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The aesthetics of cyberpunk., Is it really just 80's future shock?

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emo samurai

May 24 2006, 06:43 AM

Post #1

Dragon

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I think Gibson as a whole is about more than just "ZOMG JAPANESE BUSINESS RUSH KEKEKEKEKEKE!!!" For me, that was merely superficial. And I doubt it's simply about getting rich, too. In Count Zero, the woman tracking the boxes says that when you're poor, you get crappy-looking but soft towels while when you're rich, you get fluffy but abrasive ones. And all the instances of wealth involve incredible amounts of artificiality; Kumiko's father regularly converses with ROM constructs of his elders, and Tessier-Ashpool is clocked by two AI's whether they're in cryogenic freezing or out.

I think cyberpunk is about nothing being real, or worthwhile. The "ruined city" on Villa Straylight is an expensive playground for rich children. The woman with whom Turner has a back-to-the-land romance that makes him realize the hollowness of the company prostitutes at the beginning of Count Zero turns out to be a field psychologist on retainer from Hosaka. Anything that appears real to any human sensory faculty is supposed to look that way, forced into shape through sheer human will. All things are for the sake of a sense of monolithic surivalism, the "hive," to borrow Gibson's metaphor, and all the girls, the simsense, and the drugs are just meant to keep you from realizing this.

I think 3Jane's essay from Neuromancer sums this up best.

QUOTE (3jane)

The Villa Straylight is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. The architects of Freeside went to great pains to conceal the fact that the interior of the spindle is arranged with the banal precision of furniture in a hotel room. In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand. The bright crabs burrow there, the drones, alert for micromechanical decay or sabotage.

By the standards of the archipelago, ours is an old family, the convolutions of our home reflecting that age. But reflecting something else as well. The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull. Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight.

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. The Villa Straylight knows no sky, recorded or otherwise. At the Villa's silicon core is a small room, the only rectilinear chamber in the complex. Here, on a plain pedestal of glass, rests an ornate bust, platinum and cloisonne, studded with lapis and pearl. The bright marbles of its eyes were cut from the synthetic ruby viewport of the ship that brought the first Tessier up the well, and returned for the first Ashpool...

I would say that in these days of Hot Topic, "independent" films, and corporate all-natural foods/clothing, this theme of the nonexistence of autheticity is even more relevent.

Comments?

Posts in this topic

emo samurai The aesthetics of cyberpunk. May 24 2006, 06:43 AM

mfb cyberpunk as a whole is certainly more than just 8... May 24 2006, 06:52 AM

emo samurai My thoughts exactly. Maybe it's the fact that... May 24 2006, 06:54 AM

James McMurray QUOTE it was an important part of SR cyberpunk Fi... May 24 2006, 07:11 AM

mfb it's still quite important. witness Essence. o... May 24 2006, 07:38 AM

James McMurray Ah, yet again your indiscriminate use of vague pro... May 24 2006, 07:48 AM

mfb oops. that was the "it" that i was refer... May 24 2006, 07:56 AM

SL James QUOTE (mfb) oops. that was the "it" that... May 24 2006, 08:47 AM

emo samurai I remember that one, but the only thing that was c... May 24 2006, 02:15 PM

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