Cyber Noodle Soup #1

CYBER NOODLE SOUP No. 1 CYBER NOODLE SOUP is published from time to time, usually whenever we have a couple of pages of material. Back before he became a cultural icon, William Gibson used to write reviews for Science Fiction Review. Here’s a sample... DRACULA IN LOVE By John Shirley Zebra Books, 283 pp., 1979, $1.95 Reviewed by William Gibson Housewives who take John Shirley’s second novel home for the fanged-Travolta figure on the cover, anticipating an evening’s Gothic with mild S&M overtones, are in for an ugly suprise. Funny, if your taste runs to l’humour noir, but ugly. The book moves as though Terry Southern has stripped a vintage Dennis Wheatley for drag racing, while its unevenness of tone suggests what might have happened if John Waters (PINK FLAMINGOS) were hired by Hammer Films but forced to work with a young director who insisted on drawing earnest parallels between rape, fascism and vampirism. The plot is a patchwork Frankenstein’s-neck of vampires lashed to recycled Theosophical software, a California “rape epidemic” sutured into a computer conspiracy out of THE MAN FROM UNCLE., Brazilian fascists stitched cheek-by-jowl with Mansonoid cultists, and blood- crazed zombies twisted into the fabric wherever space allowed. The resulting construction is smeared over with liberal dollops of ultraviolence, much of it sexual, and careens along the twisting track of Shirley’s story-line at top speed, spraying blood and shreds of decaying flesh at every switchback curve. When it falters, it seems to do so because the author has suddenly had some intimation of just how depraved, of just how much fun, this is all starting to be. Then the earnest young director rushes onto the set and calls for some seriousness. I was disappointed by the mail-order Rosicrucian machinery dragged on at the end to suck Dracula into some higher sphere, where at last he will be able to purge his evil on some kind of karmic hamster-wheel. Shirley’s Dracula is akin to Lautremont’s MALDOROR and Jarry’s UBU, in that he appeals to the demonic adolescent in all of us, and I hated to see him so readily absorbed into the tidy wheels-within-wheels of an occult bureaucracy. (SFR #33 1979) * NOTED* Cyberdrool: politically uncritical techno-fetishism. - Rob Latham Is cyberspace already sorting itself into two camps, a jaded, invisible elite and a teeming mass of wrassling rubes? This image wouldn’t be unusual in the history of American popular culture. - Gary Chapman Consider how the cyberpunk image of the techno-body played into the crisis of masculinity in the eighties. - Andrew Ross Our technological future has never been more transparent: alt.bondage., alt.sex, alt.fetishes, alt.conspiracy, alt.TV Simpsons, alt.nano-technology, alt politics, alt.Star Trek, alt.Bosnia, alt.jokes, alt.vacant beach... - Arthur Kroker INFODRONE “Our chief chore is taking on the duties and responsibilities of gods,” pontificates Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired. “We are gods, so we might as well get used to it.” Well, one needn’t necessarily be a theist to find this statement a trifle arrogant, not to say ludicrous. One has to wonder how divine Kelly would feel if his office was in Sarajevo or New Delhi or even Los Angles rather then Cyberia/San Francisco. If he does believe we’re gods shouldn’t he be setting an example? Afterall, Wired certainly exhibits some decidely un-godlike behavior. Gods ought to be all-powerful, recognizing no master. But the magazine’s subservience to consumer capitalism is so total and abject as to be the envy of every dominatrix in the Bay area. (“On your belly, slave! Make like Wired and lick my boot!”) And isn’t immortality a necessary prerequisite? All that spacey Extropian talk to the contrary, we have no real clue how to extend the allotted three score and ten we’ve pretty much always had to live. Download our “intellegence” into a computer? Good science fiction plot device but as a practical matter it’s a trifle premature. It’s only Gilgamesh’s magic plant or Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth all tarted up in techno-babble. Actually, the “we are gods” line apparently originated with Stuart Brand, the Whole Earth guru and refugee from the fabulous Sixties (but aren’t we all?). Back when Whole Earth was still interested in carbon instead of silicon, Brand and his ilk once searched for god with drugs rather then trying to manufacture one out of software. The search was apparently unsuccessful and the disappointed survivors must now jack-in if they hope to find transcendence. When a former hippie like Brand speaks of “gods” it’s hard to tell which pantheon he might be considering. Tibetan? Hindu? There was a lot of miscegnation with Eastern religions back then. But when today’s hardcore machine rationalist like Kelly thinks “gods”, he can only have the Olympians in mind. In the scientific, techno-driven West, that’s the only working template available. Immortal, immoral, awesomely powerful, these gods are literally inhuman. Creative? Sure; but also petty, vengeful, egotistical, and possessing an unhealthy appetite for mortal women. And while we’re mucking around in Greek mythology, does the word hubris ring a bell with Kelly and the cadres at Wired? Probably not. Kelly’s touching faith in technology (“I believe technology is unadulterally good,” he tells us) hasn’t been seen on the planet since the 1950s when it was the fundamental religion of the emerging American superstate with all it’s attendent drawbacks. Remember Atoms for Peace? Thalidomide? How about the Cold War? Probably not. For the ahistorical at Wired, the Fifties are as far removed in time as Hesiod’s Greece. Prior to the personal computer we all lived in caves, didn’t we? Kelly’s idea of a god actually resembles not so much the personalities of Edith Hamilton (let alone Homer or Euripides) but rather a particular god, Apollo, from the old Star Trek episode. You know: the Enterprise discovers Apollo on some distant planet and he immediately snatches the main characters and that week’s female lead off the ship and begins to bully them. He brags about his great powers, makes petulant demands for worship, punishes defiance and seduces the woman. Typical god behavior. Kirk settles his hash pretty quickly, vaporising his temple, taking back his woman, and making Apollo grovel in defeat. Humiliated, the god finally evaporates into the ether. A not unfamilar story in Western history. There’s a valuable lesson here for Kelly. Humans don’t actually want to be gods. They like to search for gods but when they find any, they kill them. JOHNNY WE HARDLY NEU YA Alas, Johnny Mnemonic, the much anticipated movie, was a terrible disappointment. After all the hype it would have been difficult to meet all expectations in any event. But this confused mess of a flick didn’t have a prayer. The story sticks pretty close to the short story (they have the dolphin), with various bits of Neuromancer thrown in to round it out. If you’ve read Gibson you’ll probably muddle through in one piece. If you haven’t (but who reading this falls into that category?) you’ll be confused and not a little pissed off. The planet is a mess in a standard, c-punk dystopian way. Information haves and have-nots battle each other. The corporations rule. An AIDS-like plague, called NAS or “the Black Shakes”, ravishes mankind. Our lad Johnny goes to Beijing to have some data loaded up. The plot fleshes out this aspect of the short story nicely. Johnny had to lose all of his childhood memory to make space for the information he carries around in his role as cyber courier. But this particular download is so large that his head is filled to, litterally, bursting. If he can’t deliver the information within 24 hours he’ll die. No problem, he thinks. But then the Yakuza show up, kill Johnny’s clients, and chase him to Newark where he hopes to find the people who can extract the information. Newark looks bad in the the early 21st Century (it looks bad in the late 20th, to tell you the truth). In fact it looks just like NYC in Escape from New York. Betrayed by his manager (a nice job by Udo Kier) and hunted by Yakuza heavy, Takeshi, Johnny stumbles into the hands of “Jane “, a punk bodyguard for hire, and her pals the Lo Tek, led by Ice-T. “Jane” looks like Michelle Pfieffer, but is really Dina Meyer. She’s suppose to be Molly Millions but isn’t she isn’t even in the same universe. But she makes a nice love interest for Johnny, albeit a pretty chaste one. For a bodyguard, she gets into a lot of jams from which she must be rescued. So the “woman in danger” theme, without which no Hollywood (or Canadian) movie can exist, is nicely served here. You don’t see much of Dolph Lundgren, the cyborg preacher/assassin, but he seems to speak perfect American now. He has little to do except chase our hero from time to time, show up unexpectantly and illogically, and die a fabulous death. Ice-T plays his usual rebel-leader role and he’s good at it but he’s wasted here. Likewise, Henery Rollins. He and Lundgren are on screen maybe a total of 15 minutes. You have to wonder why they bothered.

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