CYBER NOODLE SOUP no. 13

CYBER NOODLE SOUP is published from time to time, usually whenever we have a couple of pages of material.

The Brits by Jerry Denny

I remember one Interzone correspondent, or perhaps it was a columnist who said of the British, "Perhaps we just can't write ." Well they certainly try. And there certainly have been some near misses, many of them Interzone contributors like Eric Brown, Greg Egan. No, wait -- Egan is an Australian. Well there have been some Interzone writers who have come pretty close but a couple of genuine Limeys have actually pulled off the real 18-carat thing. Admittedly with varying degrees of success.

John Courtney Grimwood, a former journalist, did not seem at first to be a suitable candidate as a cyberpunk . Perhaps it was the garish book jackets, or the lurid jacket copy describing him as a "Cybershock" exponent. Perhaps it was the fact that the of neoAddix, his first novel, was named "Alex Gibson". Once you get past these many distractions you discover although he sports many undigested influences, he actually knows how to propel a story forward. What is more, although his prose is not the most elegant, it does not constantly trip up the inner tongue as so many of the later SF stylists do. Grimwood writes novels at a frighteningly fast pace, since beginning he has laid down; Lucifer's , reMix and redRobe. This appears to be his last novel set in the future for a while because he is diving into a series of differently themed books.

OK, so I'll jump from JCG's first to his latest, redRobe, I like my evolution on fast-forward and I was eager to see what he grew into. The preliminary findings are not good; first of all he sics me with my least favorite device; a machine with attitude. Fuck it, I hate 'em all from the Doctor in Voyager to the truly stupid cast of robots in Lisa Mason's Arachne, and the dumb-assed AI assistant in Scott Robert's screenplay for Burning Chrome. These anthromophic machines all act as if they have emotions, and the even dumber humans act as if they agree. Annoying, smart-arsed borgs, half the times the authors invest them with more that their pallid human cast. The one thing I can never figure is why someone doesn't just turn them off! In this case we have a gun with AI personality chipped into it, its original owner has met an unfortunate fate, and it finds itself a traveling. Hey wait a second didn't I read something like this in Ken Macleod's Star Faction? Anyway, as we move into the book the cliches mount up. I mean all of the Hispanic stuff with the slang is OK, although Spinrad did it with Little Heroes and Ian McDonald did it with Necroville (that's Terminal Cafe in the USA), but we got Japanese tourists videoing everything, we got news crew with zeisscams Inset into their eyes. We got guys who think they are cool by driving finned cars, there's Voudoun (but you can't blame him for that, as well as Count Zero it's also made guest appearances in Michael Blumlien's XY, Greg Bear's Queen of , and Mary McHugh's Half The Day is Night among other recent SF). This is all beginning to look terribly . We are in well-worn Grimwood territory here, with religious conspiracies and ancient history manifesting itself in brutal, modern violence. There are some good ideas here, but they go by in a flash, and although most of the book moves along well, by the last half it seems so long, you just want it to end. Here is a book that wants to be transcendental but ends up tricksie. Don't get me wrong, in person JCG is the gentlest soul, the most fascinating conversationalist, and I'd have a drink with him in a New-York-minute but this novel doesn't encourage me to read him again.

Richard Calder got very good jacket copy from William Gibson for his first novel, Dead Girls. I can only say that me and the Big Guy will have to part ways here. I can best describe Calder's style as "Baroque" and there is no indication that he is getting any less so. He too has laid down a lot of ink since his opening, he has pushed Dead Girls into trilogy (Dead Boys, Dead Things) and added Cytheria, Frenzetta, Malignos and The Twist. I haven't tried any of them but I can tell you this about Dead Girls: just imagine that you spliced Gibson with Charles Dickens and let Terry Gilliam build the sets... so you're salivating already huh? It isn't anywhere near as sweet as it sounds; the result is turgid, obscure and annoying. (And from the point of fundamentally he seems to have trouble distinguishing actual machines from fucking magic, a point borne out by his latest works which abandon sf imagery for fantastical backgrounds.) Calder has none of the storytelling abilities of Grimwood and none of the lightness of prose of Ings. He ain't my brother, he's just heavy.

Next up we have New York Nights by Eric Brown. This isn't a cyberpunk novel. Brown will say it isn't a cyberpunk novel, I say it isn't, but it has all of the elements; a hardboiled (complete with private detectives) an urban background, emergent High technology, a rogue AI, hacking through the net, and some vaguely mystical elements. What it doesn't have is "strange." It doesn't have those queasy moments of weirdness without which no C-P novel is complete. It's a quick read, entertaining, but I warn you, there is nothing here you haven't read already. It's a snack rather than a full meal.

Simon Ings made his Interzone debut with "The Braining of Mother Lamprey", as unlikely as it may seem, it is a piece of information age, high . It would be impossible to describe exactly how Ings structured his medieval tale of magic around information and chaos theory ideas, but believe me he does, and with considerable success. After that he embarked on a succession of stories, most of them more conventionally SF but the odd few inhabiting a bizarre literary space that can only be described as "ingsville." (His second novel The City of the Iron Fish, is of this variety). However of direct interest to the reader would be Hotheads and its sequel Hotwired. Hotheads appeared first of all in Arthur Straker's short-lived magazine REM. (No relation to Charles Platt's critical journal). It was the first example of Euro-punk a form of cyberpunk that not only set events in a near future England but factored the growing political importance of Europe into the mix. Ings severely rewrote the story between the magazine and novel publications, but the impact remained. It is a spectacular story of a warrior who has returned from space and finds herself depressed. The lack of the high-tech neural augmentation she used in her battle against the moon based Artificial Intelligence is driving her to emotional Instability. Her attempts to regain any part of her former enhancement lead to a sequence of escalating events climaxing in a stunning space based sequence. It is a remarkable debut for a writer. The sequel, Hotwired also has many remarkable sequences and great deal of narrative momentum. It is hampered by the fact that it appears to be half of an uncompleted diptych.

Also highly recommended is The City of the Iron Fish, a fantasy that throws away most of the rules. There are only two Instances of Magic, and no annoying magical creatures (no , dwarfs or even by another name), there are however very subtle and deeply nested ideas about society, information and belief. Unusually for a novel the characters are excellent and utterly believable. His last SF novel Headlong is somewhat less than successful, it reads like a novelization of an unused screenplay and it may indeed be an expansion of "Red Rose" a that Ings wrote which was broadcast on Britain's Channel 4. In any case Headlong fails to take off the way his other novels do, it uses little of the novelistic canvas, it is literally earthbound. It again deals with a character who has had neural augmentation removed. This time it is framed as a mystery where he hunts for the truth behind his (similarly once augmented) wife's death.

Ings has 'exited' the genre for the potentially more lucrative and respectable field of thrillers, his latest, Painkilers, has been published by a non-genre house but it is just as intense, straight-ahead and technology driven as his debut. Can you have a non-sf cyberpunk novel? You tell me. It journeys back and forth across time and geography to tell of how a little device shaped the destiny of a Hong Kong dynasty and scarred the lives of everyone the family touches. On first glance it is as un-SF as you can get, it is firmly set in the late nineties and anchored with historical detail, it is almost obsessively realistic in its or ordinary life. But Ings' sf roots show through with his need to structure his narrative around the ideas. This one slips right under the radar. I really fear for Ings' future. It could go in two directions. He could be come Lewis Shiner, an excellent writer who has abandoned the genre only to find he has also left behind his audience. Or he could become like JG Ballard who has parlayed his incisive SF skills into a merciless dissection of contemporary life. Of the two the former is all more likely. I have visions of spending the rest of my life shaking the collars of strangers and demanding whether they have read any Simon Ings (in very much the way that Shiner would despair that his own hero, Russell M. Griffin, remained unrecognized). On the upside, when I last spoke to him, he told he was working on a very large SF novel, I've heard him reading from an early draft and I'm sick with anticipation.

Can the Brits write cyberpunk? One of them can, but he doesn't want to, and another has made a pretty sincere effort. Now, some of you with a better than average knowledge of British SF will notice that there is at least one highly prominent name missing. And yes I haven't forgotten him, I've met him, he's a nice guy, really war, and personable and that's why I'm not going to write about him or his first novel which was severely overpraised. Peace. Out.

Go! Go! !

We here at CNS Central receive few submissions but when we do they are always great. A case in point is the video from Kaiju Big Batell: Best Fighto! Kaiju is a group of performance artists out of the Boston area. Kaiju (means "mysterious beast" in Japanese) clearly had some sort of epiphany while watching Ultraman reruns at an impressionable age. In the DIY the group began staging Wrestling Matches. Not "monster" as in "big;" "monster" as in "Godzilla" and "Gammera." Beginning in 1994 Kaiju has matched beast for beast in the arena and let them battle it out.

What Kaiju does is put up a ring, invite an audience and bring in the likes of "Astro-Turfo" and "Hell Monkey" ("the one-eyed scarlet horror – and they are not kidding!) to go hand to hand with each other. Well, some of the contestants don’t actually have hands. The themselves are great creations in that man- in-a-rubber-monster-suit genre. It’s as if Toho Studios decided to run the WWF. Wonderful stuff! Buildings and skyscrapers are flattened as the creatures grapple and toss each other around. City buses are used as clubs, innocent bystanders are engaged, and the referee is butchered before the camera. So "Dina Kang" (kind of Barney on bad peyote) and "Club Sandwich" (ham & cheese between two pieces of white bread with arms and legs), "Dust Bunny" and "Mufura", "American Beetle" and the insidious "Dr. Cube" meet in individual combat or as tag teams. There are currently forty such mysterious beasts on call. Best Fighto! is a compilation tape of these crazed contests, introducing a good cross-section of our heroes (such as my fave, "Force Trooper Robo") and villains. In addition Kaiju has a whole line of consumer products, such as the truly frightening Hell Monkey Hot Sauce. Shouldn’t something like that be illegal? Maybe it is! The tape is great and there are several other available now as well. Don’t tolerate that computer-generated crap that passes for "monsters" in sick, bloated, cynical Hollywood. Return to your Japanese roots.

Kaiju’s truly amazing web page can be accessed at http://www.kaiju.com/ Check them out right way.

NOTED

[Bruce Sterling & William Gibson discuss the "c word" with Steve Beard.]

BS: I suspect it will be chiseled on our tombstones.

WG: It has a life of its own. We’ve just had to get used to it. Trying to get rid of it is a Sisyphean task. BS: I feel about it the same way as I feel about the term science fiction, really. There are drawbacks to it and there are useful aspects to it. Actually, after having met the Milanese cyberpunk movement, they’re like these Italian sub-Red Brigade.

WG: Post-Marxist.

BS: Yeah, post-Marxist political punk anarchist philosophical types.

WG: With very nice jerseys.

BS: They were wearing, like, jerseys they’d made themselves that said ‘cyberpunk’ on the back.

WG: And a brain with lightning bolts leaping out.

BS: Yes, I was quite cheered by the sight of it. The c-word’s stock rose a bit there.

[Graphic liberated from "cyberpunk en espanol: Violence & Funky 2.01. ]