{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Went to Ground Kontrol for pinball yesterday. Before Rock Band karaoke started they were playing Total Recall on the projector...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/45321022458/", "html": "

Went to Ground Kontrol for pinball yesterday. Before Rock Band karaoke started they were playing Total Recall on the projector screen. I’d never actually seen it, it looked better than I expected. I read the story, though. It’s funny, none of the great cyberpunk books ever got made into movies, but a few 12-page stories did. Johnny Mnemonic was based on a pretty good story, though the movie was ridiculous.

(The girl in that was supposed to be Molly, the mirrorshade-implanted, ex-meat puppet razorgirl that ties Gibson’s universe together, but she was tied up in the unproduced film rights to Neuromancer)

Its known and accepted that science fiction is always just a projection of the present, and we’re far enough away from cyberpunk to appreciate that. Gibson, famously, had never used a computer when he wrote Neuromancer and based his impressions off of video arcades, that’s something that definitely shows up in the “cyberspace as VR file directory” of the ‘90s.

Snow Crash now rings clearly as a dream of early '90s Southern California. The opening inciting incident a riff on “your pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free”, the burbclaves of housing developments, the Metaverse of text MUDs (note the way users can program their own locations and appearance but many just buy premade - I guess that accurately predicted Second Life, but not its eclipse by, say, WoW), the Raft is a mashup of the boat people and the Mexican overland wave that swamped the region in the '70s-'80s. The whole nam-shub of Enki thing is kind of a distillation of California technomysticism - post-Leary circuit theory, neurolinguistic programming, the Mondo 2000 shamanic magik, all rolled together.

I mentioned Jews for the Protection of Firearms Ownership a bit ago, that was the milieu the HEAP guns in Cryptonomicon came from, and today’s Defense Distributed and the printable firearms movement is the pretty damn cyberpunky endpoint.

Someone lent me a book of Philip K. Dick’s early short stories a year or so ago. They’re not nearly as drug-psychotic as his later work, a lot of them are post-nuclear-apocalypse tales. And it’s really interesting and makes you notice how much of later postapocalyptic fiction is really just a retelling of narratives about the settling of the savage frontier. Because these ones aren’t at all, instead they’re riffing off the reconstruction of Europe after WWII - the Marshall plan, the struggle for dominance between two spheres of influence, the rebuilders’ attempts to purge the defeated prewar regimes and establish their ideology by force, the locals’ subtle resistance. It’s all quite fascinating.

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