in post-cyberpunk continues to make sense if it is pointing toward an attitude: an adversarial relationship to consensus reality. This attitude is just south of cynicism but well north of mere skepticism. It has to do with a reaction to a world in which humanity must constantly be renegotiated. Ina cyberpunk story, any given moment can be at once thrilling and horrifying. Life is never smooth; it is illuminated by lightning flashes of existential insight, paved with the shards of our discredited philosophies. Sanity requires a constant recalibration of perception.

  The characters in a PCP story need this healthy dose of attitude because their relationship to reality is different from ours. Yes, there may well be, and often is, a virtual reality that is as persuasive as reality itself and far more pleasant. It can be variously a trap, an escape, or a refuge. Perhaps all three at once. But reality itself is everywhere mediated, and what comes between the characters and reality must constantly be interrogated.

  singular

  The stories in this collection are too various for us to draw a tidy summary of what twenty-first-century cyberpunk is about, nor do we see the profit in it. However, so many of them imply or actually explore a post-human future that we would be remiss if we failed to point out that a logical consequence of much of cyberpunk extrapolation is the singularity. Vernor Vinge, by no means a cyberpunk, although highly respected by them, first proposed the notion of a technological singularity in 1993. Briefly, he contemplates a moment in history in which runaway technology causes a change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence.” Vinge speculates this change may come through artificial intelligence, through computer/human interfaces, or through biological modification of the human genome. After this point, human history will end.