I finished Neuromancer and have gulped down most of 'Ghost in the Shell' as part of my attempt to become a Cyberpunk Aficionado. I've seen all the matrix films, seen both versions of Blade Runner and played to death the Deus Ex videogames. I've watched Youtube videos and listened to talks and interviews by Neal Stephenson and Philip K Dick. Thus far, I have to admit - the genre still somewhat eludes me. I get the high tech/low life part. That's fine. I am all about that.
But there's a knife edge to Cyberpunk that I'm not even remotely comfortable trying to balance on. A very, very fine line separates, on one glorious side, serious and gritty Cyberpunk and, on the other god-awful side, embarrassing and hammy Cybercheese. I'd love to try my hand at Cyberpunk one of these days - maybe even soon - but I just don't feel ready. After all this time and immersion, I don't know if I'm capable of producing something that comes down on the right side of that line.
I'm convinced that there's room in the market for a Young Adult Cyberpunk series. I've got a loose framework for a story (very loose, but nonetheless existent). I can't recall, off the top of my head, any series directed at the teen market that you might call Cyberpunk. The gap is there.
I suspect my trepidation comes down to two things. The first is that Cyberpunk, or most of it that I've read, emphasises style in a way that I'm not used to. I think the difference between successfully selling the idea of a water-soluble contact-lens Nanoimplant for Social Networking will depend on how cool you can make it sound. If you can convince people that this implant is the sort of thing that they'd really want to get the second it becomes available, it goes from being a silly piece of scifibabble™ to a plausible bit of future tech. Basically, if you want to write decent Cyberpunk, I think you need to be the kind of person that the R&D team at Apple would be happy to employ.
And therein lies my second concern. We're living in a time where the phones we have in our pockets right now are going to be, in three years or so, less phones than they'll be hilarious memories. In a decade or so we're going to look back and say things like 'Remember how we used to have a phone and a computer and a TV and they were all separate things? Simple times.' Did you know there are people born right now that are old enough to have never, ever seen a VCR? In fact, that's incredibly common. In about 5 years, kids are going to look at you like you're a headcase when you talk about DVDs.
People--and especially kids--are very, very hard to fool. Writing a near-future Cyberpunk story is all about fooling people into thinking that your crazy ideas about where technology is headed might be even remotely plausible. Reach too far and people will baulk at your pie-in-the-sky dreams of humans that can traverse cyberspace as a packet of consciousness. Don't go far enough and young people will bring examples of technology that outstrips your future tech along to your book signings. I don't know that my grasp of futurism is strong enough to fully imagine a world thirty years from now, let alone fifty. It's a scary thought, actually. I have absolutely no idea where this bloody world of ours is headed.
That, too, is one of the awesome themes of Cyberpunk. Actually, I think that might be why I like it so much. Half the fun of it seeing where Stephenson and Dick and all the others got it wrong. Or even better, where they got it right.
I'm going to keep ploughing ahead, because it's absorbing and I like a challenge. In the meantime, any Cyberpunk fans that can set me straight on YA Cyberpunk works feel free to leave a comment.
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| Booze + Guns + Robot Arms + Cigarettes - Colour - Shirt = Cyberpunk? |
But there's a knife edge to Cyberpunk that I'm not even remotely comfortable trying to balance on. A very, very fine line separates, on one glorious side, serious and gritty Cyberpunk and, on the other god-awful side, embarrassing and hammy Cybercheese. I'd love to try my hand at Cyberpunk one of these days - maybe even soon - but I just don't feel ready. After all this time and immersion, I don't know if I'm capable of producing something that comes down on the right side of that line.
I'm convinced that there's room in the market for a Young Adult Cyberpunk series. I've got a loose framework for a story (very loose, but nonetheless existent). I can't recall, off the top of my head, any series directed at the teen market that you might call Cyberpunk. The gap is there.
I suspect my trepidation comes down to two things. The first is that Cyberpunk, or most of it that I've read, emphasises style in a way that I'm not used to. I think the difference between successfully selling the idea of a water-soluble contact-lens Nanoimplant for Social Networking will depend on how cool you can make it sound. If you can convince people that this implant is the sort of thing that they'd really want to get the second it becomes available, it goes from being a silly piece of scifibabble™ to a plausible bit of future tech. Basically, if you want to write decent Cyberpunk, I think you need to be the kind of person that the R&D team at Apple would be happy to employ.
And therein lies my second concern. We're living in a time where the phones we have in our pockets right now are going to be, in three years or so, less phones than they'll be hilarious memories. In a decade or so we're going to look back and say things like 'Remember how we used to have a phone and a computer and a TV and they were all separate things? Simple times.' Did you know there are people born right now that are old enough to have never, ever seen a VCR? In fact, that's incredibly common. In about 5 years, kids are going to look at you like you're a headcase when you talk about DVDs.
People--and especially kids--are very, very hard to fool. Writing a near-future Cyberpunk story is all about fooling people into thinking that your crazy ideas about where technology is headed might be even remotely plausible. Reach too far and people will baulk at your pie-in-the-sky dreams of humans that can traverse cyberspace as a packet of consciousness. Don't go far enough and young people will bring examples of technology that outstrips your future tech along to your book signings. I don't know that my grasp of futurism is strong enough to fully imagine a world thirty years from now, let alone fifty. It's a scary thought, actually. I have absolutely no idea where this bloody world of ours is headed.
That, too, is one of the awesome themes of Cyberpunk. Actually, I think that might be why I like it so much. Half the fun of it seeing where Stephenson and Dick and all the others got it wrong. Or even better, where they got it right.
I'm going to keep ploughing ahead, because it's absorbing and I like a challenge. In the meantime, any Cyberpunk fans that can set me straight on YA Cyberpunk works feel free to leave a comment.
There's a renewed appreciation for cyberpunk lately, I think brought about by the rise of steampunk and the retrospective exploration of the literary "-punks".
ReplyDeleteIn the past couple of years, I've been picking books & movies back up that I enjoyed in the early to mid nineties as a highschooler--"Blade Runner", Neuromancer, etc. I'd never claim to be an expert on cyberpunk. But I can see that, though even these greats (and certainly their knockoffs) contain a bit of what you awesomely call "cybercheese", what holds them up over time is a combination of storytelling basics and concern with overall atmosphere.
Cybercheese is what focuses on the tech, the gadgets, the rule of (year-specific) cool. The greats hinge on time-tested plot devices and strong characterization, and overlay a sense of cyberpunk atmosphere onto that, *using* references to tech. Making the tech support the atmosphere, instead of taking center stage, seems to invite more forgiveness when the tech starts to look dated.
Just my two pennies.