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Contemporary literature
The genre classification of Contemporary literature represents certain texts written during and after 1960. There are also other requirements for a text to classify as Contemporary literature; the text should be of a class distinguishable by a high standard of writing; be it beauty, composition, style, significance.
What is Contemporary literature?
The term literature signifies an array of meanings, the widest and most literal being derived from the Latin "littera", now meaning "acquaintance with letters". There are broad definitions of literature as the entirety of written works and texts of a particular country, period, or knowledge. In contemporary western culture, the current definition of "literature" seems to have narrowed somewhat and is largely defined now as it is taught within the context of English; incorporating poetry, theatre and dramatic performance, essays, and fictional prose.
It is within this category of English literature that Contemporary literature falls. There is broad agreement that the classification of Contemporary literature represents literature produced from 1960 to the present day. However, it certainly doesn't represent all written works that fall within this time period, and indeed, there is more to Contemporary literature than merely a time period. There are also stylistic issues and issues with personal subjectivity that cause certain classifications within and omissions from this genre to be contested.
While these issues are long-winded, there is a fairly well recoginsed belief that "literature", and therefore Contemporary literature, comprises of writings of a class distinguishable by a high standard of writing; be it beauty, composition, style, significance. Obviously these are all subjective and therein lies the dubious nature of such classification. Reasons that have been given for outcasting certain texts from the classification of Contemporary literature are things like poor grammar and syntax and inconsistent or poorly constructed characters and storylines, but these seem to be rules with exceptions. There is also a belief that certain genre fiction (such as romance and sci-fi) is generally outcast from the realm of "literature", however that is extremely disputable.
Our classification of texts within the Contemporary literature section is based on both outside sources, and the writing being of a higher standard than that of pulp or popular fiction. This classification is therefore often subjective.
Ten most popular Contemporary literature:
Plot
The inhabitants of Midland city are putting on an Arts festival, and one of the invitees is otherwise-unknown author Kilgore Trout. Trout is a grumpy, unwashed old man who decides that he will accept this invitation in order to show up and present the unshaved, filthy face of unsuccessful creative endeavour. Because he’s that sort of guy.
What Trout and the residents of Midland city don’t realise, is that they are being watched over by an omnipotent being who sees their every thought and controls almost all their actions…Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt has an appointment with Trout, before whom he intends to manifest himself and make known the secrets of Trout’s existence.
The good
So this whole book is written in a paragraph-ish, point-based, nearly stream-of-consciousness form. It is an unusual style which uses small blocks of text with blank space in between. It jumps from thought to thought and provides bite-size bits of information, some of which are directly relevant to the plot and some of which are not. It sounds like somebody explaining Earthling behaviour to a Martian from the future sometimes. It is remarkably enjoyable to read, and flows about a thousand times better than you’d think. Sometimes there are even doodles, drawn by the author, inside the blank spaces, to illustrate, as it were, a point. It sounds a bit postmodern because it is. Like this:
Post-modernism was a term used by teachers on Earth. It didn’t really mean “post modern”. I am using it to mean self-referential, deconstructive, and definitely ahead of its time, and in order to make myself sound more intelligent. Much of the same applies to “deconstructive”, although post-modernism I have a tenuous feel for, whereas deconstructionism I really know nothing about at all, other than it sounds approximately correct in this context. Although Vonnegut uses shorter sentences.
OK, I’ll stop now. Vonnegut is a science fiction writer in the sense that he is more concerned with real ideas than space ships and explosions, and the truth that appears in strange situations, rather than trying to capture some tedious “reality”. What is most brilliantly explored in this book is the idea that all each of us really are is a machine for moving around and eating, connected to a perfect brilliant light of awareness. I wont extrapolate on this idea too much because I don’t want to ruin it by getting it wrong, but Vonnegut uses his own awareness like a small powerful torch in the big black dark, throwing its beam every which way, including back upon himself, in a manner that seems scatterbrained until you realise it’s exactly what he’s intending to do and in fact works on many levels, not least that of being deceptively short, light and fun to read.
This really feels far ahead of its time in structure, style, and in theme. If this isn’t postmodern I don’t know what is, which aint bad for something written in the early seventies. Vonnegut even mixes brand names symbols into the prose as a kind of schizophrenic lens to put over his torch when the occasion demands. How Gen X is that?
The bad
I must admit that I preferred Chris Bachelder’s Bear V Shark – it’s more contemporary, both in terms of setting and character, but also in terms of the places Bachelder takes the themes of this book, updating them to suit our times. That said, obviously, without this book there would be no Bear V Shark, full stop.
The ending is a bit sixties-ish, but only the very end, and it all holds water.
The channel-surfing ground-level p.o.v style has aged very well (ie not a jot) but ironically, this camera angle, as it were, gives us a more intense sense of the time and place in which the book was written. This is OK when it’s deliberate, ie the cod-anthropological stuff, but it is a bit of a pity in terms of degrading the fresh and zippy prose with a bunch of thirty year old hang-ups and lifestyle commentary – the stuff about racism and the environment, although not irrelevant, seem a bit hysterical now.
What I learnt
That Vonnegut saw first-hand the bombing of Dresden as a POW in WWII.
That Kilgore Trout is actually only really the author’s conscience and eyes and ears, not his avatar, as it were.
That the movie of this book wasn’t too bad, given the awkwardness and age of the source material for turning into a film thirty years after the book was published.
As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the defining books of the “chick lit” genre; so defining, in fact, and followed by so many pale imitations, that Bridget Jones’s Diary should probably surpass this tired and overstuffed genre into something else with the emphasis on “literarty”. There have been so many awful books that have tried to sneak into a similar category, but they just can’t touch the wit and style and glorious lovability of Bridget Jones’s Diary.
The content. Bridget Jones is a thirty-something single girl, with her own flat and a group of supportive friends. She also has man problems, weight problems, mother problems, and career problems. Sure, it sounds trite, but Helen Fielding has that true genius of a writer whereby every small detail is a delight to read and serves to create a masterfully told story. Bridget’s diary, written (as you would imagine) in the first person, is written in an authentic shorthand and provokes a close empathy with Bridget, and her story as she lives from day to day and her experiences with work, men, friendships, etc. The diary begins in January with a list of New Year’s resolutions, and ends with her measurements of how she did. It is lots of fun to live Bridget’s life with her while she consumes alcohol units, cigarettes (v. bad) all manner of food stuffs, has an affair with her boss, and tries to cope with her mother dating a deeply suspicious European named Julio while she remains married to “Daddy”. All the characters are three dimensional and completely living, and the novel is referential to outside events while remaining timeless in the story.
What I really appreciate about Bridget Jones’s Diary is that it is not solely the diary of a neurotic thirty-something. It is also a dazzling social commentary, a witty look at British culture and life, and showcases Helen Fielding’s knowledge about literature, art and her understanding of social issues without drawing conclusions or shoving them in the reader’s face. All of which serve to make this book more impressive and multi-faceted.
Now, while Bridget Jones’s Diary because a massive cult sensation with the advent of the movie, I don’t feel like such a prat giving the contents synopsis as I did with Harry Potter. This is because no matter how much you loved the movie, you will love the book more... mainly because Renée Zellweger’s pout doesn’t feature quite so heavily in the novel (and by the sequel movie you just want to run away), but also because a movie, no matter how expertly done, can’t covey the dry wit and empathy that the book seems to effortlessly exude. My one problem with Bridget Jones’s Diary was that I paid $24AUD for it and finished it in an hour and a half. And was left, half way through a train trip, thinking “is that all?”. However, this feeling has gradually dissipated because re-reading Bridget Jones’s Diary certainly doesn’t diminish any enjoyment of it, and I feel I definitely have had my money’s worth.
Who is this book for? While classed as “chick lit” this book transcends gender. Don’t feel that just because you’re male you are excluded from such things; I know many men who have read this book and utterly loved it. This book is for anyone who wants to see the world through the eyes of Bridget, but also for those who want to experience modern life.
If you like this book, you would also like...Helen Fielding’s earlier novel, Cause Celeb, which is also excellent. And you will probably find other novels in the “chick lit” genre trite and nowhere as good, so stick to the highbrow, because that’s what this is.
3. Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
4. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
5. Something Happened by Joseph Heller
6. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
7. Waiting by Ha Jin
8. Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley
9. Lullaby by Chuck Palaniuk
10. Survivor by Chuck Palaniuk
Science Fiction, Literature and Technology
Sci-fi --or SF, as its current practitioners prefer to call it--has had a colorful literary history. Depending on one's definition and point of view, it is either (A) a relatively recent literary phenomenon that, despite its humble origins, currently finds itself riding a wave of popularity towards a brighter and more lucrative future or (B) one of the oldest and most respectable of literary genres--a form of imaginative fiction that has successfully reinvented itself from century to century, generation to generation, but which now finds itself frantically striving to keep pace with the dazzling improbabilities of high-tech reality itself.
No respect?
Kurt Vonnegut once called the designation "Science-Fiction writer" a sort of "file-folder label or pigeonhole" and complained that all too often literary critics mistook the file for "for a urinal." Apparently "the way a person gets stuck into this file," Vonnegut went on to say, "is to notice technology." He was referring to the fact that at one time SF was considered a vulgar form of pop entertainment--a robots-and-flying-saucers pulp genre just a notch above (or below) the comic book. What the National Enquirer is to high-gloss journalism, SF was to serious literature.
Fortunately, for Vonnegut and other wearers of the sci-fi label, that is no longer the case. In the past three decades, not only has SF stayed enormously popular (in terms of new titles and overall readership, it's second only to mystery and detective fiction), it has also achieved a remarkable level of artistic respectability and intellectual cachet. (It's currently the favorite genre of philosophers, scientists, and techies themselves.) Furthermore, with the startling array of high-powered inventions and world-transforming technical developments of the past half-century (from rockets and A-weapons to computers and cloning), it is hardly possible for any modern writer not "to notice technology." Consequently, to be placed in the SF "pigeonhole" today is no longer to suffer second-class literary status (or serve as a public convenience facility), but to be recognized as a writer who is interested in imaginative adventure and ideas.
The origins of SF
The debate over the beginnings of science fiction (When did it start? Who invented it? etc.) is largely a debate over definitions of the genre. For example, if we require that "science fiction" be in some sense fiction about modern science and technology (which seems a reasonable demand), then the genre could not have begun until the late18th century. For it was only then that the idea of science as a special category of human knowledge--disciplined, rigorously tested, and uniquely reliable--began to gain wide intellectual acceptance. Only then that writers began to appreciate the profound, possibly decisive, role that new technologies might play in world economic development and social change. And only then (after the early stages of industrialization) that the full power and potential of applied science (for better or worse) began to be a matter for serious speculation and moral concern.
So if we accept this limited (and nearly literal) definition, SF is a comparatively recent genre. And the first bonafide science fiction classic is probably Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)--a gothic tale of techno-scientific aspiration, hubris, and retribution that continues to gain fans not only in Hollywood (five different productions in the 1990s!) but among contemporary SF readers as well.
Shakespearian Sci-fi?
Although the label "science fiction" was never actually applied to literary products until the 1920s (when it was used, as Vonnegut implies, to identify exotic tales of imagination and adventure published in juvenile-oriented pulp magazines), the genre can easily be expanded to include some of the oldest and most distinguished works of world literature. It all depends on how much actual science (in our modern sense of the word) we require an SF work to contain. If none--that is, if all we require are certain themes, characters, settings, and plot elements (e.g., an alien monster, a voyage through space, imaginary worlds, contact with a spirit or extraterrestial) then the Bible is science fiction. And Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton are all sci-fi masters.
But this is obviously stretching things too much. If all imaginative literature is science fiction, then the "pigeonhole" becomes worse than stigmatizing or degrading--it becomes useless. A more practical solution is to hold on to our earlier restrictive definition--namely, that SF is essentially fiction about modern science-- yet allow for the possibility of various analogs and precursors. Allow, that is, for writing that resembles or anticipates science fiction.
Take the Odyssey, for example. Although no critic would pronounce the poem a true piece of science fiction, there's no disputing the fact that it contains elements that are science-fictionlike. The same may be said for classical works like Plato's Timaeus (a dialogue on fate and cosmogony) and Republic (a dialogue about justice that winds up delineating an entire ideal society). Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon's, The New Atlantis (1627), and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) are further examples of early sci-fi prototypes.
A Note on Genre
To recognize some works as precursors of SF makes sense in any case because literary genres aren't absolute classifications. They're fuzzy sets. Moreover, individual works of literature--especially modern ones--are seldom entirely tragedies, or comedies, or satires, or adventure stories, or SF tales, or lampoons, or any one thing. Instead, they tend to be complicated amalgums of various genres. Twain's Connecticut Yankee, for example,combines elements of comedy, satire, parody, farce, fantasy-adventure, and prophetic nightmare. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle offers a similar mix. Yet without question both novels also qualify as specimens of science fiction.
Visions and Scenarios
One final point: The mere fact that a novel or film deals at length and seriously with science and technology does not necessarily mean that it's honest-to-goodness SF. The novels of the British writer C.P.Snow, for example, are largely about science and scientists, but they're hardly examples of science fiction. In fact these novels are actually much closer in style and character to standard historical or political novels than to sci-fi products. That's because Snow's concern is entirely with character, power, and moral conflict in a realistically rendered present--a precisely depicted here and now. Traditional SF, on the other hand, tends toward the hypothetical and has a decidedly more prophetic or apolcalyptic goal. The SF writer, that is to say, is more concerned with future scenarios and vivid alternatives, with provocative extrapolations and exciting possibilities, than with the naturalistic transcription of current circumstances. In short, true science fiction is visionary writing about science and technology.
A Few Sub-genres, Conventions, and Examples
We can conveniently sub-divide SF into a set of modes, sub-categories, or sub-genres, including:
| Cyberpunk as Literature: Shattered Reflections of a Post-Modern Future. |
| Once upon a time there was a society that did not know itself. It had known itself once, when it had been modern. When everything had fit. When everybody agreed on everything. All was in harmony, or so it had seemed. But slowly it had lost its homogeneity and had fractured into a multitude of subcultures, all of which seemed to contradict one another. There were the yuppies, the alternatives, the rednecks, the intellectuals, the liberals, the conservatives, the Socialists, the Nazis, the skinheads, the punks, the hippies, and many many more. There were so many different groups that no one could seem to agree on anything, and the people became very confused. So they looked to the past. They cut it up, rearranged it, deconstructed it, and reworked it. They took the modern and created the postmodern. INTRODUCTION Postmodernism is now a well established and documented cultural fact that has been argued over for at least the past two decades, and should be of keen interest to the literary critic today. Defining such a term and how it relates to literature, though, is at best difficult and at worst totally useless due to the anarchistic nature of postmodernism. Postmodernism, on the surface, encompasses many different and often contradictory ideas. In no other genre of fiction are the postmodernist ideals for literature expressed better than in the sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk. This relatively recent offshoot of science fiction, has come into its own with its recognition as a form of postmodernist writing. Yet cyberpunk is as difficult to define as postmodernism, because like postmodernism, cyberpunk has many different individuals contributing to an uncentralized and unmanifested concept. One must, then, look not for simple one line definitions of the term, but instead try to gain an understanding of it through thorough examination and exploration of the concept. By looking at the fiction, interviews and essays by the leading authors in this genre, and tying this into the postmodern context, one can more accurately and substantially comprehend the term cyberpunk and hopefuly come to a better understanding of postmodernism. CYBERPUNK IS SPAWNED "The future isn't what it used to be!" - Arthur C. Clarke In the late 1970's a new kind of music burst onto the scene which has had a profound effect on western popular culture. Punk Rock comes out of the back streets of London, and although loosely based on the Rock-a-billy tradition, the same style that produced the Beatles, its ferocity of tone and lyrics set it apart from previous music. Punk Rock groups, in general, preached Anarchy and individuality in violent and rebellious songs. Groups such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ruts, scream their music to audiences who are tired of hearing how great the world is, when they can look around them and see the truth. These groups, wrote Griel Marcus, made music so brutal, haphazard, or obscene that airplay was out of the question. Given that the normal channels of pop communication were irrelevant, all restrictions on what could go into a record or a performance, on what a record could sound like or what a performance could look like were forgotten. These new musicians ignored all the conventions of pop music, and instead sang and played staccato lyrics and beats designed not to entertain but to irritate. Coming quick and sharp they gave little time for digestion before another round would hit. Many writers of the late 1970's pick up this style and begin to write science fiction stories with the same jarring feeling that punk rock music gives. It is highly debatable as to whether these writers do this consciously or not, but the term cyberpunk is conceived to describe these new authors and their abrasive stories. In the introduction to his anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterling, one of the innovators of the sub-genre, reflects on this term. This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group. But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one stuck: cyberpunk. Thus, "cyberpunk" - a label none of them {the writers of cyberpunk} chose. But the term now seems a fait accompli, and there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of words that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground. (xi) This "overlapping" of ideas is crucial to the success of cyberpunk, as it shows that science fiction needs not be unrelated to our daily existence. The term then defines the sub-genre, and it is the rebelliousness that it represents against traditional science fiction that attracts a whole new generation of readers and writers to its flag, "The point of the cyberpunk argument," argues one writer," is that this old technofuture is a flabby, outmoded idea, one that makes for boring science fiction because it's based on an old-fashioned dream of the future and therefore obscures our view of the burgeoning dystopia we're inhabiting right now". Cyberpunk can directly deal with our culture, and its immediate future. This subgenre is a bringing together of the cyber, referring to the technology used to artificially augment the human body and human abilities, with the popular culture and social ideas found in punk rock and roll music. No idea can come from only one source, and cyberpunk does not merely evolve directly from science fiction. Instead, it derives its style from a verity of literary sources, and it seems that, almost surprisingly so, one of those chief sources would be the detective novel genre, especially those written in the 1920's. In an interview conducted by Larry McCaffery, William Gibson, considered the father of cyberpunk, comments on Dashiell Hammett, famous for his creation of the character Sam Spade in the novel The Maltese Falcon; I remember being very excited about how he had pushed all this ordinary stuff until it was different - like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost surreal. You can see this in the beginning of The Maltese Falcon, where he describes all the things in Spade's office. Hammett may have been the guy who turned me onto superspecificity. Novels such as those by Hammett and his contemporaries, portray raw details, giving an almost hyper or paranoid awareness of what is happening in the story. This "superficialness" is what writers like Gibson pick up on, and use. Dialogue is kept short and punchy, with incomplete sentences trying to capture more accurately normal human speech. In this selection from Hammett's The Maltese Falcon the reader is presented with a phone conversation between Sam Spade and an unknown caller. The reader does not know who is calling or why, and we are only privileged enough to hear Spade's end of the conversation, "Hello... Yes, this is Spade... Yes, I got it, I've been waiting to hear from you... Who?... Mr. Gutman? Oh, yes, sure!... Now - the sooner the better... Twelve C... Right. Say fifteen minutes... Right.". On the one hand, this dialogue sounds trite and meaningless, empty of deeper content, since, unlike the modernist writers, who also attempt to represent realistic human speech in writing, we never see the thoughts or conscience behind the words; but the problem is that in real human communication there often is not anything deeper than what is being said. Writers like Hammett present the reader with an ultra real surface, with the events, nothing more than you would get than if you were actually standing in the room with the characters. Rather than attempting to analyze events and actions for the reader, the reader is left to puzzle through the characters motives just as in "real" life. Many cyberpunk writers also work at this surface level, allowing the reader a more active role in character development than in the modernist novels, since the reader judges the characters not upon their intentions, for which the reader has only the narrator to interpret, but upon their actions, which are left to the the reader to interpret. The Fall of Western Civilization: The Cyberpunk Years Cyberpunk quite defiantly creates a niche all its own through its writers' innovative use of language and embracing of popular culture. Cyberpunk stands out from other forms of science fiction due to its unique vocabulary, its "slang", which the uninitiated often find difficult to understand. Cyberpunk stories often concern themselves with images and facades: the mystique. This might come across as trite and superficial, but what the writers are trying to get to are the substances within a superficial world. The people who populate the dark urban sprawl cities of the future, who are caught in the cogs of an immense world machine, follow trends and fashion as if their lives depend on it because there lives often do. Cyberpunk writers are fascinated by popculture as a skill, not just popular culture as a topic of academic interest, "In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows limping in its tracks," writes Bruce Sterling. They explore the immediacy of the latest trends; and in cyberpunk trends and fashions are indistinguishable. They pass so quickly that it is a full time job just keeping up with them. In his short story "Freezone," John Shirley explores a society in its different fads, and how these fads conflict with one another. There are two "crowds" in this story vying for popularity: the Minimonos, who are rising in popularity, and the Flares whose popularity is waning, The Minimono crowd wore their hair long, fanned out between the shoulders and narrowing to a point at the crown of the head, and straight, absolutely straight, stiff, so from the back each head had a black or gray or red or white tepee-shape. Those, in monochrome, were the only acceptable colors. Flat tones and no streaks. Their clothes were stylistic extensions of their hairstyles. Minimono was a reaction to Flare. And to the chaos of the war, and the war economy. The Flare style was going, dying. These fleeting fashions also reflect the immediacy of life in these stories because fashions come and go as quickly as the people. One of cyberpunk's chief characteristics is the portrayal of life in the future as a cheap commodity. In a way, they present the immediate future (the next 50-100 years) as being parallel to the Dark Ages, or to the fall of the Roman Empire, with society corroding from within and without. So what is left to a society that had been the greatest ever produced? America is typically represented as a kind of decadent playhouse, and all that remains is the flash of neon lights in a smoke filled night, and the apathy of a people destroying themselves. Tough attitudes and tribal instincts take over from organized society. Although the future in the majority of cyberpunk writings is a dark and stygian place, which at face value seems like nothing more than a twisted view of today's worst social and economic problems, at its heart, cyberpunk retains a kind of romanticism about it, but a romanticism with razor blades and silcon chips attached: a "Neuromantacism" (Glazer 160-161). The worlds of cyberpunk are places were danger is a daily necessity of life, where everyone lives in a constant state of mild paranoia. The protagonists in these stories are rarely heroes, and are far more likely to be anti-heroes. There is no line between good and evil, and the valorous are eaten for breakfast. In the short story "Spook," the protagonist is a hired mercenary who is sent out to "save the world" from a group of "crack pots" who are trying to get back to nature in an extreme way. But the reader is given insight into the mercenary's true feelings: "Talk of loyalties and ideologies bored him. He cared very little for Synthesis [the company hiring him] and its ambitious efforts to unite the planet under one cybernetic-economic web" (Sterling 167). These are worlds of adventure and intrigue, where governments and corporations wage unseen wars by computer, and the "little guy" can get a "piece of the action" if s/he has the right connections. Within this social disintegration, a new world power arises: the "multicorp". The idea of huge corporations that almost replace the need for a central government plays heavily in cyberpunk, and it is not as abstract a concept as might be thought. We see around us today companies taking on more and more functions outside of their traditional roles: providing health service for their employees, keeping large security forces, etc... Leveraged buy outs, mergers, hostile takeovers are buzz words that are quite commonplace, but what happens when these corporations grow out of all proportions and become powers unto themselves? Will it become the new basis for society, with patriotism related to corporate status? There is no doubt that the corporations of today will continue to grow, but it is the role of science fiction to attempt to predict where these trends in growth might lead. One possibility put forth by Bruce Sterling in his novel Islands In the Net is of a democratically controlled corporation, where all of the employees actually vote on who their chairpersons will be. Man V. Machine Information, data, controls our lives. From our bank account to the prices at the grocery store, to personal records, to the type of pizza we order from Domino's (which does keep records of such things), data is constantly being sorted and sifted through. The data about us defines, and in many ways, controls us. It is only the easy access to information, via computer, that allows credit cards to function as they do. And with the future, data will become power, according to the cyberpunk authors. A new bread of pirates will plunder the stocks of data. Corporations will higher net runners to infiltrate their competitors systems, to steal and destroy them, and plant computer viruses. Wars will be fought through modems and over telephone lines, all by computers with their human interfaces. Computers become more and more sophisticated every year. It seems that as computers decrease in size they increase in capability, such that by the time the cutting edge is established it is already outdated and outmoded. One of these cutting edge technologies is artificial intelligence, trying to make a machine "think". Thinking machines have been a favored topic in science fiction almost since its advent. What happens when the machines begin to replace the humans, when we create our own superiors, and they bite the hand that feeds them. There have been many examples of androids (robots that can look and act like humans), especially in the cinema, that turn on their human masters: The Terminator, in which a computer gains sentience and decides to annihilate the world population, InBlade Runner (movie version) there are several androids who are dissatisfied with their limited life span and try to force their creator to extend it, and Alien has an android programmed with a secret mission that supersedes any programing against killing humans. All of these movies fall into a cinematic form of cyberpunk, with dark and oppressive scenery of crumbling cities and tacky housing projects, technology being used not for good or evil but simply being used: a distopic view of the future. These movies actually result from the literary movement. The cyberpunk tradition often will use androids as slaves, and explore the ethics of slavery from a new angle. These machines have been made artificially intelligent and yet are still bout and sold. Displeased with the way humans are running things, much as a young child might dislike the way their parents treat them, they decide to take control, only these children are far "superior" to their parents, physically and mentally. Of course this idea is easily traced to Mary Shelly's Frankenstien, the major difference being that in her novel the monster lost. This is not to say that all intelligent computers are going to end up blood thirsty maniacs. In Mona Lisa Overdrive we see androids and computer generated holographic images entering into strange friendships with human beings. In this scene a young girl, Kumiko, is traveling to London, and her father has sent along a computer that uses a hologram to communicate with its user: The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow {airport}. The fifty-first generation of Maas-Neotek biochips conjured up an indistinct figure on the seat beside her, a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots. "Hullo," the ghost said. But however these new intelligent "life" forms are represented, they do question what humanity is by allowing us to play god and create them "in our own image", thus making them a reflection of the extremes of good and evil in human kind. Whatever the future holds it is important that we see that its seeds are sown around ustoday, and that science fiction authors, especially those writing cyberpunk, are merely following these lines to their logical, although often exaggerated, conclusions. Cyberpunk has at its heart a dark view of the future. The societies in them have already destructed, for whatever reason whether social, political, economic, or military. Either this or the people of the society in the midst of collapsing under their own lethargy and stagnation. The inhabitants rut through the decay to find what is left to live for in a society that has given up on itself. Cyberpunk is a bringing together of the "armogedon" futures of the sixtiess with the "technology will save us" veiws of the fifties, leaving worlds that, although seeming bleak and hopeless, are still filled with marvels beyond imagining. Whether cyberpunk can continue as the rebellious sub-genre it was in the early 1980's, especially in light of the recent attention placed on it, is unsure. Many feel that the sub-genre is already dead, killed by its own unadaptability to new world problems. Cyberpunk is the fulfillment of postmodernism within the narrow confines of the science fiction genre. But if both postmodernism and cyberpunk are understandable and definable terms, does this mean that culture has moved on, and if so where are we now? Some of the most recent work to come from recognized cyberpunk authors might shed some light on this. In Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling creates a world that is out of the cyberpunk mold. Gone are the dark and sinister mega-cities and video junkies. Instead the world is in the midst of unifying. And instead of looking at the problems of the entirety of humanity, such as modernism did, or the problems of the individual, like post modernism, we are faced with the problems of the community. |
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