Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier and more fun to use than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.

The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…

Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1985:

“I once read some remark of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s in which he spoke of wrenching his stories from his emotional wounds — in this case, it was some busted affair from which he was ‘still bleeding like a haemophiliac.’ It was from a letter he sent to some writing hopeful, a young woman begging him for advice, and one suspects he laid it on a bit thick with the Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect.

But this sort of ‘writer’s paradigm’ has stuck with me and caused me many moments of doubt. It makes me wonder to what extent science fiction is ‘fiction’ at all. Perhaps it is based on emotion, and the central emotion is wonder. But wonder is such a pale and nebulous thing, and shades off into intellectual curiosity, or even just an abstract admiration for imaginative cleverness….

It also strikes me that each of your examples: Hamlet, The Glass Key, Persuasion, The Secret Agent, fulfills its genre rather than distorting it. Each of them delivers the pop genre elements that the audience expects. The Glass Key, for instance, is not a mainstream piece shoehorned into the restrictions of genre, but a genre piece elevated to the status of literature….

I don’t think anyone can really understand SF who does not have a solid understanding of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Here is a story without characters, almost without plot, and markedly devoid of humanistic values. And by any meaningful standard of definition this book is great science fiction.”

Kessel to Sterling, 1 March 1987:

“I just taught Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s some kind of crazy great book, but it’s not all there is to sf, and certainly not all there is to fantastic literature. And Bruce, I hate to break this to you, but to people of a certain disposition it’s boring as three-day-old shit. I’m talking about normal in-the-street readers, not English majors. I think such people are missing something, but they’ve got a case. I suspect that what you think makes Star Maker a great book is also what you consider to be the central virtue of sf: its speculative content. There are other views. I don’t buy into a set of standards that makes only such work the best of the genre….

I could be wrong. I don’t expect us to agree. The most cogent statement I found in your letter was your handwritten note at the end of page one where you suggest, ‘let’s wait until we’re both dead, O.K.?’ I’m ready to declare a truce on the basis of that statement.”

Jonathan Lethem How We Got in Town and out Again

Jonathan Lethem, in a series of stories in the early to mid-1990s challenged the pieties of CP, seeing the promises of freedom and power offered by such staples as virtual reality as a new realm for hucksters and scam artists. As in so much of his fiction, here Lethem finds a literary ancestor, in this case Horace McCoy’s 1930s novel of dance marathons in the Great Depression, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The result is a vision of desperate humans in a broken economy imagining VR as a way out.

* * *

When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.

It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.

“So what do we do?” I said.

“You let me talk,” said Gloria.

“You think we could get into town with them?”

“Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”

I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.

“Hey,” said Gloria.

Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.

The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn’t know their names yet.

“Beat it,” said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. “We’re busy,” he said.

He was being reasonable. If you weren’t in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?

But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. “Who are you?” he said. He didn’t look at me.

“I know what you guys do,” Gloria said. “I was in one before.”

“Oh?” said the guy, still smiling.

“You’re going to need contestants,” she said.

“She’s a fast one,” this guy said to the other guy. “I’m Fearing,” he said to Gloria.

“Fearing what?” said Gloria.

“Just Fearing.”

“Well, I’m just Gloria.”

“That’s fine,” said Fearing. “This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What’s your little friend’s name?”

“I can say my own name,” I said. “I’m Lewis.”

“Are you from the lovely town up ahead?”

“Nope,” said Gloria. ‘We’re headed there.”

“Getting in exactly how?” said Fearing.

“Anyhow,” said Gloria, like it was an answer. “With you, now.”

“That’s assuming something pretty quick.”

“Or we could go and say how you ripped off the last town and they sent us to warn about you,” said Gloria.

“Fast,” said Fearing again, grinning, and Kromer shook his head. They didn’t look too worried.

“You ought to want me along,” said Gloria. “I’m an attraction.”

“Can’t hurt,” said Fearing.

Kromer shrugged, and said, “Skinny, for an attraction.”

“Sure, I’m skinny,” she said. “That’s why me and Lewis ought to get something to eat.”

Fearing stared at her. Kromer was back to the van with the other guys.

“Or if you can’t feed us — ” started Gloria.