Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [55]
I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that anything could be healed, once it was understood.
Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1986:
“Actually I’ve been wanting to do something on BOFFO [aka humanist sf] for some time…. I was further stimulated by the appearance of [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s ‘Down and Out in the Year 2000’ in the April MOV’S, with its long Gibson parody and slashing backhand to Sterling. This was one of Robinson’s best stories, I thought, and a point well taken. His attempt to seize the moral high ground in the debate seemed a canny attempt to use BOFFO’S perceived strengths — at least vis-à-vis the anomic medical objectivity of true chrome-and-matte-black cyberpunk. Also, Shepard’s amazing ‘R&R’ in that issue seems to capture a kind of Mirrorshades incandescence without in any way kowtowing to shock-effect high-tech.
It seems to me that ‘R&R’ and ‘Down and Out’ both represent a kind of elastic and powerful reaction of other 80s writers to the impact of cyberpunk. A kind of waking from dogmatic slumbers which, without following the c-p line at all, still shows a new kind of alertness and commitment. A sense that the stakes have been raised. A healthy and very encouraging reaction to challenge — and not a blind reaction by any means, but an intelligent and wide-ranging response.”
The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry, with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience
Pat Cadigan
Pat Cadigan gives us a variety of VR that aspires to historicity in this witty piece; “fraudulent pasts and faked memories” will get you a kick in the teeth from the authorities. The surface of this story is ornamented with all the bedazzlements of classic cyberpunk: drugs and rock and roll and cyborgs and a technophilic art form. Narrators with an attitude have always been a specialty of Cadigan and here Gracie lays down a line of pharmaceutical quality wisecracks and caustic insight. But what informs this story is its pervasive sense of irony: this culture, so desperate to recover a lost past, has got it pretty much all wrong.
So! Fix yourself a smell and sit down!
There’s a wet bar, too, if you go that way. You know, for years I told myself I didn’t, even though I always kept a full complement of cheers, vines, and the hards and their pards. I’d say to myself, Oh, but of course the hooch is strictly for hospitality and nothing else.
But now, I’m out about it and I really feel much more non-bad about it. And wasn’t it Elvis who said, “Drinkers, like the poor, we will always have with us”?
Or was that Dylan? Might have been — Dylan was the big expert on drinkers, wasn’t he, dying as he did face down in the gutter — lucky beast! — not fifty paces from the Tired Horse Tavern where he came up with his biggest and best — “All the Tired Horses” (of course!), “Knockin’ on Fern Hill’s Door,” “The Hand That Signed a Paper Got to Serve Somebody,” and, my personal favorite, “Do Not Go Gentle into Those Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Rage, rage against the leaders, watch the parking—”
Sorry, sorry, sorry! I can barely hold still, this is such an exciting time for me. I think my man Dylan put it best when he said, “I sang in my chains: everybody must get stoned.” One of his most evocative lines, at least for me. Even now, long, long, long after I first read it, it still stirs up for me the sensation of that state where you’re practically thrumming in excitement, and the only thing that keeps you from flying up in the air and dragging the whole world after you like a cape tied around your shoulders is the incontrovertible fact of your just-that-much-too-heavy flesh —
Sorry again! The human condition tends to make me wax poetic. Rather, it makes me want to wax poetic, except I can never think of the poetic counterpart to words like “incontrovertible.” Got a drink now?