John Shirley
The Godfather of Cyberpunk Remembers the Days Before the "Cyber-"

by Zach Dundas

John Shirley cranks it out.

For 20 years, this wildcat author has poured the detritus of a life lived on the edge on to page upon page of fever-dream prose. With a bibliography as long as a lifer’s rap sheet–we’re talking 14 novels, five collections and a brick of screen plays–his output alone makes him a late-century Harlan Ellison, if not quite an Asimov. His writing, a dizzy melange of hi-fi sci-fi, noir, horror (with the Lovecraftizer ripped to 11) and erotica, plays in the best tradition of American pulp. It lives fast and dies hard.

Gonzo fiction like Dracula in Love would be a hell of a legacy by anyone’s standard, but Shirley doesn’t stop there. With his novel City Come-Walkin’ , this nihilistic enfant terrible bombed open a foundation for cyberpunk sci-fi, the computer-struck genre that quickened the pulse of stagnant genre through the ‘80s and early ‘90s, influencing the direction and perception of the digital revolution to an extent that will probably not be truthfully tabulated for decades.

William Gibson, whose opus Neuromancer took cyberpunk over the top, calls Shirley "cyberpunk’s Original Patient, first locus of the virus, certifiably virulent." Perhaps Gibson cloaks his tribute in the nomenclature of disease because Shirley offered something even more infectious than his insight on the binary dawn of the Age of Zeroes. His true genius, it turned out, was to put the punk into cyberpunk.

He’s holed up in California with the wife and kids now, but at the turn of the ‘80s he haunted the nascent punk scene of Portland, Oregon–a city that, at the time, suffered in the throes of economic despair and terminal unhipness. Smashing through the rainy haze, Shirley’s band SadoNation drenched Doomtown in the New Wave.

Today, the author reflects on a time of heady subcultural coup de main.

"The town was hostile," Shirley says, garrulous as could be over the phone from Cali. "I mean, people were just getting used to hippies. You have to understand, the ‘60s didn’t get to Oregon until the ‘70s. There were a few hippies and freaks around before then, but not nearly enough. So they were just getting used to dealing with that when punk rock came along and was just much, much too much for a lot of people.

"People were worried that civilization was creaking to an end."

Indeed, the bondage gear and often puerile, always abrasive confrontation practiced by early punks sent a shiver through small-potatoes Portland. While larger metro areas like L.A., New York and London at least had long histories of outré weirdness to brace against, PDX had never seen the like. Perhaps because of this naiveté, Shirley says the fetid nooks of the run-down city made particularly fertile breeding grounds for fucked-up art.

"Portland was wide open for artists," he recalls. "Even people who weren’t punk per se would come to punk shows because there was that feeling of openness for all the arts. I was looking for a scene where I could do some radical art projects, and I found it.

"We saw this thing as the only outlet through which we could establish an acceptable identity, because we’d been excluded from the other culture, as far as were concerned."

Shirley’s exile from Squaresville began in earnest when Salem’s McNary High School booted him for–among other offences against prepatory scholastic order–locking a teacher in a closet and publishing an underground newspaper. He drifted north to Portland, and by the mid-’70s he’d found a rougher sandbox to play in.

"I remember going into an import store and asking if they had the Sex Pistols’ EPs," he says. "And the guys running the store just looked at each other and said, ‘My God, not another one! What is he talking about?’ Kids had been coming in all day, asking about this British band they’d never heard of. What happened was, Parade magazine had just run a feature warning parents about the dangers of punk rock, and to me that was like, what, they’re warning my parents? Must have."

Before long, Shirley found himself neck-deep in the inchaoate Portland scene, playing at long-gone boltholes like the Earth Tavern and Long Goodbye and running his own ad hoc all-ages joint, Revenge.

"We’d rent out a lodge hall, charge a few bucks at the door and stock the place with soda and popcorn we got from a movie theater in Salem that had a hatch on the roof that didn’t lock so well. I’d drive down and climb up on the roof, be back in Portland shortly. It’s closed down now, so the truth can be told. People used to ask, where’d you get these bags of popcorn? Where’d you get these jugs of soda? Never mind."

Shirley says that, like him, a lot of the bodies packing Revenge and other punk rock dodges in Portland came from the white trash hinterlands or the stultifying suburbs. In Portland, far off the big-city cognoscenti’s coolness charts, they found a womb-warm haven.

"There were a lot of kids in places like Lake Oswego and Vancouver and Salem. These were places that were very sterile environments, and they were really frustrated with their inability to fit in. So they gravitated to punk rock, which was tolerant of pretty much any peculiarity. We were just sort of trying this on for size. You know the early punk thing with spitting? Well, if you look at videos from that era you can see people sort of tentatively spitting on each other.

"Our scene was small, but for some people, that’s all there was. For a few, it was that or suicide, you know?"