Issue 9 - June 1995

Greetings again to all members of the SF SIG. After being neglected and under-promoted for so long, it's great to see Australian Mensa's few Special Interest Groups finally enjoying a resurgence of interest. I hope that as more members join the SF SIG it will be possible to expand its activities beyond the publication of Ibn Qirtaiba to include meetings and other activities in most States of Australia.

Due to the positive reaction to our feature on the Internet in issue 8, I am also investigating the possibility of creating an SF SIG home page on the World Wide Web, and perhaps an Internet Relay Chat topic for discussion at a pre-arranged time every week. The advantage of an on-line Ibn Qirtaiba is that it would be free - partly because I'm not in this to make money, and partly because the Internet doesn't easily lend itself to user-pays anyway. However I am conscious that if Ibn Qirtaiba was to go entirely on-line, those readers without Internet access would thereby be deprived of the main benefit of SIG membership. Therefore so long as there remain a bare minimum of subscribers to the hard-copy IQ, I propose to keep publishing it in that format as long as I can. Please send me any comments or suggestions you may have in this regard, so that I can tailor the activities of the SIG to suit your needs.

This issue is our cyberpunk special. Although cyberculture's explosion into the mainstream may have rendered it a little less hip amongst those who were there at the beginning, cyberpunk remains the latest and perhaps the only distinct popular cultural phenomenon to emerge from the SF canon. This issue begins with a feature article on the genre.

Continuing the theme, the first of our new series of Fiction Archives features the novel that started it all; William Gibson's classic Neuromancer. IQ's ongoing serial Other People's Flesh isn't especially cyberpunk, being essentially a nearer-future story, but I have managed to contrive a scene set amongst a pile of computer hardware into part 6, which I hope will suffice.

Your thoughts and contributions are of course welcome at the editorial address below.

Contents

Feature: Cyberpunk

Fiction Archives: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Serial: Other People's Flesh, part 6

Letter

Back Issues

Feature: Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a variant of hard SF that epitomises the cutting edge of the genre during the eighties. In the nineties, cyberpunk may no longer be so cutting edge, but it is even more prevalent in bookstores and in the mainstream press, and shows no sign of fading away.

The most obvious characteristic of cyberpunk fiction for me is the affinity its characters possess for high technology; using it in their jobs, their bodies and their relationships. However even this general observation commands less than universal acceptance. Cyberpunk author Tom Maddox has described the sub-genre as "neither technophiliac (like so much of "Golden Age" SF) nor technophobic (like the SF "New Wave"), cyberpunk did not so much embrace technology as go along for the ride."

Short of a definition, it is at least possible to point to some of the themes that recur in texts commonly accepted as cyberpunk. These include computer hacking and cracking (Neuromancer), cybernetics (Tetsuo), virtual reality (The Lawnmower Man), genetic engineering (Blood Music), mega-corporations (Hardwired) and drugs (Warhead). Although all of these themes have been are still are explored in texts that could not be described as cyberpunk, there is usually a clear difference in tone and perspective. In cyberpunk fiction unlike most other SF, the point of view is generally the underdog's. What makes this point of view interesting to the contemporary reader is that in a world where technology is cheap, the underdog has a tool in technology denied most 20th century down-and-outs.

Cyberpunk encompasses both written and visual forms of SF. Written cyberpunk is characteristically written in a technical, hard-boiled and streetwise style. It is typified by William Gibson's Neuromancer, reviewed below, which is considered to have originated the sub-genre.

However while Gibson springs immediately to most people's minds when cyberpunk is mentioned, it is cyberpunk author and self-appointed spokesman Bruce Sterling who can claim much of the credit for turning the cyberpunk style into a movement. With a nack for PR, a missionary zeal for publicising the sub-genre and a better understanding of technology than Gibson, Sterling has brought cyberpunk out of pulp magazines and into Time. His best-selling collection of short stories, Mirrorshades, contains examples of most variants of cyberpunk, including some at its fringe that hint at avenues for future development of the sub-genre. Many of the authors represented in that collection first found print in Sterling's groundbreaking fanzine Cheap Truth. Sterling, whose cyberpunk novels include Schismatrix, Islands in the Net and Heavy Weather, will be visiting Perth next Easter for the 1996 Natcon.

Moving to media SF, the archetypal cyberpunk movie is incontestibly Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The style of this film is hip, dark, urban and dystropian. Although these adjectives can be used to describe a number of earlier films, such as Escape From New York (as well as some of Ridley Scott's earlier work), Blade Runner stands out as being more inventively techno-fetishist and at the same time more film noire than anything that had preceded it. These factors have been amongst those that have not only pushed the film into the cyberpunk sub-genre, but have indeed contributed to the sub-genre being defined by reference to the film.

Cyberpunk television has yet to find its archetype, although there have been plenty of series that have borrowed ideas from the cyberpunk canon to form their central premise; the execrable VR5 being an obvious example. Perhaps Max Headroom is the closest the small screen has come to recreating authentic cyberpunk. Before the title character became a Coca-Cola icon and prime-time VJ, he starred in a cult British telemovie, that later spawned a short-lived American series of the same name. This series is most notable for injecting an uncharacteristic vein of humour into the sub-genre. Although the potential for cyberpunk to send itself up seems obvious, this opportunity has seldom been taken (Neal Stephenson is a notable exception amongst authors of written cyberpunk).

Cyberpunk is not only a sub-genre of fiction, it's a subculture, embracing fashion (Sterling's "mirrorshades"), art (H.R. Giger), lifetyle (hacking and cracking) and music. Amongst the various musical styles have claimed the label of cyberpunk - including, dubiously, Billy Idol's 1993 album - a near-consensus restricts the honour to industrial music and techno. Industrial music hits closest to the mark. Groups like the Nine Inch Nails and Ministry combine dirty guitars, unashamedly computer-generated beats and bleeps, and morose lyrics delivered in a tortured rasp to create a confronting aural distropia. At its best techno can reflect a similar mood, without the guitars or the lyrics, and with a greater emphasis on synthetic sound; Aphex Twin and Itch-E and Scratch-E provide good examples of this. On the other hand the cheesier ("toy town") side to techno is simply hedonistic pop music, as far from cyberpunk's antiestablishment ethic as Kenny G.

The observation has been made that cyber-culture is fast becoming, simply, culture. Bill Gates' vision of "a computer in every home" seemed unlikely ten years ago; now it is (so to speak) a virtual reality. Similarly, ten years ago few people outside universities had heard of the Internet; now even fewer have not. Within another ten years the information age will make its greatest achievement yet, as broad bandwidth communication lines link up into the much-vaunted information superhighway. Together with continuing advances in multimedia, this will shortly bring upon us one of the major components of the cyberpunk ethos - near-costless electronic access to near-unlimited information.

Predictably then, the phrase "cyberpunk" is beginning to wane, and phrases like "techno-postmodernism" to wax, as the former is gradually being absorbed into the mainstream. But this should not necessarily be interpreted as the death of cyberpunk. In my view there is still going to be room for cutting edge cyberpunk amongst the racks of Wired and Mondo 2000 magazines, just as there has always been room for cutting edge SF of other sub-genres. Moreover, the commercialisation of cyberpunk is happily more a case of the mainstream coming to science fiction, than of science fiction coming to the mainstream.

Back to Contents Back to Index

Fiction Archives: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer is the most famous and successful SF novel of the last thirty years. All the SF awards most of us have ever heard of - the Hugo, the Nebula, the Ditmar, the Philip K Dick - Neuromancer won on its release in 1984. Apart from originating the genre of cyberpunk, the novel also introduced fresh concepts and styles into SF that have found their way into other genres of fiction and into everyday parlance. The novel is offensive in parts and annoying in others, but remains immensely rewarding to read eleven years after its publication.

The story's protagonist is known simply as Case. He is, or was, the equivalent of a modern-day hacker, and as such he has a principled distaste for the flesh, and the needs and urges that accompany it. Case once strove to escape his flesh in the virtual reality of the matrix, where his mind seemed to possess an independent existence, like a computer program suspended in RAM. However when he was caught stealing, his employer terminated his life as a console cowboy by injecting him with an engineered toxin. As the novel begins Case is working in a seedy district of Chiba, Japan, buying and selling computer hardware and software on the black market. He counts his life expectancy in days, and thinks payback has finally come when he finds an intruder in his hotel room.

Her name is Molly; she works as a mercenary, go-between and general hired hand. She has artificial eyes that look like mirrored glasses, retractable blades beneath each fingernail, and in the course of the novel is wired to transmit her sensory impressions to Case in real-time VR ("sim-stim").

06:27:52 by the chip in her optic nerve; Case had been following her progress through Villa Straylight for over an hour, letting the endorphin analog she'd taken blot out his hangover. The pain in her leg was gone; she seemed to move through a warm bath. The Braun drone was perched on her shoulder, its tiny manipulators, like padded surgical clips, secure in the polycarbon of the Modern suit.

Molly, Case and Riviera (who has an implant that enables him to create illusions in other people's minds) are hired by one Mr Armitage to perform a job - what, they aren't told. Case, for his part, is given a special incentive to perform the task for which he's been hired.

"You have fifteen toxin sacs bonded to the lining of various main arteries, Case. They're dissolving. Very slowly, but they definitely are dissolving. Each one contains a mycotoxin. You're already familiar with the effects of that mycotoxin. It was the one your former employers gave you in Memphis."

But Armitage, whose too-perfect face has been reconstructed and whose past appears to have been also, does not seem to be running the show. The nature of their quest and who - or what - is really behind it, are clearly related but hidden from Molly and Case. As Armitage leads them around the world and later into space, they make their own inquiries as to Armitage's identity and the secret purpose of their mission.

Undoubtedly the most famous contribution of Neuromancer to the English language is cyberspace. Gibson's conception of cyberspace is of a 3D virtual reality visual representation of computer data. The term is often used today to describe the Internet, but nothing on the Internet approximates cyberspace as Gibson saw it.

The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void.

Neuromancer is occasionally unlikely, especially to computer literate readers, but it is never dull. High-technological concepts flow thick and fast, with no pause for explanation. As if Gibson feared being accused of including an insufficiency of ideas in his novel, Neuromancer explores artificial intelligence, psychic projection, Japanese and Rastafarian culture, drugs, cyber-prostitution and personality constructs stored in silicon.

"Remember being here, a second ago?"

"No."

"Know how a ROM personality matrix works?"

"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."

"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential, real time memory?"

"Guess so," said the construct.

"Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"

"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"

Gibson's debut novel, Neuromancer is also widely considered to be his best. For some it is the cynical mood of techno-fetishism that makes cyberpunk, and Neuromancer wallows in this from its famous first line ("The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel") to its last. But unlike some of its paler imitations, the novel also has plot, characters and style. The plot may not be of a traditional structure (wait for the beach scene near the end of the book), the characters may be amoral and difficult to relate to, but the book as a whole is one of the finest examples of inventive fiction ever written.

Neuromancer is not simply the novel that started a subcultural movement, it is also literature in every sense of the word. Those few readers who haven't experienced Neuromancer yet are strongly encouraged to do so.

Back to Contents Back to Index

Serial: Other People's Flesh, part 6

The story so far: Mark Heydon was about to transmat from Perth to Singapore when the operator of the transmat started shooting at him, and was killed by Heydon in the ensuing fight. At the same time as he fled from the scene, he appeared to be in Singapore, and was questioned there by police. The two Heydons met and the Heydon from Singapore explained that in a transmat malfunction his body had been transmitted to its destination without the original copy in Perth being destroyed. This Heydon, having been charged with the murder, entreats the first Heydon to surrender. He refuses, and now horrified by transmat technology, tells his tale on current affairs television. A radical anti-technology group take up Heydon's cause, and he joins two members, Dr Julian Asqui and Natasha Morris, at a demonstration at the transmat terminal.

Heydon objected, "The media may be interested now, but in a few weeks they'll have forgotten all about it. Transmats are too useful to be killed by a little bad press. If things are going to change, there needs to be a groundswell. I don't think enough people are listening yet."

"I'm not so sure, Mr Heydon. I think people will listen. This time, they will listen."

They walked on as Heydon considered Dr Asqui's remark. Then his heart stopped as he noticed that Natasha was no longer carrying her briefcase.

Across the road, the walls of the transmat terminal erupted on the crest of a ball of roaring flame.

For Heydon, the screams of car alarms were the death cries of charred victims. He hardly noticed his own voice joining the chorus. As the debris settled, the devastation gradually receded from view, as if by the force of Heydon's denial. But it was Natasha Morris dragging him away by his collar. He wrenched himself free and faced his companions with wild eyes.

"What have you done?" he stammered as he regained control over his voice.

"What had to be done," Dr Asqui snapped. "Now get into the car, quickly."

"Murderers!" he cried hysterically.

"You have a short memory, Mr Heydon. Last night you were the very revolutionary. Didn't you say something like, 'Let's trash some transmats'?"

"I didn't mean this, you know I didn't! I don't think Instransit should run a transportation system by destroying people's bodies and reprocessing their remains. But blowing up innocent people is even worse!"

"You're a coward, Mr Heydon," Dr Asqui accused him as Natasha slammed the driver's side door and started the engine. "The world is full of cowards. They don't know how to travel any more, to entertain themselves, to cook food to eat, without using computers and machines. They don't realise how precious their humanity is, and they are too scared to fight to win it back." Dr Asqui briefly held the car door open for Heydon, then stepped inside himself and closed it.

The silver car accelerated and Heydon was left alone. He ran, pursued by images of flaming bodies and with wails of death in his ears.

Detective Constable Pearsall and Constable McKellar waited outside the door of 15 Lafayette Street, Joondalup, as footsteps approached to answer their knock. A young woman with short brown hair opened the door smiling, then concerned.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"DC Pearsall, Constable McKellar," announced Pearsall, a tall greying woman. "We would like a word with Mr Heydon please, if he's in."

"Er... yes, in the end room tinkering with his computers. Follow me, please." Penny Heydon led the officers into a cramped workshop criss-crossed with optical cable and stacked with decapitated computers and monitors.

"Good morning officers," Heydon greeted them as he extricated his head from the shell of a Zhang Yao VX-32.

"Morning Mr Heydon. Do you know where your other self is at the moment?" asked Constable McKellar, a stocky Scotsman.

"Last time I saw him he was making a fool of himself on the Mike Carr show. Making a fool of myself, too, more to the point. I would have thought you'd have nabbed him in the TV studio, if you're still going to charge him over that transmat operator."

"Unfortunately we are now investigating a more serious charge," McKellar stated.

"Oh?"

"Have you been watching TV this morning Mr Heydon?"

"No, I've been working. Hang on though..." Heydon wheeled his chair over to a large monitor displaying a complex fractal image, which disappeared when he moved a nearby mouse and clicked on a TV icon at the bottom of the screen. A window appeared displaying a television reporter standing in a pile of rubble outside the smoking wreck of a building.

"...yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but police are searching for Mark Heydon, a Perth man who was recently involved in a bizarre transmat accident, and who made an emotional appearance on a television current affairs programme last night denouncing transmat use."

Heydon's face appeared on the screen, saying, "I've thought about what Instransit is doing a lot in the past couple of days, and I'm convinced that they're practicing genocide. Did you know that they had to get the law changed so that they could operate their machines?"

The reporter's voice cut in over Heydon's. "Just before he was tragically killed in the blast, a reporter for the same current affairs programme spoke again with Mr Heydon close to where I am standing now."

Heydon remained on the screen, but the undamaged transmat terminal appeared in the background. Heydon said, "If I have my way, people will think twice before transmatting their own bodies from place to place."

Again the reporter cut in. "It is believed that Mr Heydon may have joined a terrorist group opposed to..." His hand trembling, Heydon clicked the mute button at the bottom of the window and the room fell silent.

Eventually DC Pearsall said, "We'd like you to help us Mr Heydon. As the media has guessed, we believe your other self may have been recruited by a radical anti-technology group; probably the LHL - Libertarian Humanist League."

"That doesn't sound like him, officer; he's no Luddite." Heydon spread his hands. "Look at his office."

"You saw his interview last night," Pearsall responded. "He's a disturbed man now. He doesn't know how to react to his predicament except by attacking what he sees as its cause."

With an impatient glance at his colleague McKellar said, "We don't have time to psychoanalyse him, anyway. The media doesn't know it yet, but Instransit has received threats to each of its other Australian terminals that have been traced to a Perth public phone. We need to find him now, and we need you to help us."

"Okay," Heydon relented, "so I'll help you. But Perth's a big city. I wouldn't know where to start looking."

"You didn't take long to track him down last time," McKellar noted.

"He won't be going back to the Tempus Fugit in a hurry, believe me," Heydon rejoined.

Pearsall brought her face close to Heydon's and spoke in a low voice. "I strongly advise you to do your best. Because if he kills again, you're going to have a hard time doing your weekly shopping. Unless you know a very good plastic surgeon."

Heydon sat at his favourite table at the back of the Tempus Fugit and sipped a cappucino, accompanied by the alto saxophone of Charlie Parker. For an hour he had been trying to identify the songs he recognised, or to read the posters along the side wall, or to make a boat out of his serviette, but his mind kept returning to Julian Asqui, Natasha Morris, and others he never knew, now charred into anonymity. And to Penny, his wife. He had to try to ring her again. He left the cappucino on the table with a ten dollar note and made towards the telephone booth outside the cafe.

The phone rang twice, and his own voice answered it. "Hello, Mark Heydon speaking." Heydon cursed his surprise, and began to replace the receiver.

"Hello? Hello, who is this?" the other Heydon insisted, then guessed, "It's you, isn't it?"

Penny called out, distantly, "Who is it, Mark?"

"Nobody - just a friend," her husband called back, then whispered, "We have to meet. Where are you?"

Heydon gave in. "I'm outside Tempus Fugit."

"Nobody noticed you in there?"

"Do they ever?"

"Maybe not, but you weren't famous before. You're lucky cafe patrons don't watch the daytime news."

"I've been on the news?"

"You're the big lead the police have on the transmat terminal bombing. Not that they needed to do much detective work, given that you held a press conference before the big event."

"Would I have, if I had anything to do with the bombing?"

"Frankly, the police aren't sure of your sanity at the moment. Your performance on Mike Carr last night had an air of mania about it."

"I was angry about the way lnstransit is playing with human life. I still am."

"The worst of it is that a lot of people seem to agree with you, according to the media. But of course, they all deplore what you've done - allegedly done," Heydon corrected.

"Surely you don't think I did it."

"It's certainly not the kind of thing I'd do, but then I don't know how far gone you are. Either way, you're in big trouble at the moment."

"Do you have any more gems of advice for me before I hang up?" Heydon spat.

"As a matter of fact, I do. The police have come to me for help in finding you, and I've managed to a arrange a deal with them."

"I'm listening."

"You give yourself up peacefully. After you're tried for the transmat bombing and you either serve your time or walk, you'll be enrolled in the witness relocation programme, and start a new life under a new name."

"That's a deal? What's the alternative?"

"You spend the next few days as a fugitive, the police hunt you down, and you spend the rest of your life in prison under your own name."

"Goodbye," Heydon intoned.

"Wait, don't go yet," the other demanded.

"Why not?"

"I haven't told you about everything that's happened. The Libertarian Humanist League and Right to Life Australia have organised a joint rally for tomorrow morning to lobby the government to ban transmats altogether. And Instransit have just announced that they'll be temporarily closing their Australian terminals for a security and maintenance inspection."

"Is that all?"

"Er, no. The Catholic church..."

"I don't give a toss about the Catholic church, Mark. If you haven't got anything important to say, I'm going."

"No, don't, please. Let's talk about that deal again," the other suggested.

A gloved hand knocked on the glass of the telephone booth. Heydon waved it away impatiently. Then he noticed it was attached to a police officer's jacket.

"Mark Heydon?" DC Pearsall asked.

"I'm sorry, Mark," came the voice at his ear.

"I am arresting you for wilful murder."

"But I meant what I said about the deal. Think about it." There was a click at the other end.

"You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so..."

Back to Contents Back to Index

Letter

Dear Jeremy,

Thanks for adopting my suggestion to print a directory of SF resources on the Internet. Very useful it's been too, and the rest of the issue wasn't bad either. There are a few major sites that you missed out though, which I thought I'd list for the benefit of readers:

• The Dominion, a site run by the Sci-Fi Channel (an American cable TV channel specialising in guess what?). Reach it at http://www.scifi.com/cgi-bin/rbox/incgif.prl.
• DreamWatch Online, an English telefantasy magazine. Visit it at http://www.dreamwatch.co.uk.
• Welcome to Twin Peaks. Given that you've covered Twin Peaks in the magazine, I'm surprised you didn't include this site or another one like it. Reach it at http://pogo.wright.edu/TwinPeaks/TPHome.html.

Also, you didn't include any email discussion groups. I might do some snooping around and draw up a list of them for you to print.

One complaint. Don't do away with Worlds of Fandom! I don't have any objection in principle to a Fiction Archives column, but couldn't you run them both, or alternate them? There are still stacks of good TV shows you haven't covered yet, like Quantum Leap, The Outer Limits (old and new series), Earth 2, seaQuest, War of the Worlds and the other three Star Trek series. Gary Keable
Surfers Paradise, Queensland

Ed: Thanks for the information. I have checked out the sites you list, and can recommend them all to readers. Worlds of Fandom will return, have no fear. I may even cover the TV series you suggest, except for seaQuest, because it's so awful. If you disagree, then please submit your own World of Fandom article on seaQuest DSV, and I will undertake to print it.

Back to Contents Back to Index

Back Issues

Back issues of Ibn Qirtaiba are now available, and for a strictly limited time, their price has been reduced to only $1.50 each. (Back issues will be mailed flat if you order more than one or if you specify that the back issue is to be sent with your next regular issue, and otherwise will be mailed folded.) As if the price was not sufficient incentive, you can win the paperback book, magazine or comic of your choice simply by ordering one or more back issues this year. Please include three or more preferences for your prize with your order. The winner's name will be drawn at random and announced in issue 11.

To assist your choice of which back issues to order, the contents of issues 1 to 8 are summarised below: