Storming the Reality Studio -A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, by Larry McCaffery, ed.(1991).
The source of this list is from this book.
Here is the complete list of Larry McCaffery and Richard Kadrey's
Cyberpunk 101 list.
Richard Kadrey & Larry McCaffery
Cyberpunk 101:
A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio
A quick list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape
cyberpunk ideology and aesthetics, along with books by the
cyberpunks themselves, in roughly chronological order.
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1989 [1818], Penguin). The recycling of body
parts, the creation of life (or monster making), murder, sex, revenge, the epic
chase, the brilliant scientist working outside the law, a brooding, romantic
atmosphere---this book is a veritable sourcebook for SF motifs and clichés.
It also created the first great myth of the industrial revolution, and reflects the
deeply schizophrenic attitude toward science so evident in postmodern culture and in
the fiction emerging from this culture.
Red Harvest (Dashiell Hammet, 1929, Vintage). Established the basic
template for the hard-boiled detective format. The tough guy-loner confronting
a vast system of corruption with his own private code of ethics, the vividly drawn
underworld populated by sleazy criminal types, the richly idiosyncratic lingoes, the
violence and surrealism of urban life--these motifs proved readily transferable to
cyberpunk's portrayal of survival in a multinational version of street life.
Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1937, Dover). Hardly a novel at all.
More like a long, brilliant encyclopedic essay on the next million-or-so years
of human evolution.
The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, 1939, Random House). Chandler's smooth,
polychromatic prose style and vision of the detective as knight-errant has
influenced more than one cyberpunk.
"Coming Attraction" (Fritz Leiber, 1950, in The Best of Fritz Leiber
, 1974, Ballantine). Virtually without precedent in 1950s SF, this grim short
story of the future was told in sharp, surreal images, highlighted by an
unflinching noir viciousness and terse prose. Its opening sentence is a
paradigm for much of cyberpunk: "The coupe with the fishhooks welded to the fender
shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare."
Limbo (Bernard Wolfe, 1988 [1952], Carroll & Graf). Wolfe, ex-Trotsky
bodyguard, wrote this great American dystopia (and proto-cyberpunk) novel.
Self-mutilation, lobotomy, and prosthetics are seen in a postnuke North America
as the cure for war. Limbo is a brilliant black comedy, which is probably
why it has been so neglected. Average SF readers don't score high on irony
tests.
The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester, 1956 [1955], Sidgwick & Jackson).
Body modification, corporate intrigue, baroque settings and characters, and a walk
down the gray line that separates criminals from the straight world. But it's the
protagonist's purely anarchic belief in humanity that makes this book so remarkable.
This remains one of the few truly subversive novels ever to come out of science
fiction.
Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs, 1962 [1959], Grove). A blast of maniacal
laughter from Hell. A combination of comedy as black as clotted blood. Dr. Benway's
twisted medical speculations, tales of the criminal underground, and sexual fantasies
that tear at your inseams like a rabid brontosaurus, all told in a fragmented prose
style that still reads like the raw, beautiful poetry it is. The influence of this
book is enormous. Without Naked Lunch there would be no cyberpunk.
The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the
Massage (Marshall McLuhan, 1962, University of Toronto Press; 1964, NAL; 1967,
Random House). McLuhan was to the 1960s what Baudrillard, Kroker and Cook, and
Deleuze and Guattari are to the postcyberpunk era: grasping the profound implications
of how technological change (in the form of the printing press, television, movies,
the telephone, and so on) was reshaping human interactions, perceptions, and
self-concepts, McLuhan presented his message in a medium that "postmodern" before
its time--that is, via a jagged mosaic of audacious speculations, samplings of
quotes, photographs, footnotes, digressions. Another candidate for the "Godfather
of Cyberpunk."
A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1962, Norton). Alex is the subject
of a mind control experiment in a bleak near-future world overrun by youth gangs
obsessed with violence and trendy fashion. Told in a well thought-out patois
collaging bits of Cockney rhyming slang and various Eastern languages.
The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express, The Wild Boys
(William S. Burroughs, 1966 [1961], 1967 [1962], 1964, 1971). In this sequence
of novels (or prose poems), Burroughs draws more heavily on the SF pulp motifs of
his childhood than in Naked Lunch. Space odysseys, Uranium Willy and the
Heavy Metal Kid, image banks and silence viruses, protopunk "wild boys" engaged
in apocalyptic guerilla warfare, body and mind invasion, the Nova Mob matching wits
with the Nova police (hampered by the corrupt Biologic Courts) for control of the
Reality Studio--these hallucinatory SF elements interact with shards of poetry by
Rimbaud, Shakespeare, and Eliot (and much, much more) to fuel Burrough's
atomic-powered strap-on, which probes the asshole of society with more glee and
wicked humor than anyone since Swift.
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon, 1966, Perennial). Like Pynchon's
first novel, V. (1963), this book serves up bits of history, science,
philosophy, and pop psychology in a sauce wonderfully spiced with rock lyrics,
sophomoric jokes, and truly twisted character names and types; when these
elements are heated by paranoia and alienation, severe turbulence occurs. Less dense
and less grounded in technology then his massive next novel Gravity's Rainbow,
Lot 49 nonetheless anticipates cyberpunk in its wondrous use of scientific
metaphors, its slam-dance pacings, its depiction of an exotic underworld of alienated
weirdos, and its rapid modulations between the realms of "high culture" and the
pop underground of drugs and the media culture.
Andy Warhol Presents the Velvet Underground and Nico (Velvet Underground,
1967, Polygram). Lou Reed and John Cale took pop audiences for harrowing rides into
the darkness existing not on the edge of town but right in its center. Combining
avant-garde, industrial-strength noise and back-to-basics impulses, VU's brutally
honest depiction of drugs, S&M, and desperation was a breakthrough for a pop
culture then entranced by the Summer of Love. The epitome of cool, bored-but-hyper
hipness and street smarts, Reed--resplendent in black leather jacket and
mirrorshades--created adult songs about characters whose arrogance and paranoia
clashed headlong with their human frailties. As musicians and as cultural icons,
the VU were seminal influences on the 1970s punk and the 1980s cyberpunk scenes.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick, 1968, Ballantine).
Renegade androids escape to earth from off-planet, and robot killer Deckard must
track them down. Identity is the big question here: who is more human, the androids
who want to live or the cop who wants to kill them? Basis for the film
Blade Runner (1982).
Nova (Samuel Delany, 1968, Bantam). Stylistically, the bridge between the
baroque 1950s SF of The Stars My Destination and the harder edge worldview
of Neuromancer. A space opera full of feuding families and oddball
characters, but with a respect for the science that makes it all run.
La Société du Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1967, Buchet-Chastel; trans.
Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red, 1977). The first comprehensive
examination of the far-reaching effects of postindustrial capitalism on individuals.
The book opens with the following startling statement: "In societies where modern
conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved
away into a representation." From there, we are only a hop, skip, and a jaunt from
Baudrillard's "simulacra," Rucker's software and Gibson's cyberspace.
The Cornelius Chronicles, volumes 1-3 (Michael Moorcock, 1969, Avon). The
semicomplete story of the life-lives of Jerry Cornelius, Nobel Prize-winning scientist
and rock and roll musician. The existential plotting, ambiguous sexuality of the
main characters, and general low life/high brow feel make these very important works
in the canon.
The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard, 1990 [1969], Re/Search Publications).
Ballard studied medicine while in college and it shows here. Through a series of
fragmented "compressed novels," Ballard traces the breakdown of a doctor at a
mental hospital.
Future Shock (Alvin Toffler, 1970, Random House). Information increased and
comprehension decreased. Sound familiar? Get ready. The future is only going to
get weirder.
Dub Music (1970-present). Reggae, all dreads and drive, collides with
modern tech toys like digital delays and rhythm machines. That bastard offspring
is called Dub, a hypnotic dance music from Jamaica, a brain graft of primitive glee
and cool digital grace. Sly & Robbie, Prince Far I, the Mad Professor, as well as
British honky Adrian Sherwood, are all masters of the style. This melding of tech
and street music was extended even further by adding sampling machines (digital
shoplifting of sound) by Rap musicians.
Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone, 1973, Houghton Mifflin). Stone's post-Beat
prose style and vision of America as a morally bankrupt party town tearing itself
apart is as harrowing as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The difference is that like
most cyberpunk, the action in Dog Soldiers could be happening right
next door.
"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (James Tiptree, Jr., 1973, in Warm Worlds and
Otherwise, 1975, Ballantine). A near-future Pygmalion story in which a
hideous street girl is fitted with a sleek new "perfect" body and groomed for
media stardom as a sort of living-breathing ad for all things marketable.
Crash (J.G. Ballard, 1973, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The erotic thrill
of violence, the secret satisfaction of watching machines fuck up and go haywire,
and the numbing power of mass-produced imagery have never been presented more
convincingly. If you've ever wondered what it would have been like to be approaching
orgasm with Jayne Mansfield just before the Fatal Impact, this book is for you.
Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973, Viking). The best cyberpunk ever
written by a guy who didn't even know he was writing it. Pynchon's most difficult
(and rewarding) book puts you into the bad brains of soldiers, scientists, hookers,
losers, and more during World War II, when science was about to Change Everything.
Soon Over Babaluma (Can, 1974, Restless). Trance music from the band that
practically invented what we now call "modern rock." Bassist Holger Czukay studied
with Stockhausen for several years before jumping into a rock band. Their sound
influenced everyone from Soft Machine to Public Image Limited to the Talking Heads.
Horses (Patti Smith, 1975, Arista). Patti Smith's androgynous, defiant,
radiantly obscene stage personality showed a generation of would-be women rockers
(and a number of cyberpunk authors) that females could be every bit as tough, raunchy,
and daring as their male counterparts. Drawing equally from the realms of the artistic
avant-garde (Rimbaud, Genet, and Burroughs) and of pop culture, Smith dipped down
into the sea of possibilities and conjured up a jagged, delirious vision that drew
its intensity from the same sense of desperation and exhilaration that characterized
cyberpunk.
Shockwave Rider (John Brunner, 1975, Harper & Row). When people are little
more than bytes in the government data stream, can anyone remain human? Fugitive
Nickie Heflinger wants to find out, and change a few things.
Galaxies (Barry Malzberg, 1975, Pocket Books). Pure postmodernism in SF
drag. A novel about a trip to a "black" galaxy, as well as a novel about writing
a novel. Self-referential and reflexive in the extreme. Like reading Wittgenstein
in a hall of mirrors.
Plus (Joseph McElroy, 1976, Knopf). A dying engineer who has his brain
removed awakens to find he has become, literally, a mere communications device,
attached to a computer inside a satellite orbiting the earth. As "he" (Imp Plus)
gradually recovers his memories and reinvents language, he transforms himself into
a fully conscious biological and chemical laboratory. Eventually he discovers a means
of rebellion against the people and world that put him where he is. Told in a dense,
poetic blend of Beckett and computerese.
Never Mind the Bollocks (The Sex Pistols, 1976, Warner). The band that
shook the world and said "No" in power chords so loud and elegant that they were
heard by a whole generation of artists wishing to esape the emptiness and safety of
the corporate consumer mentality. The dadaists performing nightly in Zürich's
Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 performed an experiment in which the language used to
justify the great war raging outside was destroyed. If they had had access to electric
guitars and amplifiers, those dadaists would have sounded like this. Enter cyberpunk,
which appropriated punk's confrontational style, its anarchist energies, its
crystal-meth pacings, and its central motif of the alienated victim defiantly using
technology to blow everyone's fuses.
Second Annual Report (Throbbing Gristle, 1976, Industrial Records).
Throbbing Gristle completely abandoned the pretense of playing anything like
conventional music. Their albums and performances were psychological assaults of
the most extreme, where creative use of pure noise substituted for songs. The
Futurists performed similar experiments in the 1920s. Throbbing Gristle's brilliance,
however, came when they approached their noise assaults as rock and roll shows,
seducing thousands of listeners who would normally run screaming from anything
called "art."
Low (David Bowie, 1977, Ryko). Bowie's first collaboration with Brian Eno
resulted in the album that mended the rift between the razor heat of rock
and the cooler geometry of electronic/progressive/avant-garde sounds. A happy
mistake early in the recording process resulted in a fresh drum sound still being
copied.
The Ophiuchi Hotline (John Varley, 1977, Dial). Cyberpunk ideas presented
in their larval form are the highlight of this otherwise vastly disappointing first
novel. Though the prose is graceless, Varley has a fine feel for the infinite
malleability of flesh through technology, and his multiple clones of a single female
character and their wildly different fates is an excellent depiction of the
fragmentation of a single personality.
Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978, Media). The mindless zombies who
can eagerly (but placidly) rip-and-devour the flesh of gun-toting bikers (when they're
not riding the escalators or being drawn to Blue Lite Specials) and prowl the
shopping mall scene of this classic, horrifically funny film are, of course, the
same folks we've hurried past on our way to the Cineplex 12. The nightmarish, punk
extremities of surreal violence, the relentless exposure of capitalism's banalizing
effect on individuals, the insistence on visceral, bodily reality that our
airbrushed, roboticized exteriors deny--all would find their way, in transmuted
form, into cyberpunk's own brand of dark humor, aesthetic extremity, and notions
of guerilla-tactics survival.
Blood and Guts in High School (Kathy Acker, 1984 [1978], Grove). Her
influence is similar to that of Burroughs and Moorcock, but Acker started out as
a poet, so her prose is infused with a poet's lust for words. That and her moral
outrage make her very important. If Genet had sung for Black Flag, he might have
sounded like this.
Survival Research Laboratories (Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert, Erick Werner,
ca. 1979-present). These San Francisco-based industrial sculptors and performance
artists have literalized the machinery-run-amok theme by staging spectacular,
alarming, and often nauseating catastrophes. As these surreal, grotesque mechanical
simulacra (which are often rigged up to dead animals magically brought back to a
pathetic parody of "life") attack effigies, images, targets, and eventually turn
on each other, our culture's deepest emotional responses toward the technological
milieu are played out in ways not soon forgotten by anyone who was there (and
survived).
The Postmodern Condition (Jean-François Lyotard, 1984 [1979],
University of Minnesota Press). This difficult but provocative "Report on Knowledge"
lays a philosophical blueprint for cyberpunk (if anyone can read the map). How
to react to the computerization of society? or the dystopian prospect of a global
private monopoly of information created by the profitability of the new tecnological
and information revolutions? or the crisis of representation? Lyotard has a quietly
optimistic view that science's capacity for change, innovation, and renewal will
ultimately be the undoing of the repressive system that supplies it with grant
money. Stay tuned.
MTV (1981-present). Mundane music (for the most part) is genetically
altered into a pure info monster comprising collage, rapid-fire imagery, and a
stream-of-consciousness sense of timelessness and placelessness. All these things
make MTV an infuential point of reference for the age when information overload is
more chic than a pierced nipple.
Easy Travel to Other Planets (Ted Mooney, 1981, Farrar, Straus, Giroux).
Blending mainstream's emphasis on psychological depth with an eerie ambience of SF
(an impending war in the Antarctic, information sickness), this haunting, lyrical
novel perfectly exemplifies the blend of the postmodern mainstream and SF that
Bruce Sterling has dubbed "slipstream." If affairs with dolphins, the fear of
death, the throb of reggae, and the lure of what the next twist of your joystick
might bring pretty much describes the world you live in--one that's rushing away
from you at every moment--give this book a whirl.
Big Science (Laurie Anderson, 1982, Warner). Okay, so she does seem
occasionally too cute, precious, and "profound" to be mingling with this
roughhouse gang. But there's an undercurrent of minimalist dread, alienation,
and paranoia that wafts over you so gently, as you sit entering spreadsheet data on
your laptop while sipping cocktails in the business class of a 747. Slowly it dawns
on you that you're only seconds from impact, that the reassuring voice of the
"pilot" is only another recorded message, that the arms of the loved one gripping
you in a last embrace are really automatic, electronic arms, that all those amazing
chemical reactions going on inside your body right now to protect you aren't
going to mean a thing when this lumbering, gas-guzzling pile of metal plows into a
Kansas cornfield at 600 MPH with you strapped inside like the meat puppet you are.
Stand by.
Blade Runner (Riddley Scott, 1982, Embassy). This film has often (and
deservedly) been compared with Gibson's Neuromancer, and for good reason.
The claustrophobic feel of Scott's mise-en-scène, with its over-abundance of
exotic images and information, its mixture of Asian and American, glittery high tech
and refuse strewn lowlife, plus the sheer intensity of its presentation--these are
the cinematic equivalents of Gibson's prose. Just as important, the movie shares
with Neuromancer a focus on the moral and epistemological questions created
by technology. No answers in sight.
Simulations (Jean Baudrillard, 1983, Semiotext(e)). French Marxist theorist
Baudrillard runs amok in the labyrinth of epistemological quandaries, simulated
experiences and desires, and all-too-familiar banalities that comprise postmodern
American life. His elaborate, playful theorization of the concept of the "simulacra"
--a copy of something that has no original-- has been a landmark in the
theorization of postmodern culture. Beneath all the neologisms, undecipherable
rhetoric, and confusing analogies, readers sense that in his probings of
Disneyland, Reagan, and celebrity hijackers he has indeed put his finger upon
something real in the wispy abstractions of postmodernism. (Or was that finger in a
data glove?)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983, MCA). Cronenberg explores one of
cyberpunk's favorite themes--the denaturing of the body, the displacement of the
real by the "hyperreal" of television. A Dickian vision, troubling in its gruesome
but perceptive take on how society has become transfixed as it consumes its own
desires and fears in the form of media-produced images.
Frontera (Lewis Shiner, 1984, Pocket Books). The first privately funded
mission to Mars after the collapse of NASA turns nightmarish when the protagonist,
Kane, finds himself programmed to bring something back to Earth, at any cost.
The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984, EMI). Arnold Schwarzenegger is a
time-traveling killer robot sent to 1980s L.A. to murder the woman destined to give
birth to the leader of the future rebellion against the sentient machines who have
taken over the planet. Like much cyberpunk, this film is a conscious throwback to
earlier pulp forms, full of genre references; a SF potboiler saved by a bent wit
and savage speed-freak energy, it was the model for virtually every action movie
for the remainder of the decade (and beyond).
Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive (William Gibson, 1984,
Berkley; 1986, Arbor House; 1988, Bantam). The evolution of the Matrix, a
computer-generated reality created by data from all the world's computers, and
the lives of those that live in and through it.
"Postmodernism, of The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (Fredric Jameson, 1984a,
New Left Review). This seminal essay remains the most cogent and compelling
description of the central features of postmodernism. What is interesting is the way
Jameson's central, oft-quoted premises about postmodenism--its impulse toward
collage and pastiche, its eschewal of "depth" and its emphasis on "surface," the
deliberate foregrounding of sensory overload and proliferation of signs without
reference (with the resulting inability of individuals to locate themselves,
physically or psychically), the odd response of "euphoria" when confronted with
sensory overload, the lack of affect, the "nostalgia mode"--read almost as a litany
of cyberpunk thematic and stylistic tendencies.
White Noise (Don DeLillo, 1985, Viking). DeLillo mixes dystopian premises
(a toxic cloud raises havoc in an Everytown, U.S.A.) with utopian ones (the
development of a drug that eliminates the anxiety of death) in a novel that
portrayed the most essential dilemmas, absurdities, and wonders of postmodern life.
Wonderfully comic and yet deeply moving, this was written with more wit and sympathy
than any other novel of the 1980s.
The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (David Porush, 1985, Methuen). The
first important investigation of the ways in which recent concepts of cybernetics
and AI have begun to provide contemporary writers with key sources of images and
literary techniques. While Porush focuses mostly on writers Bruce Sterling would
later dub "slipstream authors" (he examines Burroughs, Barthelme, Vonnegut, McElroy,
Beckett, and Pynchon in detail), his analysis of the struggle taking place
between those who accept the mechanical model for human intelligence and
communication and those who resist it leads him to propose the recent evolution of
a literary synthesis that has striking applications for cyberpunk fiction of the
1980s.
Blood Music (Greg Bear, 1985, Arbor House). A renegade gene hacker injects
himself with his own experimental microorganisms and gets up close and personal
with Information. Theory and a too, too malleable reality. Visually, this book is
worthy of Salvador Dalí.
Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona (John Shirley, 1985, 1987, 1989,
Warner Books). A large-scale story on the reemergence of fascism as a major political
force, told in a vivid, hallucinatory prose style.
Max Headroom (Peter Wagg, producer; Steve Roberts, original screenplay; 1985,
MLV-TV [Lorimar]). Traveling just 20 minutes into the future, we arrive in
cyberpunk land--a place where video-generated talking heads call the shots for the
anonymous guys with real power (the multinational bigwigs), where
capitalism's goal of transforming every point in space and time into a potential
sale opportunity has never been realized, where the present moment seems to
disappear into a turbulent sea of disconnected words and images that all seem
vaguely exciting and banal. And you forgot you life jacket.
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (ed. Bruce Sterling, 1986, Arbor
House). Could be subtitled "A Young Person's Guide to Cyberpunk." The
first and still definitive collection of cyberpunk short fiction.
The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (Arthur
Kroker and David Cook, 1986, St. Martin's Press). Kroker and Cook examine the "sign
crimes," "panic sex," "body invaders," the role of television as a "consumption
machine," and other central bummers of the technological age. In its own way, their
vision is as extreme and hysterical as that of anything found in cyberpunk (for
example, they claim that Saint Augustine was the first postmodernist!).
Mindplayers (Pat Cadigan, 1987, Bantam). Deadpan Allie is a sort of future
psychiatrist who works on her patients by entering virtual representations of
their psyches.
When Gravity Fails (George Alec Effinger, 1987, Bantam). Petty criminals
in a postsuperpower Arab world augment themselves with designer drugs and personality
chips in a Chandleresque murder mystery.
You Bright and Risen Angels (William T. Vollmann, 1987, Vintage). In one
of the most ambitious and original debuts since Pynchon's V., Vollmann
develops a dense, sprawling, novelistic "cartoon" in which bugs and electricity
become motifs used to explore the revolutionary impulses that have arisen
in response to the evils of industrialism. Moving across vast areas of history and
geography filled with arcane information and surrealist literalizations of sexual
longings and violence, this book's wild flights of improvisational prose and
intensity of vision signal the arrival of a major talent.
Daydream Nation (Sonic Youth, 1988, Enigma). The ultimate cyberpunk musical
statement to date, this double album evokes the confusion, pain, and exhilaration
of sensory overload, via chaos theory-produced blasts of sound and sonic textures
whose dissonance and wildness are matched only by their soaring beauty and wicked
sense of humor. What becomes a mirrorshade most?
Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling, 1988, Morrow). A thoughful extrapolation
of a future in which nuclear weapons have been banned and information is the most
valuable commodity. Don't overlook Sterling's other books, Schismatrix
(1985) and The Artificial Kid (1980).
Empire of the Senseless (Kathy Acker, 1988, Grove). Thivia (a pirate) and
Abhor (part human and part robot) roam through a Sadean future ("dystopia" is
much too mild) on a quest to kill-the-father (and hence demolish the world of
patriarchy) on as many different levels as possible. Like the cyberpunks (and she
appropriates an extended section of Neuromancer here), there is something
oddly optimistic about Acker's vision of pirate-renegades stealing what they need
from The Man and transgressing every taboo imaginable, while still trying to work
out their own myth that lies beyond those devised by the hippies or the punks.
Metrophage (Richard Kadrey, 1988, Ace). Art and crime meet literally,
in the streets when a strange virus hits Los Angeles. If Tom Waits were a cyberpunk
writer, he'd be writing something like Metrophage [L.M.]
Wetware (Rudy Rucker, 1988, Avon). Sentient robots ("boppers") on the
moon want to interface with human beings and create the first "meatbop." This book
recently netted Rudy his second Philip K. Dick Award.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (Mark Leyner, 1990, Harmony). Imagine
some sort of metal cylinder of near-infinite diameter that has been twisted into a
circle; inside this cylinder, verbal elements of political and lit-crit jargon,
cyberpunk, speed-metal rock lyrics, language poetry, movie dialogue, obscure
medical and scientific textbooks, television ads, and all manner of pop-cultural
discourses have been accelerated to near-warp velocities, until they collide
violently and begin to ooze out onto the page. If Rudy Rucker's claim that the
essence of cyberpunk fiction lies in its information density and concern with
new thought forms is to be taken seriously, Leyner, like Pynchon before him, wrote
an instant cyberpunk masterpiece without even knowing he was doing so.