Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [5]
As PCP writers began to react to and incorporate CP visions, the urge to playfulness grew. Perhaps the more literary interests of humanist science fiction writers had an influence. Or maybe the writers who were never part of the Movement with a capital M no longer felt bound to foment CP’S revolution. Twenty minutes after Vincent Omniaveritas declared victory in Cheap Truth, cyberpunk began to suffer from an inevitable genrefication. The moves that had seemed so daring in 1982 began to look a little stilted. The leathers were by now scuffed and stained; there were scratches on the mirrorshades. The PCP writers had to try something different or else take their places behind the glass in the display cases at the Science Fiction Museum. In the final analysis the CP writers went to war so that the PCP writers could be free to experiment with new forms.
present future
The idea that the physical, mental, and moral structures that most of us live by are radically contingent is at the heart of science fiction. It is evident throughout the history of the form, from H. G. Wells through John W. Campbell through Philip K. Dick and James Tiptree, Jr. It pervades the New Wave, and the feminist science fiction of the 1970s.
All cyberpunks, pre-, classic-, and post-, know this. Perhaps cyberpunk’s greatest contribution to the genre was its uncanny ability to broadcast this science fictional idea to the culture at large. It’s an understanding that, caught in whatever historical moment we write from, is all too easy to forget. We long for permanence, although we grow older with each tick of the clock. We proceed from the assumption that the world is comprehensible, even as we reel from its dizzying complexity. There are no guarantees; tomorrow we maybe uploading ourselves into cyberspace or drowning off the coast of Nevada.
This understanding is the reason why science fiction, if it rises to its own challenge, can be the literature of the twenty-first century. Our hope is that the post-cyberpunk fiction here assembled will point the way for the readers and writers to come.
“To shake people awake, one needs the conceptual ability to grip and squeeze. I would hope that my rhetoric was a catalyst — that my remarks will challenge some writers to reassess and refine their own thinking. The cake IS stale and decorations aren’t enough; we need to re-bake everything from scratch. And bake it thoroughly this time — not half-bake it. People should not be afraid to undertake this work. It’s necessary. It’s the karma of our generation in SF.”
— Sterling to Kessel, 22 August 1986
1 The term “postcyberpunk” was first used by writer Lawrence Person, in an essay titled “Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto” published in the critical magazine Nova Express in 1998. Person’s essay points toward some of the same developments we are pursuing in this anthology, but we do not use the term in exactly the same way that he sets it forth. As we go to press, Person’s essay is still available at the URL http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml.
Sterling-Kessel Correspondence
IN THE WAKE of the publication of Neuromancer in 1984 there was a lot of talk about something called “cyberpunk” and a scurrilous fanzine called Cheap Truth, which apparently (I had never seen a copy) had been taking potshots at a number of writers I admired. In the spring of 1985, I wrote a letter to Bruce Sterling asking what all the fuss was about. Did he really detest the kind of fiction I liked as much as I had heard?
Well, yes…he did, sort of.
The correspondence got out of hand. For several years we hammered at each other back and forth through the postal service (this was before the Internet took off). Bruce’s energy was