Companero

MASSIVE DICK POST

(also Cory Doctorow)

My progress down this list has wildly increased over the last few weeks, helped on by the ever readable pulp prose of Philip K Dick.

DR BLOODMONEY by Philip K Dick

Dr Bloodmoney is an early post-apocalyptic novel from PKD, a kind of cosy-catastrophe in Gamma World. It concerns the activities of a wide-spread group of people who gather in Marin County following a nuclear war, and how their society is disrupted by the power plays of three different malevolent psychics. It's the kind of old school SF that could get made into a really fun Simpsons "Treehouse of Terror" story. 

This isn't a novel I'd have read if it hadn't been on this list, and I don't think it should have been here. This is straight up Post-Apocalypse, with only the mechanical "phocomobile" piloted by a malevolent psychic thalidomide baby seeming genre-relevant. I don't know why this book is represented and not, say, Ubik.

Still, I don't regret the time I spent with it. It really emphasises why PKD is still remembered - namely, he combined the weird concepts he's famous for with really readable pulp prose. There are lots of people who can do high concept ideas, and lots of people who can do pacey prose and memorable characters, but PKD could do both. 

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DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP by Philip K Dick

I read this last October, while the site was down. 

DADES will forever live in the shadow of Blade Runner. It almost reads like a mirror of the movie, the big fear reversed:

• In Blade Runner, the fear is that you might turn out to be a robot, and not realise it.
• In DADES, the fear is that everyone else might turn out to be a robot.

This makes for a much more paranoid, misanthropic story than Blade Runner. The book discusses empathy far more, and an attack on it's a personified representation of that impulse called Mercer. The entire novel discusses different kinds of empathy, as experienced in a more automated, technological era. I'm not sure how well it manages to do so, but PKD's prose adds a lot. I read this novel in one sitting!

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A SCANNER DARKLY by Philip K Dick

Between Dr Bloodmoney and A Scanner Darkly, PKD's life imploded. He lost his family, turned his house into a drug den for teenage runaways, and descended into addiction.

While Dr Bloodmoney might not deserve to be on this list, reading it immediately before A Scanner Darkly was a real experience. The emotional difference between the two novels is palpable. DrBM has an optimism about it, a real faith in the human capacity to survive and adapt. That optimism is completely gone, replaced with a kind of broken self loathing. A Scanner Darkly reads like somebody having an out of body experience as they OD.

ASD is about undercover cops infiltrating the junkie community, while keeping their identities secret from each other, and even investigating themselves. It never really feels like a realistic portrayal of policing - there simply aren't enough cops in the world! - but more of an allegory, like The Man Who Was Thursday. The paranoia that anyone could be a secret cop is very similar to the paranoia that anyone could be a secret android.

I've read that ASD was intended to be an autobiography, but PKD was persuaded to set it the future (1994) in order to sell it to his regular SF publishers. Just like the George Alec Effinger novels I read a few months ago, there is an element of self loathing to it. The book really wallows in the continual bullshit conversation of high addicts. When the main character is surveilling himself, PKD seems to be judging his own actions from a similar remove. And like the Effinger letters, it reads as a love letter to his friends from his drug period. As I write this I can see how similar these novels really are.

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FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID by Philip K Dick

And the award for the best title of any novel on this list goes to...

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a great representative in the "electronic identity loss" sub-genre of science fiction, that also includes The Space Merchants, Slow River and My Name is Legion. In these novels, a previously powerful person becomes a non-person when they lose their electronic identity, and have to survive in a world that either ignores them or tries to crush them. It's a very modern, very relevant fear.

This is one I read a decade ago. Looking at Wikipedia, I find I don't remember much of the plot. I do remember another extremely fast, extremely paranoid novel. Once again, the enclosing fist of the police is a major theme. I do think people forget what a new institution the police are, and a lot of science fiction from the 1970s is panicked about their rise in power over society (Judge Dredd, etc) brought on by new technology.

This is another PKD book you can probably read in two or three sittings. I really love the 200 page science fiction novel as a form!

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I've been writing up the novels I'd already read prior to beginning this project, as I reach them on the list. This normally works fine, except when I've read the next seven books on the list.

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RIBOFUNK by Paul Di Filippo

Paul Di Filippo is a really prolific short story writer very much affiliated with the cyberpunk movement. Ribofunk is one of his best.

I read this around the time I first joined this site (it's where I got the name "Television City" from), and loved it. It's disturbing and funny in equal measure. It gets into the human cost and opportunity of pure body mutability. I've got much more aware of that theme since I was a teenager, and the more I write this the more I wonder if I should go back and re-read Ribofunk as an adult.

I've never really turned to this as game inspiration. I wanted to, when I bought it, but I recoiled from the sheer possibility and fluidity of it. It's possible I'm a coward.

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DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM by Cory Doctorow

I read a lot of Cory Doctorow when I was a student (when he was releasing a lot of novels). He's written some favourites of mine, like Makers and For The Win. Most of those novels were written after this list was compiled!

Doctorow writes about the experience of work, which is an important thing to write about (I wish more writers did). He's spent a lot of time earnestly imagining different futures of work. He's also obsessed with Disneyland. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was his first novel and combines both these elements.

DaOitMK is a core transhumanist, post-cyberpunk novel. It concerns a world where mortality and want have mostly been overcome, along with hierarchies and most corporate organisation. The world is run by adhocracies. It's absolutely a circa 2000 peace of internet utopianism, which was a worthy cause, and believable at the time. The Chinese government has been busy building a dystopian version of reputation economics, and that adds new resonances to this novel.

This novel is short, and the characters have faded from my memory. Still, in 2018 I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads, so I must have liked a lot then!

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EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE by Cory Doctorow

There's a type of cyberpunk novel, often written after the 80s, which is so up-to-the-minute in its technological speculation, it seems obsolete and dated within a year of being written. Pat Cadigan's Piotr Konstantin novels fall into this category, but the true avatar of them all is Eastern Standard Tribe.

When I read this around 2012, my main thought was "wow, this novel published in 2004 really captured the experience of living in 2008." It's about the experience of living in international subcultures enabled by the internet - i.e. the experience I had waking up at weird hours to have conversations with Malek77 or Interrupt or Chalkline or Encanta or Van Atta back during the busy years of this forum...

I miss that version of the internet a lot. 

Reading this novel after the internet had moved on into the social media era made it feel a bit nothing-y. Speculation about a period already been and gone had little interest and the plot lacked stakes at the time. I don't want every novel to be serious, and I like that it's about work and labour organisation, but it wasn't anything more than just fun. Fun is good, great even, but there wasn't anything to remember a decade later.

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Luckily, I have already written about the novels WHEN GRAVITY FAILS, A FIRE IN THE SUN, THE EXILE'S KISS, and the short story BUDAYEEN NIGHTS (all by George Alec Effinger) earlier in the thread.

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PROGRESS

I have jumped from 35 (23%) to 45 (30%)! And I've already read several more books!

I really like the arcology in Bicycle Repairman. 

NOVA by Samuel Delany

An early Delany novel, about a crew of aristocratic space pirates looking for a big score which will shake up the political culture of the galaxy.

I think this novel made the list as an early, and interesting, depiction of cyberware. Prince Red, the villain, uses his cyber-hand to traumatise and mutilate from an early age. But the rest of the novel depicts cyberware - and especially interface plugs - as a liberating force, freeing the working class from industrial labour discipline and creating a very footloose group of enhance workers wandering the stars. It's quite different from the later "cyberware as a science fiction metaphor for how corporations treat our bodies" depictions of cyberware.

As usual for Delany, this was quite a slow read for me. Every page was loaded with meaning and odd linguistic games, and it isn't conventionally paced. Still, it's a novel about corporate war and cyberware written in 1968, and an interesting antecedent of the genre.

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The next novel on this list is Svaha by Charles De Lint, which I've already read and covered above.

This means I am now on 35 of 152, or 23%. There are some big jumps coming soon.

I did before I asked here and went through all the Vehicle Files. I was vaguely hoping that maybe someone had dropped a big list into one of the hundred page setting sourcebooks that I couldn't remember!

Thanks for that list, @Rockwolf66!

I guess I'm just going to have to remember what the vehicle rules were and make my own! (I'm not using Maximum Metal, just going to eyeball it...)

Does anyone here remember anyone ever coming up with Maximum Metal stats for real, currently existing car models (say, for instance, a Nissan 180SX, or a Lamborghini Countach, Mazda RX7, etc)? I'm sure I've seen stats for a Countach somewhere...

I'm about to run a game about people modding and adding vehicle links to real cars, and I'd love to know if somebody has already done some of the work!

I've been reading my way down the list. It took me five years to get through B and a week to get through C! 

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PATTERNS by Pat Cadigan

A short story collection which really doubles down on the obsessions of 1980s subcultures - television and serial killers! 

Like a lot of the short story collections on this list, Patterns veers towards horror themes as much as cyberpunk. There are some really good science fictional takes on the vampire mythos in here! 

Also, a lot of great 10-15 page stories. I really like that format for short stories, especially by authors in this style. They feel like songs in a concept album. Stand-out stories for me were Two and My Brother's Keeper. Rock On includes the characters from Synners and made me want to read that novel again.

and the next book on the list is...

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SYNNERS by Pat Cadigan

I read this about a year before starting this project.

Everyone I know who has tried to read Synners - I know a lot of people who have tried to read Synners -says the first two hundred pages are incomprehensible. I had that experience as well, but found it comes together really well in the second half. 

The reason science fiction has never been a mainstream literary genre is that it demands readers go to an unfamiliar space, and figure out what's going on. A lot of people really do not like doing that, in reality or in fiction. Pat Cadigan takes this to extremes. She often describes only the things important to the characters, ignoring the things that might anchor us, and she often writes from the perspective of characters who barely know who they are, let alone where or why. I think of her a science fiction writer for the jaded science fiction fan - when you've got through all the entry level stuff and want the really extreme shit.* The stuff that would fry somebody who hasn't already read 200 science fiction novels 😅

*see also, the amount of people into cyberpunk who are also into transgressive literary fiction written in drug hazes...

Synners is one of those SF books about insanity and irrationality that turns out to be more prescient and more real than any of the hard-nosed engineering speculation books about rockets, because the world is insane and irrational. She caught the internet's transition from a bohemian land of weirdoes into a corporate nightmare run by tech-bros very well, and a decade+ in advance. I would have called the big event of the book implausible or outdated a decade ago - now it seems completely plausible in light of all the different technological apocalypses wrought on us by social media.

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Next down the list is FOOLS by Pat Cadigan, which I already covered in this thread. See also: notes above about the really extreme shit! Reading this book is like being a neurological astronaut!

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DIRTY WORK by Pat Cadigan

Another short story collection. If Patterns was a concept album, this is a B-side compilation. 

This collection really shows off her range. Every character has a different voice (although every voice is intense). There are more science fictional vampires, and so much horror in the first half I was starting to doubt whether Dirty Work should be on a cyberpunk list. But then Deadpan Allie from Mindplayers turns up to fly the cyberpunk flag. There's a really unexpected piece of amazing cosmic horror, two different alternate history stories about the death of Robert Kennedy, and a very emotionally real story about Peter Pan. 

Not as good as Patterns, but there are some real gems in here. Not just Deadpan Allie's eyes!

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TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP by Pat Cadigan

Next down the list is a novel I read a year before starting this project.

There's a kind of cyberpunk story that is soooo up to date with current tech-trends that it becomes obsolete and outdated within a year of being written. This is one of those novels.

Also, it's a novel in which a person descends into a virtual environment full of symbolic weirdos. This happens a lot in this genre, and I rarely enjoy it. There's no weight or stakes to it. Cadigan has written the best virtual world novel - Mindplayers* - but it doesn't work out so well here.

*covered earlier in this thread.

After I finished this I have a clear recollection of thinking "I'm not going to remember any of this a year from now", and I kinda don't. 

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DERVISH IS DIGITAL by Pat Cadigan

The sequel to Tea from an Empty Cup, which I read a week ago.

Same problems as above, but better stakes. It's a cop story that suffers from 1990s character syndrome - that thing where every main character has their personality surgically removed and just replaced with quips and wordplay*. They're quite good quips, but not as good as Mindplayers, and it doesn't make the main character seem real.

*see the movie Army of Darkness, or any Jim Carrey film from that era, or or or...

Short and readable. I read it in two fast sittings and didn't regret the experience. It has an arms dealer who could have come straight out of one of Malek77's games. Ask me again in a year if I remember any of it!

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I read Patterns, Dirty Work and Dervish is Digital in a week. Next on the list is THE FORTUNATE FALL by Raphael Carter, which I've already covered in the thread above.

AND THEN...

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DHALGREN by Samuel Delany

I really thought this novel was going to stall me out for another year. It's the longest book on the list AFAIK, and written by Samuel Delany, whose prose demands attention. I was really worried it was going to turn into a 1970s version of the Tea From An Empty Cup, and if it hadn't been for this list I would have bounced off the novel in the first two hundred pages. 

Dhalgren is a novel about a man who can't trust his own perceptions journeying to a middle American city which has been devastated by a incomprehensible apocalypse. People with resources have fled, leaving behind the poor and neuro-divergent. It has long, 100+ page chapters, each of which seems like a miniature novel in itself. I really do feel like I've read an entire series, not just one novel. 

It's about - IMO! - the way narratives impose themselves on people and the world. About how narratives adapt - or don't - to new information. About how people are crushed by narratives imposed on them from outside. About how people really are, when they've been freed from those narratives, and how they create new narratives. About whether narratives imposed by genre - i.e. the tropes of science fiction - have any relationship to how people really are. How conforming to obsolete or false narratives break people. About conformity versus desire. About how constructed narrative anchors people to reality. I started to love this novel around the time the main character joins a poser-gang. 

All the characters are so vivid.

You might well hate it. I understand why somebody might leave this review:

It's rewired my brain a bit, I think, and I can't stop thinking about it. I finished it about an hour before New Year, and it was a good way to end the year. I wish I'd read it as a teenager but know I'd never have got through the first few hundred pages. I'm surprised I did now.

In his afterword to the novel, William Gibson calls it the last unmediated account of a Singularity that happened in America's cities during the 1960s. That's a true statement.

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I'm now on 33 of 152, or 22%, up from 16%!

On 08/12/2022 at 21:30, The Leviathan said:

I admire your commitment to your system.  I personally don't see any harm in reading the books on the list in any order that strikes your fancy, and I am just grateful to get your perspective on those novels that I have read--it's fun to compare notes!

My big worry is that I'm going to end up finishing all the books I want to read first, and then just end up listlessly trying to finish eight KW Jeter* ** novels in a row... 

*I have read two KW Jeter novels so far, and one of them was actually really good, so that might not work out so badly...

**It's actually funny how every single different methodology I thought about ends up that way. If I read the novels that strike my fancy first, the last books I read will by by KW Jeter. If I read one from the beginning of the list than one from the end, I end on a run of KW Jeter novels. If I read the first unread book by each author in order then start from the top again, I end on a run of KW Jeter novels...

I like the solution I've settled on, which is reading whatever strikes my fancy, but only counting progress in order. It's motivating. I have a spreadsheet and watching it slowly fill in the gaps is as satisfying as watching the defragging screen work on an old PC 😅

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GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER MEGA-POST

I read When Gravity Fails a decade ago and didn't much like it. But I read the sequels all in the rush last month, and that made me want to go back and re-evaluate. 

A FIRE IN THE SUN

Every time WGF is mentioned, people talk about how the Budayeen is "really" New Orleans in the 1980s. This is the novel where I really felt that. I've got no doubt that almost every character in aFitS is based on a real person you might have met in a strip joint in the French Quarter in 1984. This entire series has such a "this is where I live, these are my friends, these are our lives" vibe. WGF's trashy aesthetic is part of that.

A Fire in the Sun is the "cops and gangsters" novel of the sequence. It doesn't have the grandiose backstory of the first novel, and it's more grounded in the Budayeen itself. It's also about complicity and coercion, in a way that feels much "realer" than pulp science fiction usually does. The villians are horrible.

THE EXILE KISS

...Marid always felt like an autobiographical character, to some extent. This time around, the autobiography seems built on utter self loathing. The depiction of Marid's drug relapses are ... uneventful... in a way that very real. He has vast and exciting moments of clarity and change, and then reverts to old habits within pages. It's frustrating and upsetting and frankly familiar to anybody who has ever been around addictive personalities. This series has always been a bit of a downer, that way.

By this time, the series has started to feel more science fictional. WGF always felt more like a crime novel than cyberpunk to me. 

BUDAYEEN NIGHTS

A collection of Marid Audran ephemera and short stories.

Aside from the weird choice to include sequences from the novels, this is a very good collection. It really reinforces how much this series has been about people intentionally living in constructed fantasies. Almost all the interesting technology in the series is really just a vehicle to explore that idea.

The introduction also confirms that the decision to set the novel in the future was explicitly made because half the characters were based on real people, including a local mafia boss.

WHEN GRAVITY FAILS

In the introduction to Budayeen Nights, Barbra Hambly informs us that Effinger wrote WGF in a helpless fury after a trans friend of his called Amber was murdered, and the police pointedly didn't investigate. 

That puts such a different lens onto WGF. The novel starts to read like a revenge fantasy, especially in light of my conviction that Audran is essentially an autobiographical character. "What if I could avenge my friend. What if her murder was the result of a grand conspiracy involving princes, rather than banal transphobia." The famous, brutal downer ending of the novel might simply be an acknowledgement that all his feelings on the matter might be futile.

I've been thinking about how that piece of information changes my understanding of the novel all week. I don't really have any answers or conclusions. The later novels are more conventional science fiction, written about the implications of the tech and the setting. WGF just reads like a helpless scream.

After half a year of hardly reading anything, the brief downfall of this site inspired me back into gear and I actually ran through quite a few of the novels on this list in the last few month, including some big ones. I'll get to writing them all up eventually. Most of them were out of order.

But two of them weren't...

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STAND ON ZANZIBAR by John Brunner

This time last year I thought I'd read this inside a week to finish out the year. Here I am twelve months later...

This another one of Brunner's "Club of Rome" dystopias, written before The Shockwave Rider. About 15 years ago, when the Gollancz edition was re-issued, there were a flurry of articles discussing the prescience (or lack-there-of) of this novel; it's the main thing people want to discuss when talking about it.

Reading this book is like analysing a collection of historical sources, on a number of different levels. The book consciously imitates John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, composing the story about of fragments of narrative and textual material - the plot is what you infer in the gaps between all of it. It's a historical source packet in the sense you construct the world out of all these fragments, but also because it was so clearly influential on the science fiction that came after it. You can see character and structure elements taken from SoZ everywhere in science fiction, especially in cyberpunk and British post-cyberpunk. And not just the obvious things like Gibson including a character called "Yonderboy" in Neuromancer! Chad Mulligan is the prototype for every mad futurist prophet that followed, right through to Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan (he's the least interesting character in the book).

It's also a historical document because it feels so real and plausible. It's a document of what felt plausible decades ago, and a kind of funhouse mirror of our actual world. It got a lot right, especially about the emotional experience of living in the world today. It isn't so much that it reads like a novel about our world, as about another world dealing with the same tensions. It's a kind of case study of an alternate now. 

I found SoZ to be greater than the sum of its parts, which are often flimsy. It's a kind of accretive experience, which was the aim! I found it much more satisfying than The Shockwave Rider, which lacked the "lived-in" detritus and emotional weight of this novel. Like Queen of Angels, I found it expanded my understanding of politics a bit - not in the sense of directing to me towards a specific ideology, but by suggesting new things that might be important to think about. That's the best kind of political fiction, I think - novels that don't seek to convert, but to expand.

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THE SHEEP LOOK UP by John Brunner

jesus christ I chose the wrong decade to read this

I started reading this in 2020. At the time I was in quarantine and walking a lot, and so I decided to get the audiobook. At the time country was crippled by an epidemic, the world had recently suffered continent spanning fires, microplastics were in the news, the USA was convulsing with political disorder, and... ...well, this book was a little timely. I listened to a few chapters, then put it down and struggled to pick it up again.

Now that I'm no longer going for long walks every day, I realised that I'd never finish the audiobook. There's no way I'd want to cover 9 hours of commuting with a drone of accurate dystopian speculation. I bought the ebook and read the latter two thirds of the novel over the last couple of hours. I got through it so quickly partly because it's a very well written, propulsive novel, and partly because I just wanted to get it over with.

This isn't really a cyberpunk novel. It's a straight up dystopia, which is a genre with which cyberpunk is often confused but ultimately separate from. It's the story of how a series of environmental problems cascade over a year to bring about the effective collapse of the United States. It's at it's best when discussing the ways in which people just try to go on with their lives as everything gets horrifyingly worse around them, retroactively re-imaging their own pasts to make the present feel normal. 

It's a better novel than The Shockwave Rider or Stand on Zanzibar. Compared to SoZ it has things like a "plot" and "twists" and "an ending". The characters are a little interchangeable. I didn't find it mind-expanding like SoZ - it hasn't changed my mind about anything or caused me to think about things in new ways, like that novel. It just bludgeoned me over the head with all the horrible garbage of the present day.

While only three of them are on this list, John Brunner wrote four of these novels. I'm going to leave The Jagged Orbit for... some time. Maybe. Ummm...

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The next novel on this list is MINDPLAYERS by Pat Cadigan. But I've already read that, and written it up in this thread.

This means I'm now on 25 out of 152, or 16%. I've read considerably more out of order!

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Ode to the BEAR TRAP

When I first decided to read through this list, I looked at the letter B with trepidation.

It contained:

• A number of very long books by Greg Bear, an author I had struggled with in the past.
• Several long books by Alexander Besher, the only writer on this list I had never heard of before.
• Several long novels by Bruce Bethke and John Barnes, which I hadn't been expecting much of.
• Several *very* long dystopias by John Brunner - dystopias have never been my jam.

I thought the letter B had the potential to kill the entire project, and called this threat the "Bear Trap". I thought about reading the list in a different order, but every alternative had flaws and dangers of it's own, or simply was unsatisfying somehow. 

And then I did, indeed, stall for a year on Slant. Later, it took me months to psych myself up to read the Besher books (which weren't bad!), and months to psych myself up to read Headcrash (which was fucking horrible). I also finished thirty (non-cyberpunk...) novels between first picking up Stand on Zanzibar and finishing it. It look me five years to get through the letter B. Meanwhile, I bought a bunch of paperback cyberpunk books which made me feel bad sitting there unread, and learnt a lot about my, umm, neuro-divergent spending habits.

BUT NOW I'M DONE WITH B

According to Goodreads I read an average of one novel a week. There are 54 novels remaining for me to read, which means I could theoretically finish this by the next year. ...spoiler: I won't, but just knowing I'm that close is very nice!

Another month, another couple of books...

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ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES by William Gibson

I skim-read this when I was a teenager, but decided to give it a re-read because I didn't really remember any of it except the ending.

...which was the most memorable part, in hindsight!

ATP is probably the weakest Gibson novel I've read, which still makes it better than almost anything else. It has odd pacing issues, and some weak characters, and sometimes reads like a self parody of Gibson. There are multiple characters obsessed with very specific manufactured objects, who read exactly like their counter-parts in every other Gibson novel.

Buuuuut... thing is, I love Rydell and Chevette as characters. Virtual Light was my favourite novel as a teenager, and I just really like spending time in that world with those people. And the novel does have a really satisfying ending. So I'm happy!

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THE TICKET THAT EXPLODED by William Burroughs

Book 3 of the Cut-Up Trilogy according to my edition. Book 2 according to this list and almost everywhere else! I have to admit, it feels like a Book 3.

I'm much more willing to deal with Cut-Up Prose, plotless novels and experimental text than almost anyone I know, but after three books this trilogy has outstayed its welcome. If I wasn't reading this for the list I would have gotten bored and stalled out half way through.

Every couple of chapters contains a few paragraphs of transcendent genius, and I frequently spotted things that cyberpunk writers referenced in their own later novels. Rudy Rucker in particular seems like he might have been inspired by this - "let's take this chapter and expand it into a readable novel!". It's also fun to see the origin of almost every famous underground rock lyric of the 1970s: looking at you, Iggy Pop!

I really wanted to enjoy this more than I did. Maybe my mistake was to read the entire trilogy in order, in a month!

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Finishing the Cut-Up Trilogy takes me to 21/152, or 14%.

The next two novels on the list are John Brunner-penned dystopias. Stand on Zanzibar is a huge novel, and I'm literally finding the audiobook of The Sheep Look Up too depressing to listen to in the grey, plague-ridden, war-haunted days of January 2022. So maybe I'll get through some other books out of order, first!

Because everyone here was talking about it, and I own a copy, I decided to read...

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...CATSPAW by JOAN VINGE

This was so much better than Psion!

Whereas that novel really was an Andre Norton pastiche in cyberpunk clothing, this had it's own identity. Cat gets to "do things" and "make decisions" instead of just being swept from one horrible situation to another (while still being swept from one horrible situation to another). I liked him as a character much more this time around. 

I didn't really buy the "street level" parts of this book. All the criminals and netrunners felt a bit archetypal. They all had some interesting ideas behind them - the underwater crime boss in particular - but none of them felt "real" to me. Argentyne's art collective was something I've seen before in a few novels.

That said, her character was really well drawn, along with all the corporate family members. This book was at it's best when dealing with the emotional dynamics of living in a gilded cage, I think. I liked the romance in the novel quite a lot - cynical enough for the genre, but "real" seeming.

There were lots of individual elements of Catspaw that felt weak or contrived to me, but together they all worked to make something more than the sum of their parts. I felt the opposite about Psion.

I don't own a copy of Dreamfall, and I'm trying not to buy any more books from this list unless they're the next in the sequence. That means I probably won't get to it until very near the end of this project.

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NOVA EXPRESS by WILLIAM BURROUGHS

It's a bad sign that I read this less than two weeks ago, but have already forgotten most of it!

This book was more interesting as a historical artefact than a novel. I can absolutely see how it influenced the genre that came after it. The Nova Criminals around whom the book revolves could have come out of almost any of the novels on this list written afterwards.

But it's a repetitive drone. It would have been revolutionary to publish something like this in the 1960s, but these days if I want to read a paranoid rant I can look at Facebook or a politician's twitter feed. This has the same clipped tones and memetic dog-whistle style.

It lacks the literal snuff-porn of the first book. Honestly, that stuff at least gave the novel a discomforting emotional kick. This was just boring.

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2021 STATISTICS:

In 2021 I read 19 (and a half) books from this list. 

In total, I have read 89 of the novels on this list.

63 books remain.

6 of them are by KW Jeter.

I currently own 20 of the remaining unread books.

4 of them are by KW Jeter.

Aside from Jack Womack's Ambient, which I'm intentionally leaving until last, I'm going to try and read as many of the 19 books I currently own as possible in the next year.

This may make a mockery of my decision to only count my progress down the list, in order.

However, Nova Express takes me to 20/152, or 13%.

EXCEPT

My edition of that novel is very clear that Nova Express was intended to be the second book of the trilogy. However, many sources, including this list, regard it as the third book in the trilogy. This means that I did not, in fact, progress down the list. My progress remains at:

19/152, or 13%.

The next book on the list therefore remains The Ticket That Exploded.

12 hours ago, The Leviathan said:

I read the same three Rucker novels you covered here some time ago.  I found the ideas intere=sting, and don't dispute Rucker's offbeat creativity, but I realized that while his NPCs become point of view characters and explained their otherwise wacky motivations in a way I could understand (which is saying a lot considering some are clothing-based AIs, and others are every flavor of loser), but I realized after three novels that while I could kind of sympathize with some of his characters, there wasn't a single one that I even remotely liked enough to care about what would happen to them.  It seems deliberate to right multiple novels with characters so off-putting that I can't be bothered to worry about the outcome.  If it was intentional, then: Bravo, I guess.  If it was not intentional, then that is one unfortunate literary coincidence.  It's not that I need to be able to keep an idea from a novel to incorporate into my broader thinking or Cyberpunk database...but while Rudy's ideas are unique, I can't think of a single one I would want to import into a Cyberpunk campaign.

There is a kind of gleeful lack of empathy in those novels, that I'm sure is *entirely* intentional. It's a kind of anti-humanist literature. 

There ideas in the 'Ware trilogy do seem hard to import (although quantum drugs for computers are going right into mine ). It's partly because so much of it is so invasive, in a way that might not be fun at the table. I wonder if that's got more to do with the genre conventions of RPG cyberpunk, though. If Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun had had more robot content, would the Rucker gear have been more exciting from a DM point of view? It's always been interesting to me that neither big cyberpunk RPG had "Android" or "low grade AI" character options from the start, given the source material (that might be a whole other discussion, though!).

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I actually read a few more books over the last month, and I finished one last night, so here they are:

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DAYS by JAMES LOVEGROVE

James Lovegrove is one of that 90s generation of British post-cyberpunk writers who reliably puts out a big, hard-sci fi doorstopper a year, and whose books I seemed to accumulate unread year on year (Days is the first I've read, I own three more!). Those writers have a lot of presence on this list and could have had much, much more.

Days is a novel about a day in the life of a gigantic shopping mall, a concept that already makes it obsolete (although it still works quite well as a psychological metaphor!). There's a strong streak of allegory and "magical realism" to the book, which is really about the effect of consumerism of human social relations (and this isn't necessary a subtle book).

I tend to believe there's a strong difference between cyberpunk and dystopia as genre and tend not to enjoy the latter very much. This book also revolves around a strong sense of "Britain is a fading petty place inhabited by fading petty people", to which I can only respond I KNOW, IF I WANTED TO KNOW THAT I COULD HAVE LEFT THE HOUSE INSTEAD OF STAYING IN TO READ SCIENCE FICTION - I really wasn't in the mood for this book . That said, it had a satisfying ending, and I quite enjoyed it.

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PSION by JOAN VINGE

In the last year I have read seven science fiction novels about orphan teenagers developing unexpected psychic abilities. I honestly hadn't intended to read one...

Three of them were written by Andre Norton. Psion feels like an attempt to do a cyberpunk Andre Norton novel, and indeed Joan Vinge says as much in the acknowledgements. This means a psychic teen outcast novel with more corporate slavery and terrorists, and less cute companion animals. It's a completely predictable pulp novel, with oppressive psychic institutes, and oppressed aliens looking for a messiah, and a - very Norton like - a character who spends his entire life running from one trap into another without ever getting to make any decisions. 

The problem is, the prose isn't nearly as pacey or charming as a Norton novel, and there isn't anything especially interesting about the worldbuilding - honestly, Norton's "Dipple" environment from the 1960s is a much more inspiring "cyberpunk" environment than anything here. The novel didn't annoy me like Headcrash or Dr Adder. It was just a bit lifeless and hard to finish. 

That said, I'll probably read the next one quite soon (because I own it), and I'm not depressed by that prospect - the blurb implies it has a much less by-the-numbers plot than this one.

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THE SOFT MACHINE by WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Two hundred pages of cut-up prose, consisting largely of homoerotic snuff porn (very literally!) and paranoid fantasies about lobsters and doctors.

Reading this book in 2021, it's hard not to see it a statement on the psychological damage inflicted by being a gay man in an era when that meant being forced to exist in liminal zones with junkies and secret police officers for company. I can understand why it was so revolutionary and so widely disseminated in the 1960s, but the paranoid, damaged style has honestly been made a bit less interesting by the internet (where I can read paranoid ranting any time I want!).

Every chapter of this book takes place in a slightly different environment. One of them, set in Mayan times, is essentially Shiner's later Deserted Cities of the Heart compressed into 20 pages. Puerto Joselito is the archetypal cyberpunk environment, and I can absolutely see a direct line in influence to the way later cyberpunk writers describe their environments. To me, this was most interesting as a historical document.

In order to proceed down this list, I need to read the next two novels in this trilogy. I'm already feeling a bit burnt out on the style, so we'll see how long that takes!

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PROGRESS

The Soft Machine takes me to 19/152, or 13% (rounded up...)

RUDY RUCKER MEGA-POST

Last month I hurtled through the three Rudy Rucker novels on the list, all from his 'Ware tetralogy (which may still have been a trilogy when this list was written?).

After reading a ton of proto-cyberpunk novels it was really fun to get into some actual cyberpunk-cyberpunk. The difference between proto-cyberpunk and cyberpunk tends to be "the main character is a colossal fuck-up"

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SOFTWARE

I have to admit, my experience with Rucker before Software had mostly been incomprehensible short stories about maths problems. I wasn't really expecting this novel to be as fun or pacey as it was!

Software is a really short, really fast novel about drug addled weirdos wandering around the US South* doing awful things to other drug addled weirdos. There are also cute robots on the moon (called Boppers - one of them is essentially Wall-E). 

Without major spoilers, I'm sure this novel was one of the core inspirations for The Matrix (starting with the main character being named "Anderson"). There is a lot of philosophy to discuss in light of this book, but that would mean another 9 rambling paragraphs here.

*I have come to the conclusion that movement cyberpunk is essentially a southern literature. Most of the core writers are southern, and frankly a lot of these books are Faulkner-ian as fuck...

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WETWARE

The 'Ware books take Cyberpunk's "high tech, low life" mantra to the absolute limits. The tech is complicated and plausible and alarming, and the low-lifes are the trashiest people imaginable 

Wetware is a novel about robots trying to take over the world by means of ... [a plot so wild I don't want to spoil it]. Part of the pleasure of these novels is that the plots are so completely lunatic that you can almost guarantee having not encountered them before. Everything escalates and escalates, and the Boppers become MeatBops, and there are drug-dens for robots, and and and...

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FREEWARE

The best/only novel I've ever read about a guy who date-rapes AIs.

There is a running theme through the 'ware series about mind-control - mind-control by robots, mind-control of robots - and another running theme about weird technological fetishes. They come together in Freeware. 

The structure of this novel is really interesting. Each chapter revolves around a different character and starts by describing their path to being involved in this story, which almost makes the book 11 different short character study novels about the relationships between humanity and AI (often literal relationships). Most of the characters - including the robots - are drug addled lunatics, self-described perverts, or ideologically motivated kidnappers, but all written with a degree of empathy and emotional realism I wasn't really expecting out of Rucker. As usual for these novels, the plot escalates and escalates in ways I don't want to describe, because the fun of not having a clue what's about to happen next is what drives Freeware.

----------------

I've been reading this as part of a compilation ebook that contains Realware, and I'm sure I'll read that soon. I'm not entirely looking forward to it, because it's long as the first two novels combined and seems like it might be a lot less grounded than I normally prefer, but I'll give it a go!

Thank you!

I struggle a bit with Charlie Stross' prose, but I did get a lot out of Rule 34. Michaelmas does seem like the kind of novel he'd like!

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I've actually been on a real Cyberpunk reading kick lately...

CYBER-GNOSTIC NOVELS

Between the Alexander Besher novels and these below, I seem to encounter a lot of New Age religion in my cyberpunk fiction! It was 1990, I guess.

THE GLASS HAMMER by KW Jeter

A few weeks ago I was talking to Malek77 about Hardwired, and Damnation Alley, and cyberpunk "vehicle fiction", and I really wanted to read something about a cyberpunk car chase. And this was sitting on the rack outside my local second hand bookshop...

WHAT A COVER!

I actually had no expectations for this novel, except a vague hope that it would be an inferior Hardwired clone. It's technically a sequel to Dr Adder, although it's entirely standalone and barely reminiscent of the other novel. Which is a good thing, because I gave Dr Adder two stars on Goodreads. 

The Glass Hammer doesn't actually have many car chases, although this turned out to be much less of a disappointment than I expected. It's a story about gnosticism and physical / mental escape from oppressive, cult like environments. There's an affecting love story hidden under a bleak dystopian patina.

I read this in a single setting, and really valued the experience for reasons I'm having trouble expressing. Whereas Dr Adder seemed like an author passing off cynicism as insight, this seemed to have some genuine thought and insight behind it. 

I'm also glad I enjoyed this because it makes me feel much better about reading another 6 KW Jeter novels. I was getting a bit worried about that!

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DESERTED CITIES OF THE HEART by Lewis Shiner

Boomer spiritual journey to the end of the world!

Set during the Iran-Contra affair, this novel charts a spiritual journey by two American brothers - a Hendrix-era rock star with a drug problem and an emotionally damaged archaeologist - into the heart of a revolutionary struggle for control of a Mayan temple complex. There are Marxist revolutionaries and an American mercenary unit called "The Fighting 666th," whose leadership combine Reaganism with New Age religion. It's all very allegorical. There's are time-travelling magic mushrooms and everything! It's a novel about American paranoia and the end of the 1960s, equated here with the end of the world.

Deserted Cities of the Heart suffers a bit in comparison with Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard, a novel from the same era that covers similar geographical and spiritual territory in a more adept way. I also don't really like the way it seems to lever Mayan faith systems into a story about American spiritual malaise. The politics of the novel are very, uhm, "self-absorbed post-hippy". 

Which isn't to say it's a bad novel at all. While a lot of the minor characters are archetypes, the main characters are memorable and have satisfying character arcs. There are also some notably good action sequences (this is a really good novel about helicopters...) and a very vivid depiction of the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake.

I would have loved this book when I was a teenager. It would have been my favourite novel and I would have been vaguely embarrassed about it now!

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FRONTERA by Lewis Shiner

Having already covered Slam earlier in this thread, I've now read all the Lewis Shiner novels on the list. I may as well write up Frontera now!

Both Slam and Deserted Cities of the Heart were contemporary stories written with cyberpunk genre techniques - this earlier novel is much more conventional cyberpunk. In fact, it's one of the Cyberpunk-iest of Cyberpunk novels, written at the height of the literary movement. 

It's so cyberpunk that the main characters are called "Kane" and "Reese". There are hard-bitten, noir-ish augmented street soldiers who base their decisions on the I-Ching. There are images of blasted cities and corporate warfare. There's a space station covered in detritus and weird, repurposed technology. There are unexpected trips into forms of higher consciousness. 

Cyberpunk! First wave cyberpunk!

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All of these novels were read out of sequence, so progress remains 18/152, or 12%.

PROTO-CYBERPUNK PARADE

MICHAELMAS by Alger Budriss Algir Buryess Algis Budrys

Another proto-cyberpunk novel I'd never heard of before reading this list, written by a writer I associated with an entirely different era and style of science fiction.

Michaelmas is a novel about a middle aged journalist whose efforts to create a phone phreaking tool resulted in the creation of an AI called Domino, the two of whom are now quietly ruling the planet through tiny nudges.

It's an interesting book which I suspect a lot of people would find very dull, but which I quite enjoyed (probably on account of having a recurring personal fantasy about being friends with an AI that would help me fix problems ). The journalist, called Laurent Michaelmas, is essentially a stand-in for the Archangel Michael, and acts as a technological guardian angel for targets of a conspiracy while searching for the perpetrators.

I found it to be an interesting and thought provoking novel. I wonder if it influenced Greg Bear's /Slant, a novel with whom it has a lot in common (and similar themes and antagonists, both of them involving a well-heeled conservative reaction to a highly functional but emotionally unsatisfying technocratic regime). I ended up reading it in two quick sittings, much faster than I anticipated. 

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If we're following the list in sequence, the next novel is Bone Dance by Emma Bull, but I've already covered that in this thread.

Continuing down the list, for the first time we reach novels I'd already read before starting it.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess

I read this when I was a teenager, and honestly don't remember it this much. It's definitely a dystopia, rather than a cyberpunk novel...THERE IS A DIFFERENCE... but I understand completely why it's on this list - the focus on socially marginal street people, the subculture, the surprisingly plausible teenage slang...

It's a short book and very well written in my recollection. The ending is notably different from the film. It's the kind of thing that's worth taking an afternoon to read, just for one's cultural awareness!

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NAKED LUNCH by William Burroughs

William Burroughs always gets cited as a major influence on cyberpunk, not least by the cyberpunk writers themselves - at the time the movement was developing, as a sort of pose. It immediately associated them with a hyperbolic, counter-cultural, punk adjacent tradition. And, to be fair, the city of Interzone described in Naked Lunch is the proto-Cyberpunk city. The concerns and tone of the novel are very similar to 80s cyberpunk books, albeit taken to a much more extreme, more violent and sensory place.

I read this novel while running a fever alone in a youth hostel in Leipzig when I was 16, and remember it in confusing spurts. I imagine that isn't too different from the experience most people had of it, really.

I was a big Kerouac fan when I was a teenager but attempts to read him as an adult have left me a bit unsatisfied. I'm curious to know if that will happen with Burroughs as well, now that this list is heading in that direction.

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As a side-note I'm getting a little sick of reading proto-Cyberpunk on a cyberpunk list. Of the next 13 books I have to read on this list, 10 of them are proto-Cyberpunk. I'm anticipating almost all of them to be good, buuuuuut I CAME HERE FOR MIRRORSHADES, DAMNIT! Not heroin and ideological dystopia!

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My progress in order down the list is now 18/152, or 12%.

Two computer novels

I keep trying to write this post and keep losing it. This is my third attempt to post it, and frankly it's going to be shorter than my earlier attempts!

Anyway - on to two novels which combine my least favourite aspects of this genre: 

1. attempts to accurately surmise the future of computing* 

2. stories set in VR worlds based on fantasy worlds

*which always turn out to be less accurate than novels which base the future of computing on weird drug hallucinations or a TV overdose...

TRUE NAMES by Vernor Vinge

After Leviathan's last post I checked my copy of True Names, and discovered that the original novella is only 90 pages long. The rest of my book was a collection of tech speculation essays from the mid-90s. I promptly absolved myself of any responsibility to read them, and read the actual novella in one sitting. 

True Names is definitely a proto-cyberpunk novel. While the hackers - phone phreaks, really - have fancy cyber-names and do cyberpunk things, the tone is very 1970s. This is absolutely a story that would have fitted on the shelves of a pharmacy rack alongside E.C Tubb and Jack Vance and George RR Martin's early science fiction... and in fact it was originally published in one volume with a GRRM novella! (a really interesting, good combination, IMO)

Blackmailed by the government, a cabal of wizard themed hackers take on a mysterious, unstoppable net-entity that threatens the world, in a net themed around high fantasy tropes. There's a running theme about institutions - and especially the government - failing to appreciate the potential for individuals to use the net to change the world in unpredictable ways. The plot treats this as a threat, the narrative voice views it as a promise.

Leviathan said above that Shockwave Rider felt like a precursor rather than a genre piece, whereas True Names is both. I'm not sure I agree. To me, it reads more like Vinge was making a statement about the future direction of the world (and science fiction), more than a coherent story.

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HEADCRASH by Bruce Bethke

This has the dubious distinction of being the novel on this list I was least excited to read. It was long, it attempts to accurately surmise the future of computing, and it's set in a fantasy-themed VR system.

It was awful. 

It turns out that Headcrash also aspires to be Office Space style satire. It's much less successful at this than Office Space. Most of the jokes are basically "there are women in IT departments now, hurr hurr". It's sub-par incel Dilbert written by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. 

Reading it made me 20% dumber. 

(I had a lot more written about this, in a more forgiving tone, buuuuuut...)

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I've already read CYBERPUNK - Bruce Bethke - and covered it in an earlier post.

This means that my progress down the list is now 14/152, or 9%.

True Names is a book I'm hoping to read towards the end of this year. I have to admit that I'm a bit scared of it, although maybe unfairly. I imagine it as some kind of "tech-speculation" novel, which I don't tend to get on very well with (unlike "social-speculation"). There's a couple of Cory Doctorow and Pat Cadigan novels I've read in the past that I didn't really enjoy, partly because they were so up-to-the-minute that the minute passed and they felt dated (even two years after they came out!).

I'm looking forward to discovering I've completely misjudged it!

THE DEMOLISHED MAN - Alfred Bester

A freudian proto-cyberpunk psychic police chase thriller!

This novel - about a corporate executive maniacally trying to get away with a murder, pursued by mind-reading psychic cops - was Bester's first. It might have the highest plot-event-per-page quotidian of any novel I've ever read. The two Bester novels on this list probably hit the exact centre of the venn diagram between relentless pulp action and high concept SF. This is a little more disjointed and chaotic than The Stars My Destination, and doesn't hang together very well. Also, the entire thing revolves around Freudian psychology, which adds a certain lunatic tone to the whole thing! On the one hand, this means that certain characters just act in very unrealistic or implausible ways. On the other hand, it gives the entire book a kind of compelling "mission statement", and it wouldn't work nearly so well without the Freud stuff.

I think I always prefer a little insanity to a boring novel!

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Because I read this novel out of sequence, my progress remains:

10 out of 152 novels, or 7% of this list.

HOWEVER - counting novels I've read out of sequence or before the start of this project, this is the 76th book I've read from this list. The reason I note this is that means I have now read 50% of it.

LIGHT - M John Harrison

A physicist in 1999 confronts a mysterious (and terrifying) creature called the Shrander, while two different kind of burn-out space pilots in a Cyberpunk-inflected future reach the end of the road and have to confront their pasts. Of course, there turn out to be connections between all three. 

I've heard people say that the cyberpunk setting in this book is mannered or parodic. I'm convinced it's here because M John Harrison likes to write about a specific kind of grey, damp sadness, and the tropes of the genre allow him to do so. Everything in this book seems to happen around empty concrete wastelands.

It's a slow, insightful book with moments of real horror and a depressive kind of humour. The individual characters are very well drawn - I suspect Light may end up having the best characterisation of any novel on this list. The plot seems to be almost directionless until the direction becomes clear at the end. The world-building reflects Harrison's stated view that most world-building is worthless and stupid.

The characters and the reader alike all have to confront the fundamental chaos of the universe by the end. 

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Because I read this novel out of sequence, my progress remains:

10 out of 152 novels, or 7% of this list.

THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER

I don't want, expect, or value accurate prediction in science fiction. This puts me in an interesting position regarding this novel, one of the few that actually achieves it.

The Shockwave Rider was the fourth novel in an sequence of science fiction novels written in the early 1970s by John Brunner that he informally titled "the Club of Rome sequence," after the organisation dedicated to predictive modelling of future problems. All three of the Brunner novels on Malcolm's list are from these sequence, and all three are regarded as famous precursors of the genre. This is the last novel in the sequence, written in 1975 - approximately 8 years before the rise of movement cyberpunk and a year after the word "internet" was coined.

Like the Besher novels above, The Shockwave Rider reads like it was written by a futurist - specifically, a futurist who just read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and decided to start extrapolatin' like a motherfucker. John Brunner is rather less playful, and probably somewhat smarter, than Besher. This doesn't necessarily help it as a novel.

The Shockwave Rider is about a man who escapes from an elite government school intended to create elite operators who can thrive in the information era, and bind them to the government. Before he absconded, he learnt how to navigate the net and hack into virtually any database (using phone codes...), which allowed him to switch one identity after another and hide from the government. At the outset of the novel he has been recaptured, and the book is structured around his interrogation. 

The first half of the novel is basically a picaresque where the man encounters various Dystopian Cyberpunk Things, that have been imitated in many times since. I can sense this book in the background of a lot of British "look at this crazy future shit!" fiction - any Warren Ellis comic, etc. But as The Shockwave Rider heads into its second half, it becomes more coherent and resonant - a kind of cognitive apocalypse, brought on by constant surveillance, atomised society, and the fear that one's life could be destroyed in an instant by something occurring on the net, is threatening to bring down civilisation. 

Brunner basically gets the future of surveillance capitalism right - the collapse of representative government, the explosion of anxiety and paranoia and isolation, and especially the rise of financial crime as the main economic and political force in society. Infrastructure is collapsing, and the state has proven unable to provide basic aid in the aftermath of a natural disaster, exposing the cracks in the system. Naturally, the main characters, who are Very Smart, Very Earnest supermen types, fight to restore some kind of human agency and dignity and community.

A lot of the book reads as a kind of philosophical discourse on what the internet does to human cognition, written prior to the actual existence of the internet. Some of this stuff seems eerily correct and perceptive, and the book is at it's best when it feels like some kind of secret message to the present from another time. By contrast, nobody actually speaks like the characters in the novel, and the action can seem a bit contrived and arbitrary. The Shockwave Rider is like an incredible, thought provoking artefact in a museum, more than a novel.

...and it must have had some effect on me, because it just got the longest description of a novel on this list so far. Some of the books above barely got a sentence!

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Because I read this novel out of sequence, my progress remains:

10 out of 152 novels, or 7% of this list.

I wonder if metal gear and exo-frames and strength enhancing cyber could cause a revolution in riot shields. You could wear a strength enhancing work frame to keep it held up for extended periods. OR maybe some kind of gyro-stablised thing similar to a smart-gun rig to keep it stable, so you could also use it as a firing platform. 

Or you could just turn into this guy...

https://www.deviantart.com/flaketom/art/meet-the-protester-153974336

CP2020 doesn't really do facings, does it? That makes it had.

Maybe it could defend the holding arm, the torso and the leg on the same side?

...OR... weird idea - it could let you spend a point of luck (or make a luck roll) to add the SP to any incoming hit? 

A year on from last time, another update! 

CYBERPUNK - THE NEW AGE YEARS

There's a bit of an unintentional theme to the books I've read since last time. Lets call it "the 1990s"

SLAM by Lewis Shiner

I actually read this right at the beginning of this project but forgot to write it up...

Just like Frontera pre-saged movement cyberpunk by a couple of years, Shiner was also ahead of that thing where every cyberpunk novelist just started writing novels set in the present (the present meaning "the early 1990s").

Slam is about a middle age guy getting out of prison (for mild tax evasion) returning to the Texas coast and trying to put his life together, while various oddballs and petty autocrats alternately complicate and ruin it. I don't remember the plot at all, and i'm not sure there was much of one. This was all about oddball characters and a general philosophy of life. I read this before the meme "OK Boomer" became current, or I would have spent quite a lot of time thinking it. There's definitely a big "aging American white dude contemplating philosophy, duuuuude" energy to the novel.

Still, I kinda enjoyed it. It's amiable. 

If you like the movie Slackers, you'll probably like this.

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SVAHA by Charles De Lint

OK, this came out in 1989, buuuuut 

I'd have assumed this novel was a major influence on Shadowrun, but Shadowrun also came out 1989. I don't know what was in the water...

Setting wise, Svaha might actually be the closest I've come to the generic "sprawl full of Japanese gangsters" stereotypical thing. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Trenton, Ontario (points for unusual setting!), colonised by class ridden arcologies divided between disenfranchised edgerunner types and a Japanese ruling class who talk a lot about honour. The Yakuza ride around on trikes and have smart-guns. The only place I've experienced a world this close to the gaming stereotype of a cyberpunk world is actual Shadowrun novels.

And to complete the Shadowrun thing...

So it turns out that years before the present, Native American communities used super-high technology to sequester their communities from the burning world, in high tech Enclaves. One of the enclaves goes offline, so the closest enclave sends an agent to cross the wasteland and investigate. This agent is a Native American who dresses in buckskin, has a bow, and immediately forms a deep spiritual bond with the first coyote he meets, who turns out to be supernatural. He teams up with a spunky cyber-girl who learns to embrace her spiritual side. There are dream-quests. Meanwhile, there's a side-plot about corporate yakuza and geisha backstabbing each other, sometimes with literal katana. 

Svaha is dumber than it believes itself to be, and racist in a very specific "well intentioned white guy appropriating everything" kinda way. It was also really fun to read some cliched cyberpunk nonsense. I would have LOVED this when I was 15. I don't know if I'd actually recommend it to anybody, but I enjoyed reading it...

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RIM by Alexander Besher

Alexander Besher had the distinction of being the only writer on this list I'd never heard of before starting this project. I was a little worried by these two books, as they're both quite long, and didn't look very promising from their covers. I don't really like cyberpunk that descends into "virtual world" stuff, and Rim is all about getting trapped in one.

Except it's also the only New Age cyberpunk novel I've ever read. It's like KrishnaPunk. Rim is to cyberpunk what the band Shelter is to punkpunk.

Japan briefly disappeared and now fades in and out of virtual reality with the passage between night and day. Frank Gobi, San Francisco's premier spiritual PI, has to travel there to discover the cause of a crash which has trapped his son in a virtual world, pursued by Tibetan demons. Along the way he encounters a motley collection of beautiful women and competent gangster types.

Rim presents a world where a lot of 1990s new age stuff works and has been commercialised. There are criminal rings stealing chi from people. Chakras and Tibetan spiritual practice defines most of the world. There are university departments researching new age-y stuff. 

I can't tell how serious it is. I get "professional futurist playing around" vibe from this novel, just throwing ideas everywhere without much regard to cohesion. It's very self regarding. The cover is full of quotes from magazines with names like MACpower, proclaiming who realistic this future seems.

MIR by Alexander Besher

...is the follow-up, set 10 years later. It's about sentient tattoos trying to take over the planet. It ignores lots of ideas from the first book in favour of a 1000 new ideas. The plot is basically incoherent. There are shamans and tech companies and viruses and fascists and of COURSE it all ends up at Burning Man. 

Mir has better characters than Rim, and the sentient tattoo thing is cool. Even more so than Rim, it feels like a smart, egotistical 1990s "California Ideology" silicon valley tech guy playing intellectual games, more so than a fully structured novel.

I enjoyed this one more than the first. It was something a bit different, and fun brain food for a bit. 

There's actually a follow-up called Chi, which isn't on the VFTE list. I'm curious to read it one day.

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PROGRESS

While I've read over 70 of the novels on the list, for reasons of sanity I've decided to only count my progress in alphabetical order.

I've currently completed 10 out of 152 novels, or 7% of this list.

Oh! Thank you for breaking the trend where every surprise in 2020 is a bad one! I can't wait to read this . I've been waiting for Van Atta to put something like this out for decades now, and with your presentation skills I know it's going to be amazing even without the preview.

On a related note: have I told you how much I like Sprawl Goons? I don't think I've told you how much I liked Sprawl Goons. So, here's how much I liked Sprawl Goons: I really like Sprawl Goons

On 15/07/2020 at 11:21, Prime_Evil said:

On a different note, there are some classic cyberpunk works that many lists neglect (e.g. Melissa Scott's "Trouble and Her Friends" and Richard Kadrey's "Metrophage"). What's your favourite under-appreciated Cyberpunk work? 

That feels like it deserves it's own post, or it'll get lost in here! 

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, for sure, tho :D 

It's such an under-appreciated book. 

(although more people have been talking about it lately! It's one of those novels which get's more discussion in "literary science fiction" circles than in cyberpunk, like Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard)

Speaking of precursors to cyberpunk, I read two more novels on the list...

PLAGUE OF DEMONS by Keith Laumer

I think this is the book on the list I was least likely to have read (or even heard of!), if I hadn't been doing this project.

It's a 1964 novel about a super-spy fighting a conspiracy of monstrous, brain stealing aliens, which doesn't feel very cyberpunk. In fact, it reads a lot like a James Bond novel with more flying cars and robot tanks (and the same number of jetpacks).

The reason I think this made the list is the presence of various full-borg technologies. Like The Stars My Destination, this is an early look at cyberware, body modification and adaptation to mechanical bodies. It definitely feels like a proto-cyberpunk novel.

But the characters are absolutely out of 1960s SF, and so is the plot. It veers off in a very enjoyable direction part way through the novel - the cause is completely predictable, what actually happens, not so much... and into some grandiose 1960s SF stuff. Every character is a one dimensional archetype out of a pulp action story from the 1940s, there's lots of action, jetpacks, and I read it in three fast sittings.

A precursor in one subject matter, not in tone, and probably not one I'd ever put on a list of precursors (but a fun read with a cheap ebook...)

THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE by John Varley

I'm probably spelling that wrong.

Unlike the Laumer book, I've been hearing good things about this one for years. Written a few years before cyberpunk began, it definitely reads like a transitional novel between 1970s science fiction (the best science fiction 😉) and cyberpunk. It's also a major precursor of transhumanist fiction, perhaps even more than cyberpunk.

The Ophiuchi Hotline is about the adventures of a woman across different worlds and clone bodies in a colonised solar system. Invincible aliens have seized the Earth, and the machinations of a corrupt politician determined to take it back sets off a chaotic chain of events. Humanity survived the Invasion due to a second group of aliens, who provided technology designs using the titular Hotline - and now they want the bill.

This is one of the most ideas-dense novels I've ever read. Something new and original gets thrown out almost every page. It would be dizzying and hard to follow, except that the novel is also really well paced and has well drawn, affecting characters to keep everything (a little) grounded. It covers memory and cloning and new forms of bodies.

This is a really good, brain-warping science fiction novel, and definitely anticipates what comes later. Only a lack of setting ... "grit?" "shabbiness?" ... separates it from Schismatrix or Vacuum Flowers, and it's hard to say why this still feels like a 1970s SF book when it covers very similar ground to those later novels.

Without wanting to give away spoilers, there are at least three books on this list with a similar take on aliens to the Hotline builders. It became a recurring theme in the 1980s  

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PROGRESS

Progress ON the list: 72

Progress DOWN the list: 8

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Here's my personal list of Cyberpunk precursors - this focuses on direct stylistic precursors, so your mileage may vary. However, it glosses over the immense influence of hardboiled crime fiction and contemporary writers like John Le Carre and Len Deighton: 

I didn't know about DG Compton, thanks

For the purposes of the project in the OP, I'm consciously focusing on the books on the old VFTE list, even though

• it doesn't have a third of the books in the Cyberpunk 2020 bibliography
• or Bruce Sterling's essential's list
• and it leaves several series incomplete
• and misses some major authors

and so on. This keeps it comprehensible and possible. Every time I've thought about expanding the list to fill in the gaps I've had a feeling of vast, brain eating vertigo. If after this I want to see a cyberpunk book ever again, i'll go and fill in the gaps (and i'll probably do that anyway. I've read as many CP or CP adjacent books that were not on this list since starting this list, as I have books that were on the list...).

One list at a time

Yeah, absolutely.

The Space Merchants really should be on this list. It manages the same trick as The Stars My Destination of being really readable, really fun, and somehow being as relevant now as it ever was in the past. It's such an unexpected gem of a novel.

And also, the originator of all those "a person loses their electronic identity and gets locked out of all society" stories that this genre is built on.

An odd little genre that I keep running across:

The Space Merchants (great)

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by PKD (great)

My Name is Legion by Roger Zelazny (neat little second hand bookshop find, that treats being SINless as a superpower...)

Slow River by Nicola Griffith (genuinely wonderful)

Plus at least three different short stories. I bet i'm missing a few, as well