So someone finally tagged it with a name.
You have, I'm sure, a good idea of what I'm talking about, solely from the title of this piece.
The someone" in this case was Gardner Dozis, in the introduction to his second best-of-the-year anthology for Bluejay Books. The "it" is a certain kind of science fiction, purveyed mostly in Omni magazine and a few novels.
And the name is "cyberpunk."
I am not about to attempt, in this small space, to define the characteristics of this proto-school of science fiction, nor offer an opinion on its ultimate worth. (Oh, all right, you convinced me. Dating probably to the May 1981 publication of William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" in Omni, cyberpunk is mostly non-lyrical, realistic, cynical, near-future fiction concerned with bioengineering, computers, and corporations, and I think it is generally a Good Thing.) What I would like to do is identity four really irritating literary tics associated with cyberpunk writing that are, I believe, quite likely to reduce this promising genre to something approaching slamdancing: a self-parodying activity restricted to a few diehards.
1.) None of these writers has the slightest sense of humor; or if they do, it never shows. Now, I am not advocating that a kind of Frederic Brown silliness be grafted onto cyberpunk. I respect the basically pessimistic and nihilistic world view exemplified by cyberpunk. What I am advocating here is a little counterpoint. We all know the example of how the humorously drunken gate keeper in Macbeth serves to heighten the tragedy of the play. Could we not have a little similar leavening of our science fiction? My god, even Malzberg -- the exemplar of the seventies bum-out science fiction -- makes one laugh occasionally.
2.) Specificity is admirable in fiction. But does this mean brand-names and technical specs? Cyberpunk loves to point fingers at corporate culprits, and the catalogue of brand-names in Neuromancer -- while quite effective at helping the reader feel that the milieu of the novel is a true extension of our current world -- ultimately has the effect of making all the characters look like nothing but consumers. While this may be one of Gibson's points, its a kind of Ann Beattie stupidity to believe that you can ever define a person solely by the products he uses. Also, this technique is totally useless for dealing with any culture removed from ours by more than a few decades.
The worst offender I have yet seen in the tech-specs department is Bruce McAllister in his story "The Ark," in the September 1985 Omni. What does one do with a collection of sentences like this:
"In his left hand he held a laser-aimed Ruger carbine with silencer and folding stock. In his right, a model F-5 intruder flare' with six million lumens ready to go. At his hip there was an old .357 Colt Python, along with a pair of Black and Decker power cutters and a 5.35 transmitter for the charges. He had given the .233 Ruger carbine a matte-black finish."My immediate reaction to this is to get a gun -- a .177 Daisy pellet pistol -- and order the writer to drop his copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine in the trash where it belongs.
3.) No world -- not our present one, not our future Earth, not some sphere orbiting Procyon -- is or will ever be composed of all like-minded individuals. Cyberpunk fails to reflect this truth. The characters are monotonous to a high degree. For one thing, they all bear single-syllable names like Case and Deke and Rice and Kane. They are all young and urban. They are all burnt-out to various degrees. They are all grasping, greedy, loveless, and violent. This is not the world I see. Is it my eyes that are going? I don't think so. Ask Dickens, ask Pynchon (if you can easily contact either), and I think you'll get the same response.
4.) Finally, most seriously to my mind, is the incestuousness of cyberpunk. Now, science fiction as a whole is marked by shared concepts and terminology. As Theodore Sturgeon put it in Media: "What makes science fiction what it is today is incest and cannibalism." Every time someone uses a term like "hyperspace," he is borrowing someone else's invention, however distant the origin. But what is so painfully obvious in cyberpunk -- perhaps because we are present at the genesis of it -- is how small a coterie of writers is passing back and forth, like a rugby ball, such eye-catching terms as "wetware" from one story to another, without the slightest compunction, weaving everything into a single consensual future. This bothers me. I don't believe in collective visions. I don't care whether you're a member of a certain school or not, you still have a responsibility to be an individual. The Impressionists, for example, shared a common creed and goal -- but does Renoir really resemble Monet? Of course not. With many cyberpunk stories, I'd have trouble telling who wrote the piece in question if the byline were missing.
And why all these overt collaborations, atop the covert ones? Gibson and Sterling, Sterling and Shiner, Shiner and Gibson, Swanwick, Gibson, Shiner, and Sterling, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fictioneers, Inc. Why not just come up with a house name, and be done with it? Then we'd have no complaint about everything starting to sound the same.
I sincerely hope the foregoing is not seen as an attempt to demolish cyberpunk. (For those who are interested, my novelet "Stone Lives" in the August 1985 issue of F&SF might even qualify as a cyberpunk story itself.) I do not believe such a goal is desirable. Nor am I so arrogant as to believe that any one person could wipe out a certain kind of fiction he disliked. Instead, I hope I have outlined some things which bother me -- as both a reader and a writer -- about a school of science fiction that shows the most promise in recent years of revitalizing the field.
["Slamdancing in SF" first appeared in Charles Platt's REM #2 (October 1985). Paul says that as a result of this essay, Bruce Sterling chose "Stone Lives" for inclusion in Mirrorshades.]