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OtherRealms Issue 20 Part 03
Electronic OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Part 3
Waste of Trees Quarterly
[Part 2]
Alan Wexelblat
The Tomorrow Makers
Speaking of how the future will handle computers, all you future-
oriented people might be interested in this work. Grant Fjermedal is a
science writer, with interests and publication credits mainly in physics
and medicine. For The Tomorrow Makers he moves out of these worlds and
into the worlds of the midnight hackers and the robot builders.
The Tomorrow Makers is somewhat like a diary. It chronicles Fjermedal's
travels across the country as he visits the futurists' labs first at
CMU, then at Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Thinking Machines, and on to
Japan. It is chock full of interesting stories and quotes. The author
is quite good at conveying the atmosphere of the places he visits.
We start out meeting Terragator, the creation of Carnegie-Mellon's
Autonomous Mobile Robot Laboratory, and its builders. These people are
struggling to build something that may one day become the world's first
robot warrior, or that might be the first miner on the moon; meanwhile,
the Japanese are building robots that can play the piano. One of the
strongest points in the book is Fjermedal's careful examination of the
relationship between robots, AI and society. He takes a look at
questions of machine feeling (could we hurt or enslave our creations?
would they know it if we did?) and of the uses to which robotic and AI
technology might be put.
After CMU, we move on to the AI creations and parallel machines of MIT.
Here Fjermedal gets to play with one of his favorite topics. He, and many
of the researchers interviewed in the book, believe that it may be possible
to analyze the contents of a human brain and reproduce them in silicon.
This process, called downloading, would theoretically allow humans to
cheat death, to travel to the stars, and so forth. While many AI
critics and non-scientists publicly sneer at this idea, it is
interesting to see that most of the 'names' in the AI field agree that
this is a likely possibility. There seems only to be disagreement about
when. Some think that we will be the last generation to die in
carbon-based bodies; others think it's something that their children or
grandchildren will live to see.
It's hard to give a sense of the book to someone who hasn't read it.
It's not really a story in the conventional sense, but it's something
more than a simple chronology of Fjermedal's travels. It's a strong
book, with strength in the feeling you get that you are looking over
Fjermedal's shoulder and in the feeling that he is really capturing the
edge of emerging technology.
Despite its overall strength, I found the book somewhat lacking. It is
a little disorganized; Fjermedal is constantly referring to meetings
that the reader hasn't been taken to yet. Also, he has the 'gosh-whiz'
attitude of a newcomer to the computer field and this comes across in
The Tomorrow Makers. He is aware of the implications of what he is
investigating, but seems overly optimistic about the probabilities of
success. Overall, I found this to be an excellent bedtime book, and it
makes a pleasant change from SF authors who don't know their science.
The Artificial Kid
Before we start, it's personal notes time: at the last Armadillocon, I
had the pleasure of making Bruce Sterling's acquaintance. Over the
succeeding months we've traded fun information back and forth and I
hope to interview him for a future issue of OtherRealms; I am therefore
reading everything of his that I can lay my hands on. I hope that won't
color my reviews of his books, but at least you were warned.
The Artificial Kid is an unusual and very original book. It is futuristic
SF, but not cyberpunk in the sense that others have characterized
cyberpunk. It is set on the world of Reverie, which has been
terraformed and colonized by humans. The society is divided between
ground dwellers, who live in a semi-anarchic technocracy, and orbitals
who live in space colonies. At its inception, Reverie was ruled by a
Board of Directors founded by Moses Moses. However, Moses had himself
frozen and hundreds of years later, his cryocapsule and the reigning
board of directors were destroyed by an assassin's bomb. Stories of a
mysterious Cabal abound, but no one is really sure who did what.
Now entering its five-hundredth year, the planet's society as a whole
is supported by mineral wealth which is divided more or less evenly
among the citizens. Consequently, leisure activities have assumed
heightened importance to the point where a Decriminalized Zone is
established. In this zone, punks and gangs fight for territory, blood,
and prestige. Each combat artist is constantly surrounded by his or her
cameras, which record every detail for later editing and broadcast.
One of the fastest-rising of these self-made stars is the Artificial
Kid. With the help of his backer, Mr. Money Manies, he is establishing
himself on the fight circuit. Manies is a very eccentric, very rich
gentleman. At one of Manies' regular social breakfasts, the Kid earns
the enmity of a powerful enemy, Professor Angeluce. Angeluce is an old
enemy of Rominuald Tanglin, the Kid's father, and Professor Crossbow,
the Kid's mentor and guardian. The argument quickly heats up and ends
with the Kid tossing Angeluce off a balcony into the sea. The Professor
sets out to destroy the Kid, and incidentally take over Reverie.
At this point, the unconventional nature of The Artificial Kid begins
to surface. Most authors place their protagonists square in the center
of the action. Sterling operates more in the manner of a Greek tragedy,
however. Most of the action takes place offstage or around the Kid,
with the Kid only reacting to it as news reaches him or when people
seek him out. It makes for an unusual story.
The Artificial Kid was Sterling's second novel, and as such it has some
weaknesses. At one point, Sterling dumps his characters onto the ocean
so they can tell each other stories so that the reader gets necessary
background information. A bit amateurish, but still interesting. I
enjoyed the book in part because it is written at a fairly intellectual
level; Sterling assumes a high level of educational in his audience,
making the book somewhat more challenging than average.
Schismatrix
Until cyberpunk burst on the scene, Sterling was best known for his
Shaper/Mech stories. These stories told of the ongoing war between the
two basic branches of human evolution: the Shapers, who use biological
techniques of mind self-control and body regeneration, and the
Mechanists (or Mechs), who replace their worn-out body parts with
mechanical limbs and organs. In addition, there are also the sundogs,
dregs of both societies who prey on whatever is available without
concern for which side is winning.
Schismatrix is the story of Abelard Lindsay, Shaper exile, sundog, and
his quest for revenge on Philip Constantine his one-time friend who, for
political reasons, murdered the woman they both loved and tried to kill
Lindsay. It is also the story of the end of the war between Shaper and
Mech, and its restart and final end. It is also the story of the first
contact between human and alien. It is a story that covers centuries.
Naturally, this much story couldn't be told in 288 pages in
conventional narrative style. Just as The Artificial Kid used the style
of Greek tragedies, Schismatrix uses the style of the Greek epics like
the Odyssey. What Sterling does is follow Lindsay through several
series of important episodes. The book is divided into three sections,
each of which tells a mostly complete story. Enough threads are left to
spin into the next section, but they are thin enough threads that
Sterling can slip past decades of time between the sections.
The story begins with Linsday banished to exile in the sundog colony of
Mare Tranquilitatus People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu. Here, exiled from
family and friends, he must depend on his wits and his training to
rebuild. The kinds of talents he shows here will remain with him
throughout the story. He is a facile liar, extremely competent at
'handling' people. He is quick to analyze a situation and take
advantage of it. He uses these talents to insinuate himself with the
powers that be in the Zaibatsu, and ultimately to escape from it.
The second section of the book shows Lindsay in his prime. He is one of
the first to have contact with the Investors, the aliens who are
revolutionizing human history. For the first time, the warring factions
of humanity are united by a peace as they jointly deal with the outside
forces of trade and diplomacy with the aliens. This section also covers
Lindsay's downfall at the hands of a resurgent Constantine and the
final meeting between the two. Along the way, the alien presence is
reduced and humanity begins to recover from the culture shock imposed
by the outsiders.
The last section shows Lindsay in his final years, first as the head of
a family, then as the architect of an impossible project -- the
terraforming of Mars. The pace of the story accelerates until we are
covering years in a single section and at the end, Lindsay meets his
final destiny.
Schismatrix has none of the rough edges that The Artificial Kid
demonstrated. The characters are well-drawn and complex. The technology
is fascinatingly present, but it never overwhelms the reader. The
aliens are also well-drawn, though sometimes they seem less alien than
some of the strange people that make up the Shaper/Mech universe.
Readers may have some trouble finding this book. With the imminent release
of Sterling's new novel, Islands in the Net, the hardcover of Schismatrix
has been remaindered, and I have yet to see it in paperback anywhere.
Watchmen
To call Watchmen the comics sensation of the year would be an
understatement. Coming, as it does, on the heels of Dark Knight it will
make the graphic novel impossible to ignore.
It's hard to know where to start in describing Watchmen. Let's begin
with the form. A graphic novel is unique in that it provides a medium
in which the author can do things that would be impossible in pure
print. This was done well in Ronin and is essential to Watchmen. There
are images and actions that would be impossible to convey in print.
Moore and Gibbons have created a tight, multi-layered,
visually-oriented world and the story moves the reader around in it.
The art as art is not that revolutionary. There are none of the new
techniques that were tried in Ronin, for example. However, the layers
of detail and background are well-done and subtle. Points are made
almost without the reader being aware of what is being shown.
The story, however, sets Watchmen apart from any graphic novel that has
come before it. The story is as complex and multi-layered as a print
novel. There are well-developed characters, love interests, conflicts,
and finally resolutions. The basic plot is fairly simple. Watchmen
takes place on an alternate Earth where there were no real superheros.
Instead, there were groups of normal people who, for different reasons,
enjoyed dressing up in costumes and playing at being heroes and
villains. The heroes had some successes and some failures and
eventually vigilanteism was outlawed in 1977.
However, three heroes remained. The first was Edward Blake, the
Comedian, a cynically amoral mercenary who avoided enforced retirement
by becoming a government agent, first in Vietnam, then in Nicaragua.
The second was Jon Osterman, Dr. Manhattan, an ordinary man who got
trapped in a physics experiment. He became a true superman, able to
control matter and overcome the barriers of space and time. The
government used his abilities to keep the Russians in check, to win in
Vietnam, and in general to maintain US dominance in the world. His
ideas on technology have reshaped the world.
The third is Rorschach, a psychopath of the highest order. His reply to
the Keene amendment was to dump the body of a wanted serial rapist-
murderer on the steps of a police station. He sees himself as a man
with a mission to cleanse the world. The story begins with the
discovery of the murdered Comedian; Rorschach sets out to investigate
it and the story unwinds around him.
There are a number of themes running through the book. The simplest of
these is the question of "who watches the watchmen?" from which the
novel's title is taken. Moore and Gibbons examine issues of social and
political responsibility in both a personal and a global context. Other
ideas, such as the morality we claim to live by, are also examined. I
found the treatment of these ideas very interesting. No sermons are
delivered; instead, Moore and Gibbons allow the characters' actions to
speak for them.
Last time around, Chuq opined that Watchmen might not be a good Hugo
candidate for the future of graphic novels. I disagree; I think that
the visual and story complexity rival most print novels and the
combination of the two makes this a definite contender for a Hugo. In
addition, it is something that will make people new to graphic novels
sit up and take notice.
Even with all its good points, Watchmen has two problems which are
worth mentioning because they are problems that future graphic
novelists may face. First, Watchmen was written in twelve parts --
published as individual comics. Thus, readers had weeks between issues
to assimilate all the material. However, the majority of readers will
read the softbound volume with all the issues back-to-back. Given that
the level of the story is extremely intense, the cover-to-cover reader
is easily overwhelmed. By piling on image after image, Moore and
Gibbons can easily lose the casual reader who does not take time to
sink into the world of Watchmen.
The second problem is one that print novelists have faced for some
time -- Watchmen lacks a sympathetic character. There's almost nothing
for the reader to latch on to -- no one to identify with. Unlike a
conventional comic, which revolves around a central hero designed to
appeal to readers, Watchmen really has no central character and none of
the major players is designed to be identified with. In fact, insofar
as it is Rorschach's story, it alienates the reader. I confess that I
really 'got into' Rorschach; he is starkly beautiful in a sick way.
Insane characters are hard to make real and not caricatures. Still, I
didn't identify with him and I certainly didn't like him.
So where does that leave us? Watchmen will be hard to top, but I look
forward to seeing who will try. And if you don't already own a copy, go
out and buy one. But read it slowly.
Burning Chrome
There's hype and then there's hype. William Gibson is just about as
hyped as a new author can get. He's been written up everywhere, given
credit for siring an entire new subgenre of SF, won a Hugo and a
Nebula, and been copied to death all within the space of the last four
years. But can he write?
Unequivocally, YES. He has a flair and a talent that are awesome to
watch. As Sterling says in the intro to Burning Chrome:
In Gibson we hear the sound of a decade that has finally found its own
voice. He is not a table-pounding revolutionary, but a practical,
hands-on retrofitter. He is opening the stale corridors of the genre to
the fresh air of new data...
What makes Gibson so wonderful to read is his ability to catch the
reader up; reading his writing is a bit like shooting the rapids in a
kayak. It requires a level of attention and intensity from the reader
that is not often required.
Burning Chrome is a collection of all of Gibson's short fiction --
seven originals and three collaborations. Nine of the stories have
appeared previously, most in Omni. The most well-known -- and perhaps
most prototypically cyberpunkish -- of the stories are the Sprawl
series: "Johnny Mnemonic," "New Rose Hotel," and "Burning Chrome."
These three stories sketch the future world of the cyberpunkers --
urban decay, bio-enhancement, cultural fragmentation, and individual
rebellion against enormously powerful corporations. Central to it all
is the concept of cyberspace -- the idea that the information webs of
these corporate giants and smaller players could be linked. In this
shared artificial reality run the cowboys who are the central
characters of most cyberpunk works. And of course, there's the ICE
(Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics), the corporate defense against
the cowboys' raids.
Of the three sprawl stories, I liked "Burning Chrome" best, in part
because it's something of a surprise. For ninety percent of the story,
you're running with Gibson at his normal intense pace and then the
ending comes and ... well, read it for yourself.
The other stories of the collection are also interesting. "The
Gernsback Continuum" is something of an off-handed swipe at the
Hugo-Gernsback type SF writer -- the Utopia-seekers. Gibson's brand of
realism doesn't tolerate the starry-eyed SF writer who refuses to see
the problems of society and meet them head on; Gibson calls them
"...uninhibited technophiles."
His protagonist in "The Gernsback Continuum" is a photographer,
assigned to do a photo essay on "The America That Never Was." In the
course of the assignment, he tracks down the architectural relics of
failed predictions, like aircars, boundless cheap nuclear power, and so
on. Unfortunately, as he gets deeper into the job, the job gets deeper
into him and the boundaries of reality begin to blur. It's a good
story, not least because Gibson is not too heavy-handed in getting his
message across.
"Fragments of a Hologram Rose" is indicative of the style Gibson and
his contemporaries are working in. At first glance, it appears to be a
story about a piece of technology: the ASP or Apparent Sensory Perception.
This technology uses the recorded sensory perceptions of a subject to
give the user pre-recorded experiences of almost any variety, with full
sensory feedback. In fact, though, the story is really about the
aftermath of the narrator, Parker's, breakup with his girlfriend. The
technology is only a support vehicle for the real story.
"Hinterlands" is an unusual first-contact story. It purports to be about
contact between humans and aliens who pluck human spaceships from the
heavens almost at random and send them back with bits and pieces of
knowledge -- the table scraps of races far more advanced than we. In fact,
the story is really about the kind of person who wants to be a spaceman,
who would risk his or her life on a one-way ticket to the unknown.
"The Winter Market" is a hard story to describe. It's about a lot of
things -- a girl with an all-consuming ambition, about the people who
make the ASP tapes from the artists' raw input, and about the dream that
some people have of cheating death. As I mentioned earlier in talking
about The Tomorrow Makers, many futurists believe we may be able to
avoid dying by preserving ourselves in silicon. Gibson looks at the dark
side of downloading -- what might it do to the people who want it when
it's only available to the very rich, and what might it do to those of
us still in the flesh, when our 'dead' lover calls us on the phone?
As good as he is alone, Gibson also excels in concert with others. "The
Belonging Kind," cowritten with John Shirley, is a creepy story about
aliens in our midst. The story is a little weak in that it seems to lack
purpose. The narrator encounters the aliens and tracks them, eventually
being caught up in the pursuit as an end in itself. But his motivations
are not made clear and this lessens the story's impact somewhat.
On the other hand "Dogfight," cowritten with Michael Swanwick, is a
startlingly clear story. The narrator is a single-minded lowlife and we
follow him as he schemes and tramples his way toward his objective,
never realizing how hollow a victory can be. Hidden just below the
surface of the story is a message of warning about a government which
is callously cruel both to those who attack it and those who serve it.
In my opinion, "Red Star, Winter Orbit" is the best story of the
collection. Cowritten with Bruce Sterling, it deals with affairs leading up to
the Russians' abandoning of their space station. On the surface it is the
story of the last crew of that station and their struggle to survive. As with
the other stories, the subtext is about people, in this case the types of
people who want to move out into space -- the pioneer types who first
settled the majority of America. I liked this story in part because of its
ending -- it's more upbeat than the rest of the collection -- and in part
because Gibson's talents mesh very well with Sterling's. The result is a
pleasure to read.
I really enjoyed Burning Chrome; it's nice to see that sometimes there's
some substance behind the hype.
Count Zero
There's a concept in cyberpunk writing called "edge." Turner, the
protagonist of Count Zero, characterizes it this way:
It was that superhuman synchromesh flow that stimulants only
approximated. ...the edge let him collate the factors he had to
deal with at the site, balancing clusters of small problems
against single, larger ones. ... Instincts sharpened, on the
edge; things got witchy.
Count Zero is all edge. It takes place in the world of the Sprawl, some
decades after the events of Neuromancer. There are three main threads
to the story. In the first, Turner, a mercenary, is hired to stage the
defection of Mass Biolabs' top technical man, the man who holds all the
basic patents for the new biochips which no one else has been able to
duplicate. In the second, a young would-be cowboy named Bobby Newmark
almost gets killed on his first run, in large part because he's using
an untried icebreaker on a well-prepared target. In the third, Herr
Josef Virek, the world's wealthiest single individual, hires Marly
Krushkova, disgraced art-gallery manager, to find the anonymous artist
who has produced some works Virek is interested in.
Turner's story is fairly straightforward: he sets up and executes the
extraction as best he can, then tries to put the pieces back together
when things go wrong. Marly's story is also fairly simple: she finds a
lead on the artist and follows it back as far as she can, in almost
classic detective style. Along the way she is aided by Virek's agents
and money.
Bobby, the self-named Count Zero, has a more convoluted tale. Having
been rescued from certain death in the ice by an unknown force, he goes
looking for Two-A-Day, the stringer who loaned him the icebreaker. He
ends up involved with people whose primary interest is in the presence
that saved Bobby. They believe that the presence came from the
uninhabited section of the consensual reality called cyberspace.
Uninhabited by humans, that is. They claim that the ancient gods of
Vodou inhabit the matrix and that one of these gods saved Bobby. They
want to know what makes Bobby special enough that one of those gods
would notice him at all, let alone exert the effort to save him.
These people -- Lucas, Jackie and Beauvoir -- help Bobby trace the
icebreaker back to its source and initiate him into the mysteries of
their interactions with cyberspace. On reflection, it seems to me that
these characters are the spiritual descendants of the black mafiosi
James Bond fought in "Live and Let Die," though here they are heros
instead of villains.
The three main stories of Count Zero are told round-robin fashion,
alternating each chapter. As the novel goes on they begin to draw
together, something Gibson handles well. Each story has its own edge
and reading Count Zero is like watching a three-pronged spiral grow
tighter and tighter. In addition to the peoples' stories, there is a
meta-plot about the nature of cyberspace and the artificial
intelligences that have grown up there (despite the efforts of the
Turing police). Gibson is deliberately ambiguous about whether there
are unexplained forces in cyberspace.
As with other Gibson works, the characters are developed through the
non-stop action of the plot. Each starts off sounding like a stereotype
and quickly grows into much more. Unfortunately, this style doesn't
work well with the secondary characters who aren't on stage a great
deal. They never develop beyond one or two dimensions, and this weakens
the book a little. Some, like Finn from "Burning Chrome," already have
some history in the readers' mind, but most are lost in a blur.
Nonetheless, Count Zero is still an intensely enjoyable book. I don't
think it's fair to say the book is better or worse than Neuromancer.
Each has its strong points and it's clear that Gibson is still
developing as a writer. Along with the majority of the civilized world,
I am eagerly waiting to see what he will produce next.
OtherRealms #20
Spring, 1988
Copyright 1988 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
One time rights have been
acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned
to the contributors.
OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission of Chuq Von Rospach.
The electronic edition may be distributed or reproduced in its entirety
as long as all copyrights, author and publication information remain
intact. No individual article may be reprinted, reproduced or
republished in any way without the express permission of the author.
OtherRealms is published quarterly (March, June, September and December) by:
Chuq Von Rospach
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Suite 255
Newark, CA 94560.
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