You may have heard of cyberpunk, a new breed of science fiction that focuses on high-tech lowlifes. If you haven’t, don’t worry about it.
“I’m writing about the present,” Gibson told one interviewer. But the assumption, however untrue, that science fiction is about the future–that 1984 is about 1984, not 1948–privileges the genre: it allows it an unparalleled honesty about the present. Too many writers choose to squander this privilege, searching other planets for monsters from the id, but in his fiction Gibson never needs to go beyond the space shuttle’s orbit: he tackles our planet’s most sensitive problems here.
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The 21st-century economy trades primarily in information, not goods, and to cope with the massive flow of such information the system known as cyberspace has been developed. It’s a visual representation of all the data in the world, sort of a 3-D video game. Computer operators plugged into cyberspace decks have the illusion of moving through this cybernetic landscape. The concept seems to have been lifted from the 1982 Disney film Tron, about people who enter a computer, but in Gibson’s hands cyberspace becomes a lonely, surreal landscape of glittering corporate data bases protected by walls of electronic ice. The renegades, the “cowboys,” who roam the spaces between the data, looking for corporate and government complexes to invade with the descendants of today’s virus programs, are like computer nerds crossed with outlaw bikers–two groups that in fact are said to make up a good part of Gibson’s audience.
Meanwhile, government has atrophied. “Power . . . meant corporate power,” Gibson writes in Neuromancer. “The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality . . . hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon.”
Some have criticized Gibson for not being more polemical, for ignoring politics, although he makes a strong political statement by omitting what he thinks of as the trappings of democracy. For all the good they do us, he seems to say, we might as well get rid of the once-every-four-years circuses–instead we can get whatever group identity we need pumped directly into our brains through electrodes. (Gibson may have better reason than most, of course, to think that government is meaningless and everything is run by foreign corporations–he lives in Canada.)
The only permanent subcultures in Gibson’s fiction are black: Rastafarianism and Haitian voodoo. And these religions occupy crucial positions in his novels’ plots, functioning as alternatives to corporate hyperrationality. The Rastafarians have escaped what they call Babylon altogether, in a self-contained independent space station called Zion that’s the locus for a computer insurrection. Voodoo plays a more integrated, if somewhat surreal, role–the self-sufficient, self-aware programs that begin to haunt cyberspace eventually take on the personas of voodoo gods, finding them the most appropriate metaphor for the relationship these programs have to humanity. Those on the fringes of the system, like the voodooists, seem to have a better understanding of how the system works than those who supposedly run it.
Of the many strange types that populate Gibson’s works, one of the strangest but most evocative is the collage artist–the person who makes art from the leftover scraps of modern society, like Joseph Cornell’s boxes filled with the detritus of our society, or Survival Research Laboratory’s junkyard robots, which destroy each other, or dub reggae, made by sampling earlier records. Gibson obviously identifies with these artists, who find meaning in the gomi, the garbage “that grows like humus at the bases of the towers of glass.” In the fragments left over from industrialization, colonization, and automation–there, if anywhere, does the best science-fiction writer of his generation find hope for the future.
