camrogers | (no subject)

I'm halfway through Spook Country, William Gibson's latest (it came out a year or so ago.) I've been rereading his stuff for the last few months, when I've had time. He gave up writing specfic once he realised we were now living in the future, and then his stories switched to tales extrapolating on current iPod-chic cyberpunk2.1 cloak-and-dagger trends that turn the gears in places we don't - or can't - look. The usual Gibson things are in there: low-profile corporations so rich they're omnipotent, everyman protagonist (usually female) hired by said company for their one unique culturally-specific skill and given an unlimited expense account, parallel stories running thousands of kilometres apart that eventually intertwine in the last chapter. His voice and style were the single biggest influence on me as a writer, and is largely responsible for me being able to work out what my voice was. He's probably the only writer I've really stuck with, and it's been almost 20 years since I first picked up something of his.

I do wish he'd turn out at least one more 1980s-style cyberpunk novel though. He says it can't be done, but I think it can. You just write the thing like it's still 1983 and you're speculating on life in the 21st century.

Which is precisely how they should shoot a film of Neuromancer, in my opinion: CDs don't exist, music and data is stored on tape, and Coke still comes in bottles with caps or cans with ring pulls. The net is scary VR, computers are greenscreens and people are still deeply social in meatspace: bars, clubs, bands, poker games, road trips, kitbashed communities, artists, streetcorner prophets. No 'social networking applications.' No blogs. No mobile phones. No email. People who know how to put one foot in front of the other without Googling it first. The lateral repurposing of cast off high tech by the cast out low life.

Putting Hayden Christiansen in it is not a good first move.

The articles I've found date from January. I'm hoping it doesn't fly. The guy who did Torque was directing, last I heard.

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That's precisely it. As a genre, cyberpunk is something we can never truly go home to. It's now deeply, legitimately retro.

It would be possible, I suppose, to extrapolate on future trends and society from this point forward, but it wouldn't be cyberpunk (nanopunk?). Furthermore I wonder if it'd be as interesting as cyberpunk was, by dint of the rise of a kind of omniscience via Google, surveillance, etc. It's hard to have a good chase movie when mobile phone towers, GPS, credit card transactions and urban security cameras do the work of the antagonist. The Jason Bourne novels do okay within the framework, but No Country For Old Men couldn't have.