A Lateral Leading Edge: Australian SF and Cyberpunk
Tomorrow has arrived, and it is not a
pretty sight.
David Manasian, The Economist
Cyberpunk by itself is difficult enough to write about. Not only is it
ill-defined, but often it means contradictory things to different
people. Writing about cyberpunk in Australia is harder still, because
there has been so little of it. Thus we are going to have to define the
term itself, both inside and outside science fiction, as well as explain
just why it had such a poor following among Australian SF authors. Let
us start with the technical side.
Sean - Cyber:
We will start with . . . not so much a definition as an exploration
of cyberpunk culture. Cyberpunk is not just a literary movement; it
covers a much larger phenomenon and it did not arise overnight. Early
in this century amateur radio enthusiasts pioneered the practice of
exploring the world without leaving the comfort of one's home. The most
primitive form of computer hacking began in the '60s, when students
began experimenting with ways to crack security on early multi-user
operating systems. Then, in the early '70s, the phone phreaks appeared,
dedicated to the practice of cracking telephone network security for fun
and adventure.
Science fiction took its time adjusting to computers. For a time they
were room-sized electronic brains that would suddenly become
super-intelligent and try to take over the world until some square-jawed
hero got to the Central Processing Unit with an axe. In the early '70s
the stories began to reflect more subtle aspects of computer design.
After hearing a scientist describe a self-replicating program as
behaving like a virus, David Gerrold wrote When Harlie Was One (1972),
featuring that scourge of modern Information Technology, the computer
virus. The computer worm slithered into being in John Brunner's The
Shockwave Rider (1975), nearly fifteen years before the night of the
dreaded Internet Worm, when America's primary academic and military
research network was brought to a standstill.
All through the '70s university students had been hacking out of their
restricted mainframe accounts and into more exciting areas of academic
computers, yet the really fundamental breakthrough was the advent of
cheap telephone modems. A hacker could now sit at home with a
telephone, modem and terminal, screen phone numbers for the tell-tale
warble of a computer connection, then attempt to hack through the
machine's security measures. Whether for fun or (illegal) profit, a
hacker culture began to evolve. William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic"
(Omni, 1981) was published just when the hacking craze was gathering
pace and a year before the notorious Inner Circle hacker group was
formed. By the time Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984, the Inner
Circle had reached the public eye as a result of FBI raids, and the
movie War Games had popularised hacking amongst a large section of the
adolescent population. Hacking was real, hacking was fun, hacking was
in. Punk was also fashionable around then. Napoleon might not have
caused the French Revolution, but he made good use of its circumstances.
In the same way, Gibson hit the scene just as the frontier opened up.
Terry - Literary:
Just as Star Wars brought SF to a larger popular consciousness, and
Jurassic Park gave us dinosaurs again, so cyberpunk shows us that
sometimes the tail wags the dog so well it's taken for the whole animal.
Dynamic but hardly original works like Star Wars and Star Trek have come
to represent the sci-fi phenomenon for many, leaving a major imbalance
in how science fiction is viewed in relation to mainstream literature
and popular culture. Thus there is a reverse tendency: to identify
trends, even movements, which don't amount to all that much when taken
with larger literary standards. The contrast makes them seem
self-important, even parochial and contrived.
The New Wave, for instance, was an appropriate and exciting watershed
for the genre, reflecting the same questioning of forms that marked the
'60s generally, yet it was hardly fresh when ranged against the
explorations of form achieved by the likes of Woolf, Joyce and Beckett
earlier in the century, or by Laurence Sterne as early as the Eighteenth
Century. Contemporary social relevance rather than originality provided
its dynamic, and the question remains: was it reflecting a
consciousness that was new or did it merely represent catching up?
So too cyberpunk, as a subgenre and taken in the larger view, may be
seen as little more than a carefully reified storm in a chipped and
retro-fitted teacup, coming as it did on the heels of Blade Runner, film
noir and Sam Spade - those things given a timely, high-tech spin, but
self-caricaturing and limited, and difficult to regard as a movement.
Neuromancer (increasingly anomalous with every novel that Gibson has
published) has more affinities with Bester's The Demolished Man (1953)
and Tiger, Tiger (1956) in form and flavour than any narrow definition
of a cyberpunk 'movement'. The works which have come to characterise
the sub-genre actually changed perceptions. Most cyberpunk tales don't.
They simply imitate, and are actually quite limited, ordinary,
jumped-on-the-bandwagon-but-missed-the-train stuff.
Sean - Cyber:
Cyberpunk and hacking are quite closely associated in the popular
consciousness. One problem with SF and hacking is the mysterious,
seemingly miraculous methods required to crack computer security. In
practice most intrusions are the result of lateral thinking. Remember
the 1983 film War Games? The schoolboy hacker hero got unauthorised
access to the school computer by sneaking a look at the password, not by
magic. Back in the real world a hacker was driven into such a
vindictive frenzy by a Cray supercomputer's tight security that he
hacked the Unix workstation controlling the Cray's cooling system -
causing it to crash and bringing the supercomputer down as well. Once
again, lateral thinking, not magic. Greg Egan describes a quite
plausible hacking job in his story "Blood Sisters" (Interzone, Feb
1991), and it gives the story considerable strength. Note however that
neither War Games nor "Blood Sisters" could be described as cyberpunk.
So much for hacking, but what about the hackers themselves? They are
about as diverse a group as one could imagine, except that they tend to
be male. Real-world hackers have a class structure and pecking order,
and this is reflected in SF. To use Gibsonian paradigms again, the
character Case in Neuromancer was one of the elite, whereas Bobby
Newmark in Count Zero (1986) was a mere wannabee. Most hackers are in
Bobby's category, and by their very incompetence they amount to little
more than nuisance value. Some specialise in writing virus programs,
and some prefer worms, but most seem to go in for the traditional
intrusion method. Many are company insiders with a position of trust,
some do it for money, and some just want the adventure.
What do I personally think of hacking? It doesn't appeal, I have to
confess. If I'm working on a system and I see a hole in the security my
inclination is to leave a README file for the administrator along the
lines of "I managed this unauthorised intrusion by doing such-and-such.
I would strongly advise you to plug this hole in the system."
So that is the cyber part of it. Punk probably needs no explanation, so
what happens when we put the terms together? As far as the public is
concerned, the result looks horrible. Punk conjures up the image of a
large, malevolent psychopath with weirdly cut and coloured hair, dressed
in clothes that look and smell like they have been dredged out of a
sewer - and is liable to beat the daylights out of you if you stare at
him for too long, and who is likely to give you AIDS if you hit back and
cut your fist on his teeth. Cyber tends to be associated with some
nondescript, daggy kid who bats away at his PC for 72 hours at a
stretch, eating cold turkey stuffing out of a packet and relieving
himself in a coke bottle while he mysteriously charges a telephone call
to Los Angeles to your account so he can do unauthorised things to
nuclear missile launch computers - and who is liable to trash your PC
with the latest computer virus and transfer the contents of your bank
account to the Roger Rabbit Appreciation Society if you dare complain.
Terry - Punk:
Analyse what is behind the popular misconceptions and we find that we
are dealing with nothing more than convenient icons. To use an analogy,
there was only one mass bra-burning incident in the early Women's
Movement, yet that image became an icon in popular consciousness. Most
punks are making more of a cultural, artistic or fashion statement, and
most cybernerds are more interested in games and mucking about with
email than cybernetic mayhem. Put CYBER and PUNK together, however . .
.
Sean - Cyber:
. . . and a slavering, unstoppable, computer-raping offspring is
taken for granted by the general population.
Real-world cyberpunk covers a large and ill-defined area - an area so
large that it is actually meaningless. There is the Sydney cyberpunk
band, Bass Age, for example, which consists of three humans and several
computer-based instruments. In full costume the sight of Bass Age's
humans is enough to make respectable citizens cross to the other side of
the street, yet they are polite, friendly and well-spoken on a personal
level: cyberpunk is only the image. The science magazine Helix has run
two articles on hackers, "Attack Of The Cyberpunks" (Aug/Sept) and
"Hacking The Cyberpunks" (Oct/Nov), yet the only suggestion of "punk" in
the articles is the suggestion of anti-authoritarianism as a motive. In
SF cyberpunk becomes even more of a problem. It often means speaking a
convincing street-language of high tech while telling stories that are
apolitical yet anti-authoritarian.
Real-world hackers do seem to read SF cyberpunk, and often they even try
to write it. Judge any SF short story competition, which I do from time
to time, and you are sure to encounter several examples where the theme
revolves around some cocky young kid who hacks about on "the Network"
until he (remember, they're nearly always male) comes to the attention
of some secret organisation that either recruits him or has his head
blown off. In the USA in the mid-'80s it got so bad that some editors
introduced the ABC (Anything But Cyberpunk) policy. Cyberpunk in SF is
probably so popular with real-world "cyberpunks" because it is the stuff
of their dreams. The real-world hacker, like the real-world scientist,
spends a huge amount of time on boring legwork, with only an occasional
exciting breakthrough. The SF story puts all the excitement into one
package, and a totally safe one at that.
Terry - Literary:
If we are going to discuss cyberpunk fiction by Australians, we need to
identify it. Like good art, people tend not to be able to define it
particularly well, but they think they know it when they see it.
Nonetheless, even this intuitive approach has its problems. How is it
that people can consider Bruce Sterling's Islands In The Net (1988) to
be cyberpunk, but not Greg Bear's Queen Of Angels (1990)? Gibson's
Neuromancer is generally taken to be the archetype, featuring a fast
moving, language driven, technically orientated tale from the future
underculture, so it will have to do as our yardstick.
Although Neuromancer won the Hugo at the World SF Convention in
Melbourne in 1985, Australians were slow to follow in its wake and
cyberpunk took its time getting established with Australian authors.
Interestingly, Melbourne was also the city of origin of the Tessier side
of the Tessier-Ashpool family in William Gibson's first three novels,
and in general Australia and Australians often feature in cyberpunk
works from overseas.
Sean - Cyber:
Australia's publishing industry of the 1980s was partly to blame. There
was a large market for short fiction, yet it had to be short fiction
with a strong academic/literary orientation. The market favoured
stories of around 3000 words with a leaning towards themes and issues
that would be considered 'significant' or at least 'worthy'. Clearly SF
in general, and cyberpunk in particular, had a hard time in such an
environment. In spite of all the difficulties, however, opportunities
did arise which seemed to favour cyberpunk being published locally.
Between November 1987 and November 1988 eighteen stories were published
in the local computer press - namely The Australian newspaper's weekly
computer supplement and the weekly magazine Computing Australia.
Terry - Literary:
Of all places to find cyberpunk, one might have expected that it would
be most likely to surface in fiction appearing in computing magazines,
but only one story even came close to resembling cyberpunk. The twelve
Computing Australia stories were finalists in a $5,000 short story
competition, and the author of the winning story was serving a sentence
in a Victorian jail for theft. Surely one could not hope for more
conducive conditions for cyberpunk to appear, yet the themes and styles
that he used were very conventional. The single story that might be
identified as cyberpunk was a finalist in the competition, but not the
winner - and the author has definitely not been in jail. Comparing
"Just A Company Man" (7/12/87), by Perry Morrison with, say, William
Gibson's early short works, is rather like comparing the Wright
Brothers' Flyer with the Concorde: they both fly, but the latter does
it a lot better. Morrison attempts to make use of pace, language and
technology to get the reader involved, but basically he has written a
pacy, simple crime story. Some fairly archaic forms are employed in
order to construct streetwise language: "Sorry mister, he said, but
ain't nobody allowed ta have blasters in the Lizard. So gimmie it or
else I gotta bust ya." Not quite Ratz in the Chatsubo. Morrison, a
computer professional, tries hard to evoke real life, futuristic
high-technology by the use of slang yet the result comes out either too
stilted or too polite to be convincing.
Of the six stories in The Australian, five were comic pieces, and were
very conventional in style, structure and language. The last was
Fredlein's "A Biassed Symbiosis" (21/6/93), in which a covertly
totalitarian government recruits a young hacker to help rig elections.
As a story it seems to borrow more from Orwell than cyberpunk, and is
basically a conventional work of SF.
Many of the eighteen stories were well written, many were good SF, and a
few even managed to be both, but stylistically they could have been
written in the 1950s. Gibson's concept of a futuristic skid row is
beyond the interest of these authors, whose characters are, without
exception, middle class and bland.
Sean - Literary (. . . just to prove that there's more to me than a
fast CPU and a couple of hundred Gig. of storage): At this point it is
necessary to say a few words on language. Its role in cyberpunk is
crucial, yet it is an aspect of creating futuristic ambience that is
most often neglected or misinterpreted in Australia. Within years,
sometimes months, most new and trendy terms will have become
"establishment", if not actually obsolete. Remember that it takes
around fourteen months for a story to reach the newsstands from the
actual date of submission. Clearly then, one needs the freshness and
excitement of a new term without being dependant on a real-world
vocabulary that can become obsolete while the story is still at the
printers. Authority can compensate for this unstable foundation, and an
examination of the better overseas cyberpunk supports this.
Gibson's use of a type of latter-day Japanesquery is one example of
terminological authority. Japan's current domination of a large section
of the world's economy and overall technological excellence are long
term, so that companies, brands and products whose names are structured
to produce associations with contemporary names are able to carry the
illusion of being state-of-the-art. The Ono-Sendai decks in Gibson's
novels are sufficiently attuned to the contemporary computer industry
language to sound 'real', yet the name is sufficiently removed not to be
affected by the speed at which the industry is evolving. It is much the
same with the pop component of cyberpunk language, in that one must
convey a sense of the latest fashions in terms that do not age.
Going back to the early 1980s, there are a few examples of Australian SF
with more strongly defined cyberpunk characteristics. In May 1982 Terry
Dowling had "The Man Who Walks Away Behind The Eyes" published in Omega
Science Digest. The story is surrealist in structure and content: a
man is to be executed within his own mind, but when his executioner
comes stalking him he flees, hides and fights back within himself.
While the story incorporates most of the stylistic features that one
would expect to find in cyberpunk (including virtual reality), the style
is cerebral rather than streetwise. The story was Dowling's first, and
it won the Ditmar Award the following year.
In mid-1985 Russell Blackford's "Glass Reptile Breakout" was published
in the anthology Strange Attractors. Blackford's setting is much closer
to cyberpunk than in any of the other stories. Blackford is an admirer
of overseas cyberpunk authors, and both the language and setting of the
story are identifiably cyberpunk. Set some decades into the future, the
story features fashions in punk body modifications, and discos that have
such entertainment features as self-mutilators. Well, some contemporary
Tokyo clubs feature live enema shows, so why not? The language,
setting, and technology are all convincing, and it is definitely
cyberpunk. It is interesting to note that Blackford has a Doctorate in
English.
Thus two authors well grounded in the study of language, but without
strong backgrounds in computing, were closer to getting cyberpunk's
language right than those writing for the computer press - as one might
expect. Cyberpunk's most important characteristic is its language, and
while it is vital, even crucial, to get the technology right, without
language there is no cyberpunk.
Other Australian authors have also made use of the computer culture in
their SF writing. Gillian Rubenstein is one of Australia's best known
children's authors. Two of her novels, Space Demons (1986) and Skymaze
(1989) incorporate the familiar cyberpunk of computer games but the
style and prose are quite conventional. Space Demons is a prototype
computer game imported directly from Japan, and has the effect of
forcing the players to confront the darker sides of their own natures.
Hate initiates the game, quite literally, and the players participate by
generating aggression. Unknown to the players, one wins by conquering
hate, and putting one's gun down. Space Demons has had several print
runs, and has won a number of awards - all of them non-genre. Note yet
again that Rubenstein has an academic background in language, having
studied Modern Languages at Oxford before coming to Australia. She is
only one of several authors who have evoked the pace and excitement
characteristic of cyberpunk without making a commitment to the style
itself.
There is evidence that other Australian SF writers have been
experimenting with the cyberpunk form, but have not been lucky enough to
see their work reach print. In 1990 the local representative of the
Writers of the Future competition estimated that one story in fifteen
submitted in Australia was cyberpunk in both style and content.
Remember that one story in eighteen amongst the computer press SF was
cyberpunk, and we can conclude that there was a small groundswell of
cyberpunk writing in Australia by 1989. Where did it go from there? I
was recently a judge for a short story competition where one entry in
six was cyberpunk, and other works have made it into print. Some
authors certainly have embraced cyberpunk as it is generally understood.
For example Paul Collins, a prolific and stylish Australian author, has
made use of the form consistently in his short stories, particularly the
Calloway series. Damien Broderick is another fine Australian SF author,
some of whose works seem to come close to the sub-genre: "Coming Back"
(Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dec 1982) and The Judas Mandala (1982), for
example. In cases like these, one has to apply the "I'll know it when I
see it" principle. Broderick writes SF, and - unlike many authors - he
very sensibly keeps up with current trends. This might give his works a
particular flavour from time to time, but it does not force them into
any specific basket.
Terry - Literary:
Remember that the best cyberpunk work (like the best surrealist work,
for example) has probably been produced independently of any movement,
often produced obliquely to it and in spite of it. In other words,
original, synthesising, ground-breaking work often proceeds tangentially
and is at odds with the followers, imitators, joiners and marketeers who
seek to honour, emulate and enshrine it as a real social force. Gibson
himself was pre-cyberpunk! His own original lack of computer literacy
is the ultimate irony in this regard -showing that it is a perceptual
shift, a streetwise hipness of viewing trends to which computer
knowledge is incidental, merely part of the enabling decor. Like most
movements, cyberpunk is a reactive thing - a social perception, a
different way of seeing and ordering reality. Computer knowledge and
language are its hallmarks, not its driving force: that is why being a
computer wizard or hacker, or even a gifted linguist are not enough.
You have to have the intuitive consciousness, the correct second-nature
intention, something quite hard to identify among all the imitators.
So what is going on in Australia today? Is Australian cyberpunk booming
and winning awards, or is it just a minor style that never really took
off? Let's check overseas for a benchmark. Bruce Sterling is widely
known as a Mister Cyberpunk by reputation, so how does his current work
look? Islands In The Net is said to be cyberpunk because of the
author's reputation, but it is really something more than that. Some
dinosaurs might have evolved into birds, but it is stretching the point
a bit to refer to birds as dinosaurs. They have built on some
characteristics of their ancestors, but they have become something
different. The same applies to such problematic works as Queen Of
Angels and Islands In The Net in their relation to cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk has given way to . . . let's call it realtech, a type of
rigorous, hard SF. Realtech is not dehumanised technophilia, it is the
provision of the firmest possible technical basis for the characters to
play their roles upon. Statements on the human condition require an
accurate depiction of the human environment, and there are plenty of
mainstream literary works with little basis in fact. Make the
environment fanciful and the statement is weakened as well.
In Australia Greg Egan and Sean McMullen are clearly two realtech
naturals. While Egan's SF is about as high tech as one can get, it is
marginal as cyberpunk. The story that many consider to be Egan's
finest, "The Caress" (Asimov's SF Magazine, Jan 1990) featured
bio-engineering, computer technology and high-tech criminals, and had it
been published in the mid-'80s it might have been called cyberpunk. In
the 1990s it is something else. His Ditmar Award winning novel
Quarantine (1992) makes extensive use of cyberpunk backdrops and icons,
but it reads as very sophisticated science fiction. Sean McMullen's
near-future story "Alone In His Chariot" (Eidolon, Mar 1991) was another
Ditmar Award winner, but while it dealt with the underground drug
culture, high tech medical research and a type of virtual reality, the
author admits to writing it without consciously thinking of cyberpunk.
Its language is definitely not that of the sub-genre.
Sean & Terry - Cyberpunk In Australia:
When Cyberpunk in its 'classic' form arrived on the scene in the
mid-'80s, it was a bad time to get established in Australia. Many local
authors were still experimenting with New Wave styles better suited to
the late '60s, those authors willing to try their hand at cyberpunk were
often inexperienced newcomers who had a hard time selling their work at
all, and the local SF publishing industry was about to go into a
temporary decline. During Neuromancer's first decade of life,
Australian authors did not manage to jack in to the overseas cyberpunk
market before it waned, yet it was not for want of trying. Perhaps
cyberpunk's legacy in Australia is that by the early '90s some
Australian SF authors had noted its strengths and built on them very
successfully to create a different type of leading edge.
Originally appeared pp. 14-21, Eidolon 14, April 1994.
Copyright © 1994 Sean McMullen and Terry Dowling.
end
|