Watch out for this character in Second Life ... he's trouble!

The Canonization of Snow Crash

An excerpt from Snow Crash (just Chapter 1) shows up in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Literature, which I am using in one of my classes. Though I skewed the syllabus for the fiction readings heavily sci-fi, I decided not to include the excerpt. Can this book be effectively excerpted? What is lost by thinking of it through the lense of "postmodern fiction," rather than the sci-fi genre to which it owes so much?

The anthology comes with a site to help the teach lead the discussion, here as the recommended questions:

• Like many works of science fiction, Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash presents a not-too-distant future based on an extrapolation of current trends. Identify the present-day economic, social, and technological trends from which Stephenson is working. Is his vision of the future credible?
• After a detailed description of the Deliverator’s high-tech equipment, the narrator asks, "Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model." How might the Deliverator be both a "roll model" and a "role model"?
• How does the Deliverator’s life compare to that of the Burbclave inhabitants? Does he have more freedom? What constitutes freedom for the Deliverator?

It's hard to imagine using these questions and not belittling the text. At its opening, Stephenson's novel feels like something written purely for fun, like a short-short story.

I'm not positing a criticism of Norton here -- the recommended questions for most of the other texts are spot-on -- rather I am suggesting that this novel is difficult to consider without the context of its genre and the rest of the book. Indeed, Snow Crash was originally conceived to be a graphic novel, and I've always felt its abruptness owed something to that. (The Norton anthology nicely includes excerpts from several graphic novels.)

transCendenZ (TM)

I find it interesting that Cronenberg often talks about "flesh" when he means so much more than that. From Videodrome's "Long Live the New Flesh" to EXistenZ' "MetaFlesh Game-Pod," Cronenberg seems to be locating new, reality-breaching experiences at the layer of the skin. Like much of the new forms of human described in the cyberpunk we've read this quarter, the new ways of being in Cronenberg have to do with growth or bio-organics but also link very closely to tropes of death: "Death to Videodrome!" and "Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!" (For a nice discussion of Cronenberg and the death drive, see Teresa de Lauretis' "Becoming Inorganic" in the Summer 2003 issue of Critical Inquiry.)

Perhaps it's the penetrable body that Cronenberg sees as both the enabling device to generate horror in his audience and also the site at which to imagine this work's central novum. The body not only offers a physical entrypoint for the gamepod to connect and affect the characters, but it also offers the central metaphor by which the gamepod communicates with the humans. Indeed, the body is the means by which we realize the gamepod's sentience. Take for example Allegra's realization that the pod introduces the theme of disease into the game in order to let her know that it is malfunctioning. Like a child or animal without language, the pod strives to communicate its suffering through gesture and other metaphorical representations of its pain. Further, the pod seems to only know how to create objects from other bodies (e.g, the fishbone gun).

Might the gamepod be communicating both its own independent thinking and its status a new kind of living being birthed from the human?

Time really is that which keeps everything from happening at once ...

Several of the writers this week contemplated the relationship between cyberspace and time. Indeed, discourses around computing have often focused on time (in the form of processor speed), with much concern about the rate at which computing speed could possibly increase before it hit some some sort of wall (see Intel founder Gordon Moore's 1965 article in Electronics Magazine.

Discussions of (the promise of) the Internet center around the realization of real-time communication and updates or streaming media for instantaneous delivery. Still, much Internet time is spent waiting, as the data must come available before they can be shared. Some of the information resides in the past and some in the future. I'm not sure if I'm more excited about the records of 197,745 cases from the Old Bailey dating back to 1674 that have recently been digitized or the release of the trailer for the X-Files movie tomorrow. For the latter, there's a count-down ticker on the website. Part of the joy is sitting and watching the ticker count-down (yes, I've spent some time doing this). Of course, part of the trailer has already been show at February WonderCon. Two things to observe here really:
1) In its current incarnation, cyberspace obtains (much of) its information from the human world and thus must wait for some human agency to update it.
2) Cyberspace is not housed in a single, unified space but rather on a variety of servers that reflect human ownership/experience.
We wait for a single, unified cyberspace with unlimited access to data and navigable through one central hub. (If we want that.)

Picturing the Hacker Subculture

Both Turkle (Second Self) and Taylor ("Hackers: Cyberpunks or Microserfs?" in The Cybercultures Reader) engage directly with the issue of how hackers are depicted. Turkle's description of MIT's "the Ugliest Man on Campus" contest depicts computer engineers as mostly men, reveling in their nerdiness. Some of the interviewees see "having a girlfriend" as being at odds with being a hardcore programmer, some see the latter as a way to sublimate the desire for the former. Neither the contest nor the depiction of the hackers in the chapter seek to really undermine the stereotype of the unattractive a-sexual or "girlfriend-less" computer geek. If anything, the chapter brings to light the way these constructions of geekiness rely on certain hegemonic notions of beauty and the ways in which sexual frustration/under-development is almost always constructed under a heteronormative system. 

Taylor's essay shows how cyberpunk works against some of this. By pointing out the fundamental difference between depictions of real-world employees at Microsoft and the hackers of cyberpunk fiction, he at least opens the possibility of sexy, engaged, uber-cool computer geeks.  Certainly this depiction is more compelling to the media market. The guys in Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science have given way to Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and Ryan Phillippe in Anti-trust. Angelina Jolie in Hackers or, even better, Kristin Lehman as the hacker "invisigoth" in the William Gibson-penned X Files episode. Even the cyberpunk authors seem to be getting cooler as their latest books come out, whether it's Neal Stephenson pictured in a motorcycle jacket ... or the creation of the Buzz Rickson's "Pattern Recognition" MA-1 flight jacket, which was customized to match the description of the jacket favored by the main character of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

I'll be interested in discussing the implication of these curious dynamics in class!

Ghost in the Shell

This has always been my favorite picture of Vernor Vinge. I like the way he is sort of secretly peering out from or into a secret world. The interview is good too. Strange Horizons is a really wonderful magazine, in case you're not familiar with it. (Disclosure: I am on the staff, but I still think my opinion somewhat objective).

I was struck by how Vernor Vinge's True Names presages Iain M. Banks' Feersum Endjinn, where reincarnation is possible by uploading one's mind to a data haven called the cryptosphere or simply "the crypt." A constant problem for writers dealing with virtual reality always seems to be the question, "What happens if you die in [the matrix]?" Vinge's consequences are less terminal than those in other novels, perhaps because it's an early instance of this kind of tale or perhaps because the threats in his books often seem tinged with a promise that everything will work out okay or there will be little suffering if things don't.

Still, outside of Vinge's novella, physical death often looms for those who play too dangerously in cyber-reality. Perhaps considerations of virtual death drives considerations of electronic immortality through mind uploading. Or vice-verse. What, then, are the barriers to such an enterprise? The problem must not have to do with the amount of data but the data structure. The Big Blue is working on it, though!

The Screen as Portal to the Real

Everyone always comes back to that first line from Neuromancer: "The Sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." The line is so compelling that Bono gets to read it aloud in No Maps for These Territories.

What is it about the screen, even devoid of sensible data, that makes it so watchable?

There's something to discern there, whether it's the voices of dead people in Poltergeist or -- wait -- the voices of dead people in White Noise. Static has to mean something, either as a metaphor or as a code (think of electronic voice phenomenon). The screen acts as a portal to other sentiences, whether they're frighteningly never-living (e.g., AIs in films like War Games) or entities that are more living than we are (e.g., an Outside that is the Real in The Matrix). Neuromancer's first line seems to toy with our curiosity about the permeable dead space of the screen. Yes, we're interested in the lives of the characters in the real world of the novel, but aren't we more curious to have the digital world rendered visible?

The Hum(usic)achine

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dick never directly says that the Penfield Mood Organ is a musical instrument. But the way that characters adjust its dials to induce certain moods (e.g., acknowledgment of husband's wisdom or desire to watch television), it's easy to interpret the device as one that plays music. This is especially true given increasing research that shows a close relationship between the structure of music and the way the brain functions. However, the word "organ" also may imply that it is simply some kind of external, artificial body part a la Existenz.

How would Oliver Sacks read it?

Mirrored Image

Re-reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, I felt very certain its events had taken place in Now Wait for Last Year. Or was it The Martian Timeslip? Maybe I don't really know Dick, not like some other people do. Or maybe Dick's narratives intentionally haunt each other, in the same way that he saw an ancient, more real civilization lurking behind its spectral double: our own. Here, I am thinking of Dick's notion that history stopped moving forward in the 1st Century AD (Rome) and that "the Empire never ended." Am I remembering that phrase correctly from VALIS or am I just thinking of the title of the story that appeared in Astounding Magazine?

Why was I so certain that the phrase "Choosy Choosers Choose Chew-Z" appeared in Stigmata, when it was really something much more simple? There's something about the doubling in Dick that spoils the memory. Something about the possible presents/alternate futures/co-located selves that make it seem like something that isn't there might still really be there somewhere. Is Dick trying to get us to realize how close we are to other possibilities or just to pay more attention to the present Real?

(s)oft machines

Reading The Soft Machine and Blade Runner, a Movie -- sifting through Burrough's intermitternt but sustained celebrations of young men and sex -- helped me better understand Gravity's Rainbow as a form of SF. It isn't just that Pynchon's novel so comfortably embraces the absurd that it begins to take on aspects of the fantastic. Somewhat in the same way, Burroughs' novels clearly embrace the fantastic but are utterly grounded in the real (partially because of the visceral descriptions of sex). It's another one of those times in which SF troublingly, interestingly, inevitably complicates genre boundaries. The connection between these tese texts recalls for me something about what is at the heart of "the speculative present," a term that Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and others seem to be batting around more and more these days.

Cyberculture and such

Enjoyed reading Gravity's Rainbow (the edition with the Frank Miller cover, though one wouldn't really know it was Frank Miller without being told). A friend yesterday suggested the Neal Stephenson's Crtyptonomicon basically re-writes Pynchon's novel. I'm not sure I would go that far, but certainly the tone shows up there.