Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

The title of Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology is by itself enough to invite comparison with the famed 1986 Mirrorshades cyberpunk anthology. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s introduction to the volume, “Hacking Cyberpunk” (which appeared as a feature in the August 2007 issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction), only reinforces this first impression by starting off with the story of how David Hartwell and Bruce Sterling conceived the earlier project.

Nonetheless, it should be made clear up front that Rewired is not another Mirrorshades, not because of some fault of those who put this anthology together, but because “PCP” does not lend itself to this. Rather than trying to present a new way of looking at the world, it simply takes what was once new in cyberpunk as a familiar starting point for something broader, with all the fuzziness that entails (and the definition of cyberpunk could be fuzzy to begin with).

Accordingly, instead of a manifesto what we have are the notes toward one, to paraphrase the title of Lawrence Person’s well-known 1998 essay in Nova Express. As Person tells it there, PCP differs from “CP” primarily in its nuances, such as a greater technical accomplishment in tune with its lessened dependence on novelty, and particularly in including more middle-class, optimistic takes on the future. (Call it “cyberborgie” fiction.) Kelly and Kessel, similarly, see “PCP” as more socially and ethnically diverse (more multicultural, but again as Person suggests, more middle-class too), as well as a bit more playful, and the technology that much more advanced—extending the key ideas rather than advancing new ones.

Well-written as they are, these two pieces raised as many questions in my mind as they answered, particularly where the core outlooks of CP and PCP are concerned. It was, for instance, my reading of CP that there were no middle class, no community and no families in it because the kinds of change these stories projected tear apart the social fabric in which they could exist, as so much contemporary social criticism suggests. (Check out Morris Berman’s Dark Ages America, or for that matter, my own article “On Dark Ages” in the November-December 2007 Futurist, where I found in cyberpunk’s sensibility an apt description of our moment.)

Consequently, what are we to make of the brighter, more celebratory economic and social outlook attributed to post-cyberpunk? Is it just fashionable backsliding from the severity of the earlier vision amid mindless New Economy optimism? Or, perhaps, just a more overt, attractive expression of what CP really was offering all along? Critics like Nicola Nixon and Mark Bould have argued all along that the “punk” in cyberpunk is often just surface gloss, that CP tends to be complicit in 1980s conservatism, particularly its economics. In his Hugo-winning The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch went as far as calling it a “literature designed to reconcile the youth of middle-class America to their lot” in a world where “Third World poverty belongs to everyone, and the American Dream has gone belly up.” The 1990s, however, offered a spoonful of sugar to make the monetarist medicine go down, perhaps opening the door to this shift in attitude, from reconciliation to an unappealing reality, to offering a positive spin on that reality instead.

Alternatively, might the changes, like the diminished interest in disaffected, economically marginal loners, reflect the fortunes of its authors as anything else, come up in the world as they have since the time when they were writing their first books? Sterling certainly tells us how far he has come in Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. Where

twenty-five years ago, back in the Legendary Days of Early Struggle, I was young and sloppy and bohemian . . . [now] there’s no question that I am a member of this planet’s financial elite. I’ve even been to the Davos World Economic Forum . . . I was invited faculty.

The Davos World Economic Forum is, for many of its critics, the very symbol of the undemocratic, destructive corporate order which made cyberpunk futures as dismal as they were.

William Gibson, once a draft-dodger living off the Canadian welfare state as a professional student, now sits comfortably atop the New York Times bestseller list; in the documentary No Maps For These Territories, he describes Neuromancer as a “young man’s book” of the sort he simply could not write now.

In the end, however, it is probably best to look less to manifestos and more to the stories themselves. The sixteen collected here—all first published between 1996 and 2006, and arranged in order of appearance—testify amply to the limitations of any sweeping generalization about PCP. There is certainly plenty of New Economy hype here, but there is also plenty of skepticism about it, and looking beyond it—often but not always to the New Economy roaring back bigger and better than ever right around the bend as the cheerleaders expect. (Particularly when looking at the more skeptical, post-tech bubble stories, I found myself wondering if it isn’t too soon to start speaking of a post-post-cyberpunk, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” a striking case in point.)

What I can safely say after having read those stories, however, is that this is an impressive collection of recent science fiction which demonstrates that even if the genre is still waiting for its next revolution, a fair amount of recent writing in it has not lacked for variety, vitality, and interest.

Bruce Sterling’s “Bicycle Repairman” starts off the collection. The titular repairman, Lyle, is squatting in his shop, which he and his friends set up inside a burned-out apartment building in exotic Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2037. (The shop itself is set up in a mobile home suspended inside the building’s atrium, and raised and lowered to ground level by means of a system of cables rigged by the City Spiders as the situation warrants.)

Sweeping into his less than idyllic life is a black bag woman working for the government of the North American Free Trade Area—which now shares a state as well as a market, much as in the nightmares of those spinning dark conspiracy theories about North American Union.

A great deal of this looks more CP than PCP, but the neighborhood where Lyle is leading this punk existence is characterized not as suffering from permanent Third World shabbiness, but merely the down-cycle of urban renewal process. He is not necessarily consigned to society’s margins forever: there is at least the idea that he is merely walking the paths of Bohemia while finding his piece of the American Dream—and should that not work out, he can always move back in with mom. The government “ninja” after him, rather than menacing, comes off as laughable, a figure bypassed by history.

The result is a story that is on the whole clever and entertaining in its imagination of many of its details, and the incongruity of the central confrontation between Lyle and company and the government agent. However, the blitheness with which it presents its basic outlook—the easy Faith in the Market, the romance of the start-up in the garage, the idea that the “right-wing paramilitary wackos” in government have been conveniently bypassed by history—makes it already feel more like an enjoyable time capsule than a vision of the future.

Gwyneth Jones’s “Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland” raises the now-familiar idea of cyberspace’s virtual worlds holding out the possibility of ordinary human beings realizing their every pornographic fantasy. However, for its anonymous protagonist, “Sonja,” her foray into virtual reality is less about pleasure-seeking than therapy.

As the title implies, “Sonja”’s version of this is a Howardesque sword-and-sorcery world where she parades as an invincible warrior woman, complete with provocative fantasy costume. However, as she finds out the hard way, cybersex brings with it all the same baggage as the original version—at least, when it involves other people.

I found this piece much more accessible than the other work of Jones’s I’ve read over the years, and while I didn’t warm to the characters involved, some of the questions it raises are well worth mulling over.

Jonathan Lethem’s “How We Got in Town and out Again” leaves behind the world of budding inventors making Bohemian lifestyle choices and people with psychiatrists for the societal margins of old-fashioned CP. The good-natured but simple narrator, Lewis, and his protective, streetwise friend, Gloria, are a pair of adolescent drifters who find themselves caught up with a futuristic version of the Depression-era dance marathon. In this one, the activity to sustain is interaction with a simulated environment for the entertainment of spectators, and just as in the dance marathons, an activity that was supposed to be pleasurable becomes grueling and exploitative. Lewis and Gloria’s adventures encompass funny and touching moments amid the bleakness and are always engaging.

In Greg Egan’s “Yeyuka,” an Australian surgeon volunteers for humanitarian work overseas mainly because, as he puts it, he had a late burst of adolescent idealism, an early midlife crisis—or a need to feel relevant in an age in which devices like the HealthGuard ring on his finger (which continually monitors his bloodstream and automatically neutralizes anything that shouldn’t be there) are making his skills obsolete. His work in Uganda, however, is a stark reminder that the medical utopianism he took for granted exists only for the rich, while the inhabitants of the plague-ridden country he is in suffer not only from preventable disease (like the new Yeyuka epidemic), but the exploitation and abuse of the same medical firms that gave him his HealthGuard. As he learns more about the reality of the situation, his confused, egoistic foray into charity confronts him into a grave moral dilemma. The result is perhaps the sharpest, most tightly constructed—and perhaps, also the least dated—story in the collection.

Pat Cadigan’s “The Final Remake of ‘The Return of Little Latin Larry’” starts out as a fairly conventional piece of CP/PCP, both technologically and culturally, in its focus on a media editor recreating interactive experiences of past events biotechnologically, via “distillable memory.” However, the setting proves to be something quite different at first glance, this being a distant, post-collapse future. (We never find out what this involves, but apparently there were mutants, and Manhattan became two islands.) The disparity between that familiar near-future feel and that much greater historical distance struck me as incongruous but proved critical to the reality game at the center of the story.

While the core concept is interesting, and the train of thought in which the story culminated appealed to me, I found the narrative voice Cadigan used at the beginning initially disorienting and off-putting (though I got used to it as the story progressed), the writing could have been tighter, and I would have preferred if the historical distance key to the story manifested itself in a more thoroughly fleshed out future.

William Gibson’s “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City” is structured as a series of word-pictures or, more precisely, word-photographs, of the interior of a Tokyo subway station. Much like “The Gernsback Continuum,” it reconstructs a world-image from ubiquitous artifacts, but where that story focuses on the relics of a bygone modernism, and the dreams of a future that never came to pass embedded in them which would haunt that story’s narrator, this comparatively minimalist, fragmented narrative infers bleak scenes of an unseen urban life from its images. Detachment and alienation are of course standard themes in Gibson’s writing, but the complete absence of characters (and with them, story) takes this to its starkest possible extreme, with the one, allusive hint of possible relief the prospect of a “map back out of the underground.”

David Marusek’s “The Wedding Album,” the longest piece in this anthology, depicts a future in which, just as people today remember major events in their lives with photos and video, they use full-blown virtual copies of themselves in a given moment (simulacra, or “sims”) to commemorate events. Anne Franklin (or to be precise, a sim of Anne on her wedding day) finds herself periodically shelved and then summoned back again through centuries of personal and human history.

The abrupt shifts in time reminded me less of Olaf Stapledon (the comparison this volume’s editors make) than Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, in which the gap between time as experienced by his protagonists as they fly between galactic battles at relativistic speeds, and back home on Earth, quickly adds up. So did the fact that like that story, the big difference back on Earth has so much to do with how human beings reproduce themselves (broadly defined).

Rather than being just an entertaining gimmick, however, those time shifts force the old questions of what exactly being human consists of and where the line between the virtual and the real really lies. The drama never quite drew me in, but the concepts were sufficient to hold my attention.

Walter Jon Williams’s story, “Daddy’s World,” begins with our protagonist, young Jamie, in a child’s fairy tale playland. Attractive as that playland is, though, things appear in it which increasingly disturb him, and virtuality, its possibilities, implications, and limitations increasingly become an issue. Longtime science fiction fans will have seen this basic story told before, but the telling of it from a child’s perspective, and the intelligence, sensitivity and grace of the execution, make the material fresh and new, and the story is one of the most involving and poignant in the collection.

Michael Swanwick’s Hugo-winning short story “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” is the titular story of a Swanwick collection by the same name which came out in September. It depicts a “post-Utopian” future in which a vaguely remembered, mythologized disaster (apparently the havoc wrought by malignant artificial intelligences) has ended our present line of technological development but not produced a simple reversion to premodern times. Instead, technology has advanced along other lines and in other ways, particularly in the manipulation of genes. (This postmodern, “biopunk” take on technological society has gained in popularity in recent years, and a similar theme is evident in Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man.”)

The main character in the story is a talking, anthropomorphic dog known as “Sir Plus,” a dashing rogue who owes his existence to such technology, and his plans for the technologies that have all but disappeared—namely, a racket he intends to run at the royal court in London involving a forbidden modem—feature in this story. Swanwick’s usual combination of wit and fancy is on full display here, and those who enjoy “Bow-Wow” can check out the further adventures of Sir Plus in the Hugo-nominated “The Little Cat Laughed To See Such Sport,” and “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play” (also available in Swanwick’s collection).

While the editors describe Charles Stross’s “Lobsters” as “in tune with a ’90s embrace of entrepreneurial capitalism,” what I found when I read it was rather more complex and interesting than the New Economy paean this description implied. The protagonist Manfred, a “venture altruist,” constantly defies capitalist convention by going around “giving away get rich quick schemes that work” and determinedly living outside the cash nexus (which he can do well, because he’s owed plenty of favors), behaviors which are not merely eccentric. Looking ahead to a post-scarcity future (from a standpoint of global economic Depression and a blooming American debt-and-pensions crisis), he is intensely annoyed with both capitalists and Communists alike.

In rendering a future where Manfred’s behavior makes sense (even if most of the people around him don’t yet realize that it does), Stross offers a blizzard of well-wrought concepts, details, and notions unequaled in the whole volume. These include a host of bizarre social mutations (Russian Neo-Communists obsessed with Austrian School economics, the perverse contradictions of 21st century Neo-Puritanism) that are much more than background to a plot involving the defection of a KGB artificial intelligence, cybernetic lobsters, and the IRS headhunter/dominatrix who wants to have Manfred’s baby as he passes through Amsterdam. The results are consistently engaging, the pacing brisk, and the craziness of a world moving toward technological Singularity comes right through.

Paul Di Filippo’s “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” is, as anyone familiar either with the author or the film he references might guess, is a wacky, pop culture soaked comedy. At the heart of the story is “Bash” (short for “Basho”; he was named after the Japanese poet), a computer geek tycoon of the kind that so captured American imaginations in the 1990s.

Bash, ironically a child of parents burned by the ’90s tech bubble “who took a vow…to have nothing further to do with any hypothetical future digital utopia,” earned his place in nerd Valhalla by inventing “proteopape” (protean paper). This near-magical version of the smart paper we’ve heard so much about becomes the fundamental building block of modern civilization in a matter of years—and makes Bash himself wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. (The New Economy, in short, comes back with a vengeance; Bash’s neo-hippie parents having simply been foolish in their choice of Internet enterprise and proving to be on the wrong side of history.)

A run-in with an old college crush, however, creates the danger of upsetting everything he has accomplished, and the situation snowballs out of control. There are some real ideas here under the lunacy, and while Di Filippo is heavily reliant on throwaway jokes to achieve his effect, most of them work, just as in a good episode of Family Guy.

In Christopher Rowe’s “The Voluntary State,” a rogue artificial intelligence, “Athena Parthenus, Queen of Logic,” has established a dictatorship inside the “voluntary state” of Tennessee. The all-pervading AI is barely contained from expanding beyond the “Girding Wall” put up around it by the desperate military efforts of the rest of the world. In the course of minding his own business, a Tennessean citizen, Soma Painter, is captured by a Kentuckian special forces team infiltrated into the country on what they hope will be a war-winning mission, dragging the Bohemian artist into the very middle of the conflict.

The remarkable density of detail in this highly developed and thoroughly lived-in future (comparable only to Stross’s “Lobsters” in this volume, though much weirder), and the seemingly magical fusions of biotechnology and artificial intelligence, make for occasionally confusing reading. I also felt at times that the deluge of innovation overwhelmed the plot (at its core, a fairly simple one). However, the sheer imagination invested in it rewards attentive reading.

Elizabeth Bear’s “Two Dreams on Trains” is the shortest piece in the collection, an eight-page vignette from the life of Patience, a single mother living in the rickety, floating, surreal remnants of the drowned city of New Orleans—the scene of a technologically advanced but socially regressive, caste-ridden culture. Patience’s dream is for her and her adolescent son, Javier, to get away to a better life on the mainland through his entry into a trade, but the artistic Javier has other ideas.

Like Egan’s “Yeyuka,” Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man” offers a future where the New Economy not only concealed unseemly realities, but simply never came to pass. In his world, we never liberated ourselves from the constraints of the ecosystem or the industrial Old Economy. The world’s oil simply ran out, and modernity predictably came crashing down afterward, leaving us in a world with all the knowledge we have so painfully acquired over the centuries—but not the cheap, abundant energy source to make much use of it.

Nor can the discontented take comfort in this as the last act of an ecological morality play. Life, which is not some romantic return to nature, but poor, nasty, brutish, and short, sees no less rapacity and even sharper versions of the inequities and abuses of the old world, agriculture continuing under the iron-fist of quasi-fedual “calorie” corporations using tactics already being criticized today, like exploitative intellectual property claims and “Terminator technology” seeds.

The protagonist, Lalji, is an aging Indian immigrant who fled starvation in India amid the collapse and now operates a “kinetic shop” in New Orleans. (What’s left of civilization is held together in large part through the creative use of animal power, in this case, genetically engineered animals on treadmills winding up “kink-springs”—the preferred method for storing their kinetic energy to power such things as boats playing the Mississippi.) Into Lalji’s life comes his old friend, Shriram, wanting to smuggle a fugitive from the calorie corporations. The result is a compelling, idea-packed adventure upriver across an original and frightening post-oil landscape.

Mary Rosenblum takes a very timely theme—the threat to privacy created by the electronic trails we leave behind with our credit cards—and extrapolates from it for the basis of her effective neo-noir story, “Search Engine.” Her protagonist here, an upmarket private detective named Aman, makes his living by following exactly those trails, reconstructing the details of people’s lives from their purchases with uncanny speed and accuracy. As one might expect, Aman finds himself in over his head while chasing down a Gaiist Runner for the government, a reminder he didn’t need that even where the technology has changed, the reasons people use it have not.

Reading Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” a title that can not help but evoke a sense of long-vanished dinosaurs, I found myself thinking of the ARPANet that was the forerunner of today’s Internet—or rather, the urban myth about it as having been designed to survive nuclear attack.

At the center of Doctorow’s story are a group of the titular sysadmins on duty in Toronto just as a series of concatenating disasters, apparently attacks by unknown terrorists using every conceivable weapon and tactic against every conceivable group, bring much of civilization crashing down in a matter of days. As far as they know, they are all that’s left of the modern world, but even that’s tentative.

What follows is a tweaked version of the familiar trope of a group of people isolated together in the wake of a disaster, the nuclear war bunker variant in particular, tweaked with reference to current images of threat, and the casting of the bunker’s inhabitants as a collection of stereotyped computer geeks—PCP’s clear answer to the “rock-ribbed Competent Men” of Golden Age science fiction.

The collision between geekdom and a mood of terrorist apocalypse reminded me of Sterling’s novel, The Zenith Angle. A tale of the end of the tech bubble and the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks, it was a story about the end of the 1990s. Doctorow’s larger-scale version of the same sort of moment, down to the title, similarly captures the passing of that age, and though Kelly and Kessel do not seem to have been thinking along such lines in assembling this anthology, the placement of “Sysadmins” at the end of the volume is only too fitting.

Publisher: Tachyon Publications (October, 2007)
Price: $14.95
Paperback: 320 pages
ISBN: 1892391538