Gibson, “New Rose Hotel”; Butler, “Bloodchild”

Unit 6

Cyberpunk and After

Today’s author

William Gibson (1948– )

His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), is still considered the ultimate cyberpunk novel. “New Rose Hotel” (1984) belongs to the same moment and the same world.

The movement announces itself

From issue #2 of Bruce Sterling’s SF fanzine Cheap Truth (1983):

“Is SF suffering from intellectual exhaustion? Perhaps it takes itself too seriously and has lost the careless vigor it had when it was mere pop crap. … And until SF does reform itself, re-think itself, and re-establish itself as a moving cultural force rather than a backwater anachronism, even the cleverest editors will find their efforts useless. … SF must stop recycling the same half-baked traditions about the nature of the human future. And its most formally gifted authors must escape their servant’s mentality and learn to stop aping their former masters in the literary mainstream. Until that happens, SF will continue sliding through obsolescence toward outright necrophilia.”

The cyberpunk aesthetic

CYBERPUNK = HIGH TECH + LOW CULTURE

The technology is ubiquitous, miniaturized, and privately owned. The people using it are criminals, addicts, freelancers, and employees — never governments.

From Sterling’s preface to Mirrorshades

“The hacker and the rocker are this decade’s pop-culture idols, and cyberpunk is very much a pop phenomenon: spontaneous, energetic, close to its roots. Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap, a cultural Petri dish where writing gene lines splice. Some find the results bizarre, even monstrous; for others this integration is a powerful source of hope.”

“Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.”

“Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of bodily invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry — techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self.” (xi)

Cyberpunk and shades of noir

The genre borrows wholesale from 1940s film noir:

• Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Ava Gardner in The Killers (1946)

Fatalistic first-person narration, a job that goes wrong, a woman who is not what she appeared, and a protagonist who half-knew all along.

Reading notes: “New Rose Hotel”

• Neuromancer swept SF’s major awards but polarized critics: supporters praised its dark vision of a future under global capitalism and its new stylistic energy; detractors condemned its cynicism, nihilism, overwrought style, and supposed romanticization of addiction and criminality.
• Like Neuromancer, “New Rose Hotel” — note that “New Rose” is essentially a homonym for “neuros” — combines futuristic high-tech espionage with classic noir style and a plot built on a criminal venture: the narrator and his partner Fox trying to entice a leading genetic scientist to switch corporate allegiances.
• In this near-future society, zaibatsus — Japanese-style multinationals — are far more powerful than local or national governments. Fox is a corporate headhunter, watching for targets who possess what he calls “the Edge”: the cutting-edge creative genius that cannot be mechanically reproduced.
• The narrative is told retrospectively, leaving the reader to reconstruct the plot from the narrator’s fragmented memories.
• Note how the narrator’s current immobility — hiding in a Japanese airport coffin hotel to avoid assassination — contrasts with the globe-hopping of his past.
• Sandii, the woman they recruit to seduce the scientist, turns out to be much more than she appears: an updated femme fatale.
• To what extent is the narrator complicit in her betrayals, even to the point of endangering his own life? That moral ambiguity is typical of both noir and cyberpunk.

A question to hold

Ballard wanted SF to abandon outer space for inner space. Gibson gives us a protagonist lying still in a coffin-sized room, travelling only in memory.

Is cyberpunk the New Wave’s heir, or its opposite?

Octavia E. Butler

1947–2006

Butler on science fiction

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

From Butler’s manuscript archive.

Afrofuturism and Butler

Afrofuturism is “a movement, simultaneously aesthetic, political, and theoretical … that freely invents, appropriates, and recombines elements of science fiction, fantasy, and Black culture in order to ‘imagin[e] new black futures.’”

Evan Gottlieb, Engagements with Contemporary Theory, 149. See also¹ and.²

Reading notes: “Bloodchild”

• With its controversial and imaginative subject, the story achieves the cognitive estrangement Suvin describes: scenarios thoroughly strange yet close enough to everyday life to let us see the everyday in a new light. It defamiliarizes something we take for granted or assume immutable — and thereby shows that things do not have to be the way they are.
• Most basically, it defamiliarizes gender roles, imagining a future in which men can be impregnated as easily as women — and are in fact more desirable that way.
• On another level it inverts the hierarchy between humans and insects (which is what the T’lic most resemble). Seeing humans reduced to dependence on non-humans helps us think anew about how we exploit other animals — and other people — sometimes without realizing it.
  • Is the relationship between Gan’s family and T’Gatoi really as mutual as T’Gatoi believes? Is one side exploiting the other? And if so, why doesn’t Butler condemn it more explicitly?
• Although the race of the narrator, Gan, and his family is never made clear, some critics read the story as an indirect — because cognitively estranged — critique of slavery. But Butler, like Tolkien before her, resisted allegorical readings, suggesting instead that she wrote it as a way to get over her fear of botflies, which lay eggs under mammals’ skin so the larvae grow parasitically inside the host.

Two bodies

Thursday: no class

Thanksgiving.

For next Tuesday

• “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (BBSF 1097)