This material appeared originally in INTERFERENCE ON THE BRAIN SCREEN #4. Copies of IOTBS are $3.00 or trade to: Clark PO Box 2761 St. Paul, MN 55102FROM OUR EUROPEAN CORRESPONDENT... Sabine contacted me after reading the Cybperpunk Timeline with some additions and comments. After it dawned on me that I know nothing at all about any European aspects of CP, I asked her to enlighten me on the German scene. Below is our conversation formatted as an interview. Sabine can be reached at:
I'm pretty convinced the answer is NO. However, I do not subscribe to any German fanzines that could possibly be out there. The SF publishing industry here is very monopolized around three major publishers sharing more thatn 70% of the market. The stories and novels they publish are almost exclusively translations from the American. So "native" cyberpunk writers if they existed have an infinitessimally small chance of being published. Cyberpunk writers like Gibson, Cadigan, Kadrey, Laidlaw, Rucker, Sterling, Shiner, Shirly, Womack and Williams were very well received and very widely read in translation - with a slight time lag of 1 to 2 years perhaps. The anthologies Burning Chrome and Mirrorshades were on the market in translation, too. There is a unique reception context for cyberpunk fiction within the German newsmedia and magazines. And - in analogy to the American context - many readers of cyberpunk fiction were from outside the science fiction community, i.e. had not read much SF before. I'm afraid I'm one of those, too, but I've been moving backwards into SF before the 80s since.
The ultimate collection of cyberpunk stories and facts, was published in: Nagula, Michael, ed. Atomic Avenue: Cyberpunk Stories & Fakten. Muenchen: Heyne, 1990. This contains a selection of the articles published in the classic Mississippi Review 47/48 (1988). This massive 650 page volume (Nagula's) concludes with a reference to German language SF magazines that published reviews of the American stories in translation. There is no reference to any indigenous authors.
I also checked anthologies and yearbooks, edited by Wolfgang Jeschke, who is the editor of SF anthologies for Heyne books, one could compare him to Gardner Dozois in the US, perhaps. He never listed one German story that I would remotely include under even a very wide definition of cyberpunk.
I'M A BIT ASTONISHED THAT AMERICAN CP HAS SMOTHERED ANY GERMAN VARIETY.
I remember talking to the head of a private science fiction and fantasy library in a town nearby Giessen, called Wetzlar. Mr LeBlanc is quite well-known and he collects most titles that are being published by the mainstream publishers. However, when I mentionned that I was researching cyberpunk I encountered quite a negative reaction. Most people, critics, who value Fantasy higher than SF, tend to scorn cyberpunk, I believe. (Just an idea ... open for debate)
On the pulp side of things, there is the longest weekly magazine series Perry Rhodan which occasionally incorporated some cyber-if-not-punk elements in its story cycle. I believe the series ran in the US at some stage, too. Here it probably has the largest fan community apart from the Star Trek camp. I don't actually read them but my boyfriend does, if you need more info.
Also, there is a strong line of upmarket, anti-pulp Science Fiction and Fantasy published by the renowned German high-lit publisher Suhrkamp, who focus on writers like Lem, Strugatski, Holbein etc., basically writers who would fit Darko Suvin's top 10% of high quality SF with a sufficient degree of "cognitive estrangement".
Another factor is that the German language market is fairly small with our 88 Million plus a couple of extra millions in Switzerland and Austria. That's significantly less than the 240 Million US inhabitants, plus Canada and England.
IS IT YOUR IMPRESSION THAT THE REST OF EUROPE IS IN A SIMILAR SITUATION?
I remember Andy Butler from England writing on the Sf-Lit list that he considers Jeff Noon's VURT cyberpunk. Do you know that book? Do you have his e-mail? Perhaps he can think of other writers who would fit the British cyberpunk idiom. I'm sure I can find his address somewhere in my chaotic pile of note cards.
I published an article in a Danish journal with the title Passage: tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik Vol 20/21 in 1995. It was a special issue on science and the humanities. One of the editors for this issue was Soeren Pold who teaches in the Department for Comparative Literature in Aarhus, Denmark. There were a couple of other interesting articles on cyberpunk in that issue, one by Soren Baggesen and one by Espen Aarseth. Espen Aarseth is working on a project on "understanding cybermedia" in Norway. Perhaps Soeren Pold has some insights on the Danish cyberpunk scene, if there is one.
WELL, MY ORIGINAL IDEA OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO AMERICAN CP IS COMPLETELY OFF THE MARK.
Not necessarily. I could be wrong because I only have access to mainstream anthology publications. However, I think they are some indication on how much impact individual writers or stories had on a specific market.
GENERALLY, IS THERE A DISTINCT GERMAN CYBERPUNK "CULTURE" -- HACKING, CYBERSPACE, VIRTUAL REALITY, EVEN MUSIC?
The most renowned hacking group with a long tradition is the Hamburg based Chaos Computer Club. Internet cafes with VR games are sprouting all over the place. However, I don't see that as particularly cyberpunk, because it lacks the punk element completely. Regarding music, again, I can only think of Americans like Billy Idol. (Perhaps the cultural pessimists that still have considerable influence in Germany with their media pessimistic commentary, have a point in saying that we are just becoming an outpost of American culture. That's the kind of people I have to write my dissertation against and I have already been accused of writing an "internet eulogy".
I recently attended a conference in Bonn which was the fifth event in a yearly series, focused on "Der Sinn der Sinn" loosley translatable as "The sense of the senses" - the pun works in the translation, too. They had invited Hans Moravec (VR researcher from MIT, I believe) and Roseanne Alluquerque Stone (VR writer with a feminist edge from the Univ. of Austin, Texas, also collected in Benedikt's volume on Cyberspace: First Steps and the Sandford Kwinter series Incorporation). The audience tended to be very critical of utopian scheme's like Moravec's but Sandy Stone was very spectacular and received a very positive response.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DISSERTATION.
The title for my dissertation is Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of Science Fiction and the Postmodern. I am trying to do the following things: Look at postmodernism from the perspective of cyberpunk which will lead to the conclusion that most writings of postmodernism, either appropriate popular culture or science fictional elements or not refer to them at all. The methods used to discuss mainstream postmodernist texts are useless for talking about postmodern science fiction for which cyberpunk will be a test case. It is one example what a postmodern science fiction could look like but is only at its early stages. I am also trying to come up with a heuristic definitioin of cyberpunk and a very loose and open grouping of writers. Essential to my fairly narrow concept of cyberpunk is the co-existance and tension between two elements, the cyberspace/virtual reality dimension and a punk/anarchic/street culture style. The other elements like multinational corporations, international brand names, etc. are important, too.
Basically, the uniqueness of cyberpunk consists between the new chronotope of cyberspace and its style which doesn't condemn technology as good or bad from the beginning but displays it at something ultimately ambiguous. What really interests me on a smaller scale, are the metaphors (or meataphors, as my typos keep reminding me) that are used to create this new space, cyberspace, and how they ultimately end up transforming the primary fictional universe, that of the urban megalopolis with clusters of decaying technology as well. Finally, I will come full circle and conclude in showing how the analysis of cyberpunk and cyberspace with its new cyborg life-forms, has re-newed the genre of science fiction. That we need to redefine what a postmodern science fiction will look like and that the accepted poetics used by Jameson; Hutcheon, and so on are not applicable - except for McHale's approach perhaps. Interestingly Lyotard's writings in The postmodern Condition have pre-figured cyberpunk. He ends with a call to free access to all information networks and works from an information theory paradigm. From a more boring literary perspective, I think that older approaches to literary theory like Jakobson's structuralists writings could become useful again, if they were rewritten in a digital mode. Well, that's just speculation. I'm sure you didn't really want to hear this much ....
HOW MUCH HAVE YOU COMPLETED AT THIS POINT?
I'm hovering between 50 and 100 pages and aiming for 300. The toughest part is to set the theoretical academic framework so it will pass through my committee. The rest will be fun, I hope.
WHAT DREW YOU TO CYBERPUNK IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I became interested in cyberpunk when I was in Toronto, Canada, for my MA in Comparative Literature. Actually my boyfriend recommended Neuromancer to me and I loved it. I read it about three times until I grasped what happened in the book. Best of all I like the style which is the major short fall of older SF from the 50ies or so. I hadn't read much SF before, but have been delving a little into the past since. Well, I was in Toronto from 1991-1993, just when William Gibson published The Difference Engine with Bruce Sterling and they appeared at a book signing session at Bakka's Bookstore. (Excellent store, if you have happen to be in the vicinity.)
I actually lined up for a signature and tried to ask Mr Gibson what he thought of chaos theory which troubled my mind at the time. He briefly referred me to Mr Sterling who "knows all about the science stuff." I had suspected as much, unfortunately, I don't like Sterling's books as much, I find his style very clumsy to read. It was somewhere around this time that I started collecting information on cyberpunk without any further projects in mind. The Judith Merrill Collection of SF in Toronto helped me get started, it has moved and been renamed since. Again the librarians there were either fed up with people asking the same stuff about cyberpunk or hated it.
Since my scholarship ran out I returned to Germany and ventured to do this tedious Ph.D business, in the hope of perhaps one day finding a permanent teaching job at a university. My boyfriend (who's just undergoing teacher training) and I live with his parents (due to insufficient funds and income) and we are in our early 30ies. I'm a bit of a TV junkie to spite the literary establishment and because I think that more interesting, exciting and experimental things are happening there than in literature. I like some computer games, Pac-Man, Mah-Jong and SimCity. I have never visited a real VR environment but have seen the late Timothy Leary demonstrate some in Toronto. I love reading Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. I'm musically inclined towards alternative rock (REM, Concrete Bonde, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult) and towards some electronic non-techno stuff like, Laurie Anderson, Michael Nyman, as well as soundtracks of all sort. I also like Deep Space 9, and any Holodeck focused episode of ST:NG. I also love BASEBALL and am a devoted Toronto Blue Jays fan, I can play catch but am still saving up for a bat to practice hitting. I don't perceive of myself as suffering from American Cultural Imperialism - unlike a great multitude of so-called intellectuals in this country.
WHERE ARE YOU LIVING NOW?
Giessen, a smallish (70.000 inhabitant) town 70 km north of Frankfurt, best known for its almost-but-not-quite Nobel Prize Winners, like Conrad Roentgen and Justus von Liebig, also known for the invention of artificial fertilizer and yeast extract - for all it's worth.
Caruso: ...I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the female characters in your books. You always have very strong, very fully developed female characters, is there something special about that?....
Gibson: Well, you know I think the bottom line is that I'm a feminists and I think the reason I'm a feminist is that the hippest Science Fiction that was being written when I started writing Science Fiction was being written by women who had a strong feminist agenda.
Caruso: Like who?
Gibson: Uh, Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Rusk [sic] come immediately to mind.