/lit/ - Literature

Because the corporations are more powerful than the government.

a populace society's revolution requires a dictator. ideas never work. only doctrine and ideology. idolatry
would be preferable a dissolution of society.

Most people when they think of advancing technology they tend to think corporations.

the room is a place,
the mind is a place,
outside is a place.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something

if you talking about shitty culture like cyber punk. you might as well look to film for your example. but no one really gives a shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_pbSL7RcnM

for some reason this film reminds me of west side story.
probably because it sucks.
just like you.

The year is 2027

>>2137624
>British cyberpunk

fuck you jensen, what the hell happened to my thread

>>2137594
>>2137586

A bit of both of these. It's not that a socialist government (or any kind of government willing to try its hand at science) can't advance tech but that corporations, as profit powered entities, are much more motivated to create the kind of invasive and highly networked technology that powers most cyperpunk stories. Also, in the neo-liberal markets that power most of the world's modern economies corporations are less restricted and frequently control a hefty amount of political capital anyway, making such a corrupt future seem much more plausible.

That said, I have 11 pages of a story about the Soviet Union in the digital age lying around somewhere.

It is a time of great innovation

Because cyber punk writers are usually smart enough to know that communism/socialism is even shittier than capitalism, concentrating much more power and money in the hands of way less people. And citizen massacres aplenty to go along.

... and technological advancement

It is also a time of chaos and conspiracy

>>2137633
>That said, I have 11 pages of a story about the Soviet Union in the digital age lying around somewhere.
do want

I am so god damn excited for the Missing Link DLC. Gonna replay the entire game one more time.

Deus Ex for GOTY

>>2137637

Also, a placid Scandinavian social democracy would be rather boring.

>>2137637
honey, call the police, I think we've just been trolled

>>2137647
Why didn't Anon read William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's take on the Soviet Union in the digital age, aka Red Star, Winter Orbit?

http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/r_star.txt

Islands in the Net

>>2137655
thank you, I thought nobody would ever mention gibson.

Personally, I never saw communist or left leanings in gibson at all, just that it was a failed ideology whose time had come, but might yet be reborn in a new guise by rugged individualists.

You'd end up with the Borg.

>>2137665
>doubting /lit/'s ability to recommend Gibson in a relevant thread

I'M JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS HERE.

>>2137669
I hardly ever hear about him here. I start a gibson thread and I can count zero replies.

>>2137647

Here is a little chunk of the very small portion I transcribed to my computer long, long ago:

> I calculated that there had to be at least a hundred of them arranged in tight, tidy rows of five at their consoles, clacking away noisily. Wires snaked down from their temples and they kept their elbows cramped to their chests to avoid invading their neighbors space. Stalin grinned proudly at me from beneath his bushy mustache.

> "This is but one of our many glorious propaganda chambers- the writers are picked from the most intelligent Gulag prisoner stock and re-purposed here. We also have a separate chamber of readers, who act as quality control for the worker-empowering literature generated here. If they detect the literature to be below the standards of the Supreme Soviet or repetitious, they give them some constructive criticism in return..."
>As I watched, one of the writers jerked backward spasmodically from her hunched bird-like pose and began to flail her limbs, apparently in response to an electric current being forcibly pulsed through her skull.
> "We like to call them bloggers," laughed the Man of Steel, before moving along with me to the next exhibit of Soviet supremacy.

>>2137655

I was unaware of these, good anon. I suppose I can no longer claim the concept as original, but perhaps I shall finish the transcription of my bizarre alternate history/cyberpunk/satire/(mild) gay romance and post it on /lit/ as a sort of penance.

>>2137671
What do you want to discuss? I'm here, man.

>>2137671
NEUROMANCER SUCKS

>>2137674
IGNORANT FUCKTARD GO WATCH THE MATRIX

>>2137671
> I can count zero replies.

WHAT YOU DID THERE. I AM SEEING IT

>>2137678
>mfw I become aware of the reference

>>2137674

I never finished that book.... Parts were brilliant (and the predictions were excellent) but I kind of lost track of what the shit I was reading halfway through (probably due to the drugs I was on at the time) and had to return it before I got any futher.

I still find it kind of amazing that he created a globalized world before globalization was a real trend though.

>>2137675
Fuck you a thousand times
>>2137674
Most of the characters in the book are only half human, or completely inhuman, except for case. Is the book a dissection of what it means to be human, and do you think I'm right in suggesting that case is human especially because he is always striving to be more than just human (via drugs, cyberspace, etc, especially that hotel scene with molly in freeside)?

Is gibson saying that this striving is an inexorable part of the human condition?

I've also always thought the sprawl trilogy to be essentially a meditation on our next step in evolution and a harbinger of at what point in that process we will actually make contact with another sentient species.

It also seems to follow the old blaise pascal truism - "if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him."

>>2137671
>count zero
Yeah, the 1000000 get kind of ruined cyberpunk on /lit/ for a while.

>>2137687
So read it again from the beginning. It's a book that can be killed in 4 or 5 hours.

And stop doing so many drugs. Find a balance.

>>2137665
I am going to go out on a limb here and claim that the tendency to assume that anyone who mentions communism is a communist is as specifically American (as in U.S.A.) mental handicap.

Because Sci-Fi writers tend to either be into Hard Science and not understand soft sciences or things that relate directly to society, or they are writers first and foremost and are using a sci-fi setting to hand wave things they don't like away and shoehorn things they do like in.

>>2137690
Such a good good question. My god.

I want to copy and paste a portion of a paper I wrote on Gibson for a scifi class I took at UBC (where Gibson started out writing scifi, himself :))


City of Light
The matrices of cyberspace are the new frontiers of consciousness in the information age. It is the place where cyberspace cowboys like Case go to strive “for the transcendent reality locked within his computer console” . But more importantly for the many characters in this novel who exhibit a severe distaste for their corporeal, decaying bodies – the constant use of drugs, the amplification of abilities through microsofts, and the radical reconstructive surgery that run rampant through Neuromancer are all poignant examples of this – it is a chance to escape the mundane realities of the world of ‘meat’ in favor of the “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” . Before Case gets his nervous system repaired by Armitage, his imprisonment in his own flesh is likened to ‘the Fall’ from the bodiless exultation of cyberspace. It is a paradise lost. When Case regains access to cyberspace, the entire scene is heavy with sexual imagery and release. Molly suggests that Case has fetishized cyberspace when she remarks, “I saw you stroking that Sendai; man, it was pornographic” . Tellingly, Case and Molly develop a sexual relationship over the course of the novel, but Molly will leave Case at the end, alone once more with a new Ono-Sendai, the true object of his desire. Later, when Case finally ‘jacks-in’ to the matrix, we observe him “in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face” . Here, ‘la petite mort’, or the little death following the release of orgasm, stands in for the continuous death and rebirth of Case as he sheds his body and reinhabits it anew, while commuting between the two cities of darkness and light.

>>2137687
yeah, re read it. I've read it over 20+ times now and I still get something new every time. It's easily my #1.

>>2137699
Like the biological, eroticized bodies of Case and Molly, the claustrophobic cities of darkness and light that engulf them embody the paradox of “simultaneous materiality/immateriality” . All the detritus, technowaste, and garbage of humanity piles up and threatens to subsume the future landscapes that peep through Gibson’s world. All the while, digital technology allows the signification of something more sublime in its overlaying of beautifully abstracted maps of data-traffic overtop of the ugly and, by extension, the real:
Program a map to display a frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova.
The rampant disease and environmental decay, mounting crime rate, and unmistakable nostalgia for times past – Case’s fixation on the shuriken in the pawnshop being a pertinent example – all mark the corporeal, material, dark cities of Neuromancer as dying. The unreal – the abstracted data being exchanged at the speed of light – gives the formerly dead a fresh pulse, breathing new life where there was none. What emerges from the grave is the Unreal City, newly raised from the dead and pulsing with data, the life force of cyberpunk – “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding”… The two cities become one: receding city lights and pulsing, glowing constellations of data are no longer meaningfully differentiated, swirling and coalescing in the heady void of the eternally neon-lit night.

>>2137702
This is the unreal escape from the city that Case has been straining towards his entire life. The warmth of the sun instead of the cold glare of fluorescents; the cloudless blue skies instead of the poisoned silver smog of a television, tuned to a dead channel; the gulls soaring over sand and blue surf instead of Styrofoam and sludge; and the clamor of the city is far, far away. This is the new Garden of Eden, an impossible return from the ‘ecocidal’ hell that humanity had banished itself to long ago. And yet, it is for Case most startlingly punctuated by the brand vacuum left by its de-corporatized space – “He turned his head and stared out to sea, longing for the hologram logo of Fuji Electric, for the drone of a helicopter, anything at all” . So successful have the mega corporations been in colonizing every aspect of human life that Case feels lost without their brands to mark out the territory in these future-landscapes and situate him spatially. As readers, we feel repulsed by this unnatural relationship. In representing Case, the individual, as trapped within this frightening, symbiotic relationship with the mega corporations, Gibson evokes a nightmare-future-dream of late-capitalism, in which the bloated, monstrous, spider-bodies of the corporations straddle the continents and sate themselves on the life-blood of the consumer. As mechanical and deadly as the birthing factories of wasps, they grow and grow in size…

>>2137701
Eternal Escape and Return to the Unreal City
When Case flat-lines in the matrix at the climax of Neuromancer, all the converging threads that have been spun out through this paper come whirling together in a maelstrom and dance towards their logical conclusion. The spiritual/primal urge to return to the blue water and skies of the past plays itself out in startling ways for Case. He finds himself for the first time in true nature, paradoxically, while dead in limbo between the corporeal world and cyberspace:
There seemed to be a city, beyond the curve of beach, but it was far away. […] The sand was the shade of tarnished silver that hadn’t gone entirely black. The beach was made of sand, the beach was very long, the sand was damp, […] Behind him, a gull cried. […] Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-grey. The sky was cloudless, blue.

>>2137699
I think you've answered it beautifully. Thank you.
I have something new to think about for a bit.

Like i just said, I never get tired of the sprawl trilogy. I re-read it constantly. I can lose myself in it like a woman or a drug.

I'M JUST GOING TO LEAVE THIS HERE

>>2137699
Oh, Neuromancer papers, it is? Let me contribute with an observation of mine I have never read anywhere else:

Finally, technophobia is ridiculed in the very last scene of the novel: Case sees three “impossible” figures in cyberspace: Neuromancer, Linda Lee and himself, “arm across her shoulders” (270; 271). This is too close to the ending of Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi to even be called an allusion. The Film appeared in cinemas on the 25th of May, 1983. Neuromancer is signed 'July 1983'. Both end scenes feature the protagonist having a vision of three deceased characters, if we interpret the figure of himself that Case sees as his old, technophilic self that he left behind. By reusing the schmaltzy ending of Return of the Jedi the novel makes fun of itself, the film and the genre of Science Fiction as a whole. The fact that all this happens in cyberspace casts doubt on the sincerity of technophobia in Neuromancer.

>>2137690
It was this faggot who said that, not Pascal.

>>2137701
>>2137701
I thank you for those three posts, again... Do you think you could send me a PDF of your paper? I'm looooong past college and I can promise you i don't write papers and wouldn't be plagiarising. Send me a locked format if you want.

I just love gibson so fucking much and in between re-readings I try to consume any and all thought about the sprawl trilogy or his other works. I've gone so far as to emulate the old c64 game.

And I've actually got a signed copy of mona lisa overdrive from the man himself... I met him at a B&N last year and he downplayed the importance of neuromancer et al tremendously. And assured me I should not try to look at his collective works as representing any sort of narrative arc. But I think he missed my question a bit. I think of them as a thought process that travels back through the future until the present or slightly before it.

>>2137706
>I never get tired of the Sprawl trilogy

Me neither, man. I always high five Gibson when I spot him walking around in my neighbourhood. He's always eating Korean burritos down on West 4th in the afternoon :D

They're delicious! But I've never asked him to sign his books. I don't want to seem like an obsessive fan (which I am, I have every single thing he's ever written, often in hardcover, 1st edition on my shelf. I've even reviewed him for Zero History in a fairly prestigious lit journal. Sadly, I could not resist telling that old story of him buying his 1st computer after Neuromancer and complaining about the noise the fans made ;__;)

>>2137728
>that feel when you will never high five gibson in your neighborhood

I'm assuming you're talking canada?

I have everything of his in hardcover, too. Except for agrippa. several signed, one personalized. The man just gave me so much damn hope and fleeting beauty. Fuck yes.

>>2137728
oh and the paris review had a GREAT interview with him recently. you should cop it.

>>2137673

Where's this picture from?

Case is able to return from the confinement of Neuromancer's construct because he is administered a drug and has music played to him by Maelcum (cf. 245). The sound of Zion dub and the hallucinations caused by betaphenethylamine mingle with the sensational input he receives from Neuromancer and enable his mind to return to his body by leading the way. If Case really suffered braindeath while inside the beach construct, the acoustic and chemical signals from his body would have no way of affecting his consciousness.
Even assuming that Case is simply wrong about being braindead, the mechanism of the novel is flawed in one point when the relationship between body and mind is concerned. Case mentioned the fact himself that time in Neuromancer's construct time seems to pass at a different pace than in a normal mode of consciousness. Shortly before Case enters the beach construct, it is “07:58:40” (230). Some time after the end of his stay in the construct, it is “eight twenty-five” (253). In the Villa Straylight approximately half an hour has passed, yet inside Neuromancer's simulation, Case's experience covers a period of two nights and the interjacent day. This raises a question when considering the scene where Case starts hearing the music from Maelcum's headphones inside the beach construct. Considering the different paces in which time passes inside and outside the construct, how can Case perceive the music inside the construct in the same tempo that is has when coming out of Maelcum's headphones? Logically, a piece of music that plays for three minutes in Case's ears should, inside the beach construct, cover a stretch of time of about three and a half hours .

>>2137728
>which I am, I have every single thing he's ever written, often in hardcover, 1st edition on my shelf. I've even reviewed him for Zero History in a fairly prestigious lit journal. Sadly, I could not resist telling that old story of him buying his 1st computer after Neuromancer and complaining about the noise the fans made ;__;
Mother of god. I never really liked Gibson, he might have good stylization but this inevitably went off the rails and decapitated the coherency of the whole plot in the process

>>2137734
I've emailed you my term paper. Please excuse all the cliches I've loaded it with, and my quoting from Eliot's Wasteland. I couldn't resist. I even call Gibson our neo-noir prophet. I'm very ashamed.

We discussed Agrippa in our sci fi class out at UBC. I only wish we could have invited Gibson in to discuss it himself. He lives in Vancouver, city of glass, my hometown.

>Paris Review interview
Man, I watch every interview and discussion he does. I read everything. Follow him on Twitter for maximum Gibson fun.

https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal

Didn't read the thread (just out of laziness, it seems like it actually has good posts in it) but cyberpunk doesn't have left-leaning socialist movements because the universe and the city of cyberpunk is one in which the corporations have largely won. the fight is over. the megacity is the domain of the corp these movements have been defeated. cyberpunk is about individuals operating and attempting to hold to moral codes within those environments.

>>2137749
I feel a loyalty to him. He birthed my favourite genre out of my hometown. I love Gibson for what he represents. I agree that his plots often spiral into incoherency, but that style, that tight pacing and writing, they always pull me back for more.

Thanks so much man!
I've never followed anyone on twitter, but now might be a good time to start.

I've read transcripts of agrippa and its self deleting poem, myself. Never got to see a real hardcover, though. I should probably seek it out.

Somewhere on the net are two scans of the comic book form of neuromancer, which apparently had only two issues. It's worth looking up if only to see how cyberspace is drawn.

>>2137749
Gibson has always been about the journey, my brother. style as substance, or substance through style. There's a really beautiful sadness in his work, a feeling of things just slipping through your fingers. His prose has excellent rhythm and he just writes all pretty.

>>2137760
was for
>>2137750

obviously

I found these two points very informative. I think i will go back and reread Neuromancer. There's obviously a lot more there.

>>2137712
>>2137668

>>2137769

>>2137726
my bad, bro
I think I can remember that, actually

>>2137745
>questioning the Magical Negro plot device
>2027

ISHGYDDT

>>2137760
>Somewhere on the net are two scans of the comic book form of neuromancer, which apparently had only two issues. It's worth looking up if only to see how cyberspace is drawn.

I'm sure I've seen those. In my mind, I see Ridley Scott's vision of LA in Bladerunner when I think the Sprawl Trilogy.

I can't wait to see how bad they fuck up the Neuromancer movie.

>Hayden as Case

Please god no no no no nono

>>2137797
Maelcum is a side character, and he's far more humanized than any 'magical negro' i've seen in king's work. He doesn't even care what neuromancer is, god human or sentient AI, because neuromancer makes good beats.

Far from magical. He's just a very grounded person, even though he does believe in prophecies and smoke weed all day.

you get the distinct feeling that he's in touch with something everyone else in the book has lost sight of.
>>2137802
http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/gallery/neuromancer-graphicnovel/index.html

gibson aleph rocks
and here i just found out where the aleph came from like a month ago. genius.

>>2137580
The fabian society was wiped out 100 years prior to your stories setting. People just forgot to be socialists, much like the labour party.

>>2137826
DAMN SON. Puttin the labor party on blast.

>>2137734
>dat feel

america does 4 things better than any other country in the world

movies
music
hardcode (software)
high speed pizza delivery service

>>2138074
>bringing stephenson into this discussion

NO

>>2137580
#occupywallstreet

A socialist movement in a post-modern, cyberpunk setting.

>>2138081
>twitter hash tags

>>2138081
people saying 2011 is cyberpunk irritate me greatly

it isn't dystopian enough and we have not quite reached the technological level for all the goings on to really look the same
>as if corporations are the only prerequisite for cyberpunk

>>2138082

Huh, I actually thought "IRC channel? What server is it on?" rather than twitter hash tags.

Guess I'm just an Internet oldfag.

>>2138104
>mon visage quad when #occupywallstreet actually does exist
Freenode

>>2137580
>Why is it that cyberpunk settings never include left-leaning socialist movements?

Because the alienating effects of late capitalism is what cyberpunk is all about.

>>2138099
People who think a cyberpunk future will ever happen irritate me greatly.

Therein lies the answer OP. Cyberpunk authors paint the world that we will never choose.

>>2138245

Tru dat. Also, because socialism as a coherent political and economic ideology (as opposed to the vague idea that we should all be less greedy) is a product of the industrial era and its masses of recently urbanized factory workers. In a post-industrial information economy, there's no organized working class for a socialist movement to ground itself in, just a minority of ruling elites and a deracinated mass of unskilled laborers without steady employment. The socialist mass movement that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries isn't coming back, and most futurists/SF writers realize that.

All that said, if you want to read a good post-cyberpunk take on traditional socialism, you should read Ken Macleod's _Fall Revolution_ novels, where libertarians and Marxists team up to fight the environmental movement and ensure technological progress for all. They're great reads -- I loved 'em even though I disagree with their basic political thrust.