Crossing Genres: Is Cross Genre SF Killing Science Fiction?
Somewhere in the genre community there is someone blaming the death of science fiction on all those bastards mixing their filthy mysteries and romances with the hardcore awesomeness of SF. I don’t know where they are, but knowing the SF/F community as well as I do, I have no doubt that they exist, frothing at the mouth every time an author like Michael Chabon or Richard Morgan or *insert cross genre author here* tosses out a new, critically acclaimed book. After all, cross genre SF is a terrible amalgam that is systemically tearing down science fiction, piece by piece, right? Hardly. Cross genre is perhaps the best thing to happen to science fiction since the golden age, at least as far as being an intentional “movement.” What cross genre does is exactly what science fiction needs to convince people that it’s not the same thing it always was, that it’s not the spaceships and explosions and Star Wars/Star Trek rip-offs that too many people have allowed to flood their minds. It’s more than that. It’s complicated narratives involving anything from intense murder mysteries to complex relationships to interstellar battles. Spaceships and explosions may exist, but they are not contingent; they are probably elements of a particular brand of SF, a brand that cross genre circumvents, or, perhaps less negatively, moves around to take the genre in new directions. SF, ultimately, is better off with these non-traditional narratives injected into it. We need the mixture in SF as much as we need ideas and strong prose, especially if SF expects to survive and continue to be relevant. SF has to be able to move around, to work its way into the cracks of other genres and remind people that it’s there and ready to cause some literary damage. What do you think of cross genre SF? Do you hate it or think it’s great? Let me know!
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Five): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk C)
Now we come to the crux of the cyberpunk movement: its death. Cyberpunk was, unfortunately, always a movement that was losing momentum as it gained it. Even Gibson saw the looming death of the subgenre. He said so during a book signing some years back that I attended; he remarked that he had always considered the label “cyberpunk” to be a death note for any author, because it would be hailed almost exclusively as a label one could never escape. He was, of course, mostly right. Most of the cyberpunk voices that took up the mantle of cyber and punk are largely silent today, with exception to the greats who were able to live outside the limited scope of cyberpunk itself. Gibson, now, is a contemporary novelist who uses the furniture of cyberpunk, but does not write cyberpunk novels (though not in the same sense as Harlan Ellison and science fiction). Why did cyberpunk die in the United States and other far west countries? To answer this we have to look at what is so terrifying about the prospect of the death of science fiction. The fear, it seems, is invoked in the terror of the encroaching future. Science fiction is presumed to be dying precisely because we are already in its propose initiating point (i.e. the originary point of all science fiction tales that forever complicates the notion that science fiction is about the future). Whatever notion of future (present and past) there may be in the science fiction landscape, proponents of its death assume that its originary point limits its relevance. As such, most science fiction would seem to have found its death in two ways: 1) where it has ceased to have relevance to the projections or speculations upon the future, effected here by the prospect of the future always moving faster towards us, exponentially with the complicating of the micro-processor and processing power (the death of near- and almost-near-future science fiction); 2) the loss of the “sensawunda” or the loss of the shock of the novum (as Darko Suvin applies it to SF). Both of these deaths, however flawed, are hailed by Deathers (to take clever liberty with the Birther movement President Obama is all too familiar with) as the definitive moments that have disrupted science fiction from the fabric of literature. However, unlike science fiction, cyberpunk was always already dying, because it came at the dawn of its futuristic imagination. That imagination, coupling the speculative future of science fiction with the present conditions of networks, could never leap beyond, in its purest form, its originary point. Whatever lay beyond could be nothing more than an amalgam, a bastardized version of the real thing clinging like a parasite to the master beast: science fiction. Cyberpunk died because it did not contain within its structure the ability to survive the future; once its future became true, at least insofar as its key elements were concerned (primarily the adoption of the Internet on a massive level and the introduction of the hacker or socially-inept figure who resists through difference the systemic structures of corporatism), then it had nowhere else to go, except to merge with other, more adaptable forms. Cyberpunk was, and always will be, an evolutionary dead end in the face of genre. That is not to say that cyberpunk is truly gone; no, as I have indicated here, cyberpunk was adopted, even absorbed into other forms, particularly the master narrative of science fiction and the various more prolific and profitable sub-entities (particularly military SF and space opera, two subgenres that have yet to reach their originary point). But, as a punk genre, as a genre with something to say, cyberpunk is dead, because as much as we might see its elements lingering in the bulbous mass of science fiction and even in the quasi-fictions of modern popular movies (the Bourne books, Mission Impossible, and even the new incarnations of James Bond, among other less “masculine” items), it is never a part of the critique of modern culture. Even when it is taken up again and presented in its “purest” form, it is saying nothing that has not already been uttered, and is relegated to the position of the clone with a neon sign suspended over its head saying, “Read me at your own risk. I am infected.” Cyberpunk is dead, but not buried. Whether it can ever been revitalized without being seen as the infected zombie of literature is yet to be seen. But now we get to the question of why cyberpunk has largely been overlooked. We could easily blame Hollywood for perpetuating the idealized image of the punk: a figure who is a reluctant hero, whose fingers are sewn to the keyboard or always ready to smash the face of the unsuspecting villain with brute fury. If The Matrix had only come when cyberpunk was at its peak; then, we might have seen something new, something dreamt in the void and resistant to even the hackneyed attempts by Hollywood to appropriate the punk in cyberpunk for its ironically (for the punk) capitalist purposes (again, no offense meant to capitalists or capitalism, but blunt language is necessary here). Instead, we had Hackers, an impressive film for being so absurdly absurd that it developed its own cult movement akin to a watered down version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the various other films that have long since been deleted from my memory. We could blame Hollywood, then, for making cyberpunk into what it never was, in bringing the public to the edge and then tossing them over, telling them that the bottom of the cliff is covered in pillows, when in actuality there are stones. Alternatively, we could blame academia for its long fight against all forms of science fiction and related genres, one it is thankfully losing piece-by-piece (hell, even Fredric Jameson has written a book on science fiction). The reality is that there is no right reason for the avoidance of cyberpunk
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Four): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk B)
(Here begins the second part of my conceptualization of cyberpunk. Expect these sorts of things to be irregular, but at the same time a part of this blog, because much of what I will be doing as a graduate student is exactly what I am doing here, but simply on different subjects. This is, for all intensive purposes, practice. Regular programming should, as always be expected.) First, a recap of what cyberpunk is, with some inferences to what it is not: What is it?Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, primarily of the science fictional vein, that attempts to merge the concept of cyber (taken broadly to mean the speculative future of technology embodied as objects such as the net, artificial intelligence, and other such items) and punk (to be taken as the resistance by a figure or figures to the dominant social paradigm of the post-industrialist complex, with reasonable removal of the unfortunate hypocrisy that eventually took over the punk movement and established its resistance as moot; one can look at Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s concept of “No Future” in his essay “Cyberpunk and Empire” to get an idea of the nature of the gray that is the punk; and, of course, reading that essay can offer some unusually powerful insights into some of the aspects I glossed over in the first post for this series). Typical elements include: noir imagery, excessive representations of urbanity (to the extent that the urban is typically the central scenic POV and the corporate/industrial complex is instead removed or seemingly nonexistent, and thus is present more as a disembodied head than anything else), urban decay, hacker culture, and the introduction and general adoption of some form of social resistance through the technological (enhanced drugs, code manipulation, use of online-as-real environments, rogue AIs, etc.). It would be fair to say, then, that cyberpunk has already happened, insofar as certain aspects (such as artificial intelligent at the human level) have yet to happen, but other elements (the dominance of the web, the use of networks to mount resistance, both locally and internationally, etc.) have certainly occurred or are occurring. Example: Neuromancer by William Gibson and “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke. What it isn’t?Cyberpunk is not a grand, ridiculously Hollywood-ized foray of random technological gadgets and faux-hacker-culture obscenities that have been so readily adopted by the reading/viewing public as definitively “cyberpunk.” While cyberpunk certainly includes those elements found so grandly exposed in The Matrix and various other films and novels that have been applauded as cyberpunk, it is not so much a genre of visual or technological appeal as a genre of deeper, grander meanings and statuses of resistance. So, while one might say “that guy has a bionic eye and a talking computer” and think “it must be cyberpunk,” we can automatically dig deeper to find where its cyberpunk-ness ceases to be anything but visual aesthetics. We cannot, for example, call such a tale “cyberpunk” simply because of a bionic eye and a talking computer, but precisely because the bionic eye and the talking computer are part of a grand resistance as per the “punk” suffix, demonstrated as such through the interaction of said subjects, willingly or otherwise, with a social paradigm that is radically corporate and radically homogenized as such. Example: The Matrix is arguable, because one could argue that the robots, intelligent and sadistic, in a way, are simply an allegorical representation of an economic model of social structure, precisely because the use of humans as commodities (i.e. the use of people as objects rather than as subjects) is so obvious. But, one would have to see the Animatrix to understand that The Matrix and its sequels are not about commodity so much as about revenge and survival. A grey area still exists; perhaps further attention to such a thing may be elemental to a broader conceptualization of cyberpunk. Now, having said the above, I think it is fair to resume the discussion of cyberpunk as a genre. Cyberpunk is comprised of three movements, though not, by any stretch of the imagination, linear movements, but movements equally as resistant to standards as the punk in cyberpunk. It should be noted, too, that these movements are not definitive categories in the sense that they exist independent of one another, though it is true that they are in genres other than cyberpunk. These movements can be imagined as follows:–Post-humanism–Post-industrialism–Post-nationalism I will only briefly discuss these, because their broader contexts are not necessarily needed here, though certainly worthy of exploration outside of this attempt at literary criticism. Neither of the above categories are necessarily extreme in representation when seemingly adopted by an author, nor are they categories that should be ignored simply because they have been given a weaker role than others (literary critics would tell you that it is possible that those elements which are so hard to discern in relation to other elements are probably the ones most worth paying attention to). But to the descriptions: Post-humanism, in the sense of science fiction, is quite literally what the name seems to imply: post (after) the human. In cyberpunk, and most of science fiction, post-humanism takes the shape, primarily, of the technological: artificial intelligence, robots, cybernetics, bionics, and other forms of prosthetics, whether for the outward body (a robotic arm) or for the internal body (a chip in the brain). Post-humanism, however, should not, in this broad definition, be confused with the alien, and if further explanation is needed for this point, then feel free to tell me in the comments. Post-industrialism we have discussed before. It is the switch from super economies to service economies. Taken literally, again, it means the reduction of manufacturing and the production of service. Post-industrialism is not the end of manufacturing, since no society can possibly survive without the ability to create the goods that thus enable service, but there is simply less emphasis on the creation of objects, and more emphasis on what those objects do for us. For example, one
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Three): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk A)
To define cyberpunk is to literally take up the foundations of science fiction and say, “this is it, and there are no other options.” Anyone who attempts a definitive definition to science fiction will know how ridiculous this is to accomplish, particularly because no two individuals will agree. Cyberpunk is to punk what science fiction is to itself. Any attempt to define cyberpunk will be either heavily contested, patently wrong, or shortsighted. I expect here, in this brief forum, that I will have approached some semblance of all three categories. Cyberpunk began, at least in its most recognizable form, with Bruce Bethke, a fellow most of you have never heard of precisely because another fellow by the name of William Gibson stormed onto the scene and stole the limelight from our little Bethke. You see, Bethke was a visionary who unfortunately was rather shortsighted in his presentation of what we now know to be “hacker culture.” His story, aptly named “Cyberpunk,” was quite literally the embodiment of punk in the narrowed vision of the future, a molding, literally, even, of cyber (to mean future technology) and punk (to mean what I attempted to utter here). Fitting how the term came together, don’t you think? Then there was Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan, and even a few friends from the past who, for better or worse, were adopted into the fray by enthusiasts of the genre, even though they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, attempting to toss their names into the cyberpunk hat (how could they when they had no idea that cyberpunk would exist in another decade or two, the Philip K. Dicks and Stanislaw Lems, with all their proto-cyberpunk tales that were either ignored or acknowledged as wonderfully complicated). And what were they writing? Future punk, to be rather brutally simplistic about it. They were extrapolating upon the present by imagining a future that punk had yet to conceive: one in which globalization had been taken to the extreme, so much so that corporations took that final step to being more than just entities with a voice, but true powers, global entities with desires, wills, and superiority over the then-present (future-present) society. Here is when punk met cyber, because as society in the 1980s was gearing up for the incredible shift in economic priorities, cyberpunk writers, whether announced or silent, were imagining the decay of cities and neobarbarism (an examination of extremist urbanity), and envisioning the future of post-industrialization. Super economies were becoming service economies (Fordism vs. Toyotaism) and the entire structure of society, as envisioned by the league of cyberpunks themselves, was shifting from that in which the individual fit into one of two categories: 1) the hapless victim of social and economic change, unwilling or unskilled to mount any sort of resistance, except to adopt the new cultural paradigm and become “citizens” of the post-industrial, corporation-as-self structure; and 2) the “punk” as embodied in he/she who resists, who mounts some form of opposition and bleeds into the structure of society as one who is not supportive in action (though in mind they were not necessarily aware of said resistance) of the dominant social structures. And so, cyberpunk became a way of envisioning the future as always already screwed up, as filled with all that was wrong with the present amplified, but all that was right with the future. There was the net, a force of both social cohesion and discord, and even such wonders as quasi-noir imagery (a la old detective novels), cybernetics, bionics, excessive reference to new or improved drugs, and hacking. Much of cyberpunk, thus, saw the net as coming alive, becoming, as it were, a being-to-itself, with artificial intelligence and pre-visualized navigation structures that allowed it to be more than just a place of numbers and code. Here you should think about the nature of video games and how the Internet has change how we play them; cyberpunk saw that coming from a mile away, but yet was so clearly wrong in some respects, because we have yet to devise a game world that is a world experienced as such. This post, unfortunately, has grown too long, and must be split. Here I have conceptualized a relationship to punk itself and given a brief idea of what cyberpunk is, though rather haphazardly. There is more to say, but for now we have the above. There are movements to be discussed, within cyberpunk, and other elements that have largely been forgotten, including the interesting nature of merger and collaboration amongst the various other genres, and even the supposed death of cyberpunk. Those are forthcoming. But, for now, if you have thoughts, disagreements, or downright hatreds for what I have uttered here, please use the comments below to relay them in the manner you deem appropriate. And that concludes my rather formal, somewhat critical language. Have at it! ————————————— Read Part One (Punking), Part Two (Punk), Part Four (Cyberpunk B), and Part Five (Cyberpunk C).
First Time Novels: Small Press or the Big Boys?
An interesting thought occurred to me only moments ago: when it comes to considering publishing your first novel, how do you decide on what kind of publisher to select? It would seem, at least to me, that many automatically send their work to the big boys, get rejected, and then sit around bitter, or self-publish, due to some unfortunate ignorance on their part of all the wonderful small presses out there. But then there are others, like Paul Genesse and other talented writers, who opted for a small press from the start, for reasons that I have either forgotten or simply do not know. I suppose my curiosity on this arises because I am considering my own path, considering the future from a point far removed from that would-be point. Are certain novels more fitting for small presses than the big ones? How does one see that in a novel? And do writers who select small presses first ever consider whether it would have been better to go with one of the big boys? Or is that so far removed from an author’s mind because, hey, they’re published, even if it is by a press that will only print a thousand copies of their book? I don’t know. It seems to me that if you could define a small press novel as a particular brand, then you could easily say “this would be good for them.” But novels don’t seem to be so easily defined, and I find it difficult to believe that the many authors snatched up by small presses went there as a last resort. What about all of you? What would you say to all of this? How would you decide to choose a small press? P.S.: This is not meant as a slight to small presses in any way. I have read many great works from small presses and believe them to be a valuable asset in a difficult field to break into. I do, however, recognize that many authors do not have the sort of relationship I do with small presses, a relationship that recognizes their value and has seen the quality of work they produce. Some still perceive the small press as too close to self-publishing for comfort. It’s an unfortunate stigma, but one that small presses must combat, day in and day out.
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Two): The Past (Punk)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the strange words and concepts we have so gloriously accepted into pop culture were actually understood as the culturally/socially complex entities that they actually are by the same people that pass around the suffix “punk” like a beer keg at a frat party? Indeed, it would, but the curious thing about modern (or perhaps postmodern) culture is that much of the youth, the very ones who so readily claim to exist within the subcultural group called “punk,” who rage against the machine of authority without realizing that their vocal and visual forms of resistance (and even auditory through the likes of Green Day and their ilk) are nothing more than a continuation of consumer culture at its worst/best, have no idea, and no intention of learning, what the word “punk” actually means, or what its placement in human history entails for their strangely lucrative subculture. If that seems like a mouthful, it is, because the very nature of consumer culture is itself a conundrum of modern and postmodern ideals, clashing and wandering through a wasteland of personally useless nonsense, filled with people who are either dolefully aware of the pointless nature of their consumption of things or unwittingly a part of it. This is not to say that consumer culture, or, perhaps we should use its proper name, capitalism (late or otherwise), is necessarily bad. Rather, this paragraph begins to illustrate the reality of our existence in America and other Western capitalist democracies (or fascist states, where such things exist) and how pervasive capitalism is in our lives, so much so that many of us fail to notice its pull and tug on our pocket books. Teenagers today, for all their eccentricities and attempts at genuine resistance, have simply adopted a lifestyle or perception of the world that has been just as commodified as any other movement, ideal, and substance we have thus far conceived. Where am I getting at with this? The very nature of “punk,” as I conceive it, is that it cannot ever truly reject the dominant culture, capitalism, not if it, as a movement, expects to survive. Here you might ask: what is “punk?” You would be right to ask that. Punk originated, somewhat, in music in the 1970s or so, as many have claimed. True punk, the real, commodity-rejecting monstrosity that emerged quite literally as a counter-culture rather than a subculture, was largely a response to globalization, urbanity, and post-industrialization, an inherently commodity-rich point in our history that readily acknowledged the corporation as almost human. Curious as that may sound, it seems to make sense, because as capitalism began to spread across the globe, largely not by its own steam, but through the hands of those with the guns, so to speak, it gave new powers to the corporate entity to represent itself as a thing that could “speak for itself.” More curiosity abounds here as to why it took hardly any time at all for something inhuman in nature, almost robotic, to assume the vocalized subaltern without having had to shed blood in the process; well, at least not the corporate blood, but certainly the blood of pre-nationalist societies consumed into globalizing nationhood. Punk, to try to simplify here for brevity, invented for us the teenager as a market niche. Now, once relegated to the status of children, the budding adult had a place of his or her own, a place of music, bad or good, you pick, and protest against the “man.” How silly, then, that punk itself vied to create its own subculture as a consumer aggregate, with no real interest in affecting change at all. In its non-conformist nature, punk literally created a subculture that would eventually have its own marketplace, its own capitalist structures a la Hot Topic and other such gothic-ally obsessed teen hideouts. And teenagers bought into it, hook, line, and sinker, not necessarily through some malicious attempt on the part of punk itself, but because punk provided a place for them to go, where their voices could be heard by someone, even if that someone could do nothing to alleviate the perceived issues of society itself. Punk was at the cusp of subcultural America/Britain/Australia. In some ways, it was one of the first to take off, to become like a living thing embodied in the mind. It rejected the establishment (monarchy, democracy as fascism, etc.) and sought to ironically being non-conformist by conforming to non-conformism itself (and that might take a moment to contemplate, because punk’s survival relied quite literally on non-conformism to be a form of conformist thought, without reservation). You might view all this as a push against the nation state, a sort of anti-intellectual, anti-authoritarian monster with a chip on its shoulder. It is, because punk’s response to the world of the 70s and 80s relied almost exclusively on a resistance to the hierarchical structures of the nation, a rejection of what the nation state was doing or had done, and where it would go in the future. Punk style is forgettable, but its history, its move from a seemingly obscure subculture to universally recognized and commidified almost-dominant-culture, is not. It sat at the dawn of the invention of the goth, the black honky-tonk, the Christian rock movement, the punk music we are familiar with today, and various other movements that otherwise might not have existed if punk itself had not seized capitalism by its throat and wrangled the life out of it until the two could finally agree that they could work together. Too bad that punk got the raw end of the deal, because, after all, for something so dead set against capitalism and the nation state, punk has easily assimilated, if not without the occasional angered retort, into the dominant structures of nationhood and commidification. That is what punk is. It is not Green Day, for the punk music scene is nothing more than a dilution of what used to be legitimate attempts as subversion