People with established careers are terrible sources of advice on how to break into their chosen field. When I was a baby writer, I attended numerous panels about getting established, where writers a generation or two older than me explained how to charm John W Campbell into buying a story for Astounding Stories. This was not useful advice. Not only had Campbell died six days before I was born, but he was also a fascist.
I have two careers, one in tech and the other in SF, a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combo that’s got a long history in the field, and I am often asked how to break into both fields. I know an awful lot about how to sell a story to Gardner Dozois, who stopped editing Asimov’s sixteen years ago and died two years ago, but I know nothing about pitching contemporary SF editors.
Likewise: I know an awful lot about breaking into the tech industry circa 1990: first, be born in 1971. Next, be raised in a house with a succession of primitive computers and modems. Enter the field in the midst of a massive investment bubble that creates jobs faster than they can be filled, when credentials are irrelevant.
Another advantage we had in the 1990s tech industry: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, a literary genre that ruled sf for about two decades, was primarily written by people who knew very little about the inner workings of computers, and who were often barely able to use them.
But these same writers were, as William Gibson put it, “attuned to the poetics of technological subculture” (Gibson’s degree is in comparative literature, after all). They wrote about how it felt to have mastery of technology, and what the ethical, social and personal connotations of that mastery were. In that regard, they were squarely in the tradition of the strain of sf that starts with Frankenstein and the technologist’s inner life of hubris, self-doubt, triumph and regret.
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But the cyberpunks departed from that strain in their lionization of technologists: they made tinkering with computers rock-star cool, gangster cool, revolutionary leader cool. Untethered from the tedious business of having to deal with computers as they were, or even as they could be (given theoretical limits on computing), the cyberpunks were able to fuse the technologist archetype with the wizard archetype, creating protagonists who could use networks to project their will over billions of people without seeking permission or even facing real consequences.
This made for heady reading for young would-be technologists at that moment when, without permission, we were entering a field that had been reinvented as an uncredentialed wild west, where you could just write and release code, and, if others ran it, it would change the world. This was the era when a British physicist at a Swiss supercollider cobbled together a hypertext system in his spare time, released his rough-and-ready design into the wild, and announced that it was called “the World Wide Web.”
It wasn’t just technologists who were captivated by the cyberpunks’ myth-making: it was their employers. Companies didn’t understand what technology did, but they understood that it was doing something and that their companies needed to do that something, whatever it was. They hired us.
We learned on the job. Charlie Stross switched from his job as a pharmacist and became a computer programmer. He wasn’t the only one. Science fiction has always attracted people with a technical bent, from Clarke’s orbital mechanics to Capek’s robots, and science fiction fandom was the first nontechnical online community, giving fans a reason to get online long before anyone else wanted to. The world of SF fandom—from which most SF writers are drawn—was online early, and intensely, and thus when opportunities knocked for high-paid tech jobs, SF fandom (including writers) answered.
Cyberpunk writers—though not overly technical—inspired a generation of writers (Neal Stephenson, Charlie Stross, Annalee Newitz, etc) who were very technical, and these writers went on to both create a cyberpunk practice of technology—liberationist, politicized, subcultural, criminal—and also to write fiction.
This “post-cyberpunk” fiction is just as attuned to the “poetics of technological subculture,” but with a significant difference: computers in post-cyberpunk fiction, are, by and large, not metaphors. Rather than imagining futuristic computers whose capabilities and limitations are defined by the plot, post-cyberpunk writers imagine futuristic plots whose contours are defined by the capabilities and limitations of computers from Cryptonomicon to my own Little Brother.
This is somewhat by necessity: cyberpunk’s metaphorical—and sometimes fantastical—computers (think of the AIs in Neuromancer) were easier to sell to an audience that had less direct experience with computers overall (in the same way that an audience of suburban Americans far removed from the frontier life might overlook the fact that a cowboy’s six-gun fired ten rounds before reloading).
But post-cyberpunk writers are obsessed with the technical reality of computers for other reasons. After all, so many of us work in the tech industry and are both constrained and informed by technical reality in our working and artistic lives.
But most of all, post-cyberpunk cares about the technical nitty gritty because of its relationship to the poetics of tech subculture and the hacker archetypes of cyberpunk. For your characters to have rock-star (Hiro Protagonist), gangster (Manfred Macx) or revolutionary leader (Marcus Yallow) cool, for them to embody the fusion of the technologist archetype with the wizard archetype, they have to know a lot about the underlying technical reality. They have to know its strengths and its weaknesses, and, most of all, where a lever can be used to make it lurch dramatically into a new configuration.
Today’s tech industry is much more ossified than it was in the cyberpunk era: it has formal degree programs, certification systems, and training services without limit. But writers needn’t get a technical degree to attain technical literacy: now more than ever, online communities exist to solve every kind of technical challenge and answer every kind of technical question. From communities like Quora to the Massively Online Open Courses at MIT, Stanford and the Open University (where I’m a visiting professor), there has never been a better time to attain technical mastery.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, a YA sequel to Little Brother. His latest book is Poesy the Monster Slayer, a picture book for young readers. His next book is Attack Surface, an adult sequel to Little Brother.
I do like my SF hard, and hard SF still covers a huge variety.
Is CJ Cherryh’s deep sociology and anthropology hard SF? Yes, but for soft sciences.
Is Paul di Filippo’s “Stink Lines” with its utility fog that provides comic-book iconography to daily actions hard SF? Oh delightfully yes.
There’s no doubt that the utility fog can become grey goo: Blood Music by Greg Bear is a frightening novel of nano run wild.
Wil McCarthy’s Queendom of Sol books (starting with The Collapsium) is space opera writ large… but with a serious science heart. That sort of superscience (another would be Linda Nagata’s Nanotech Succession books starting with Tech Heaven) is among my favorite things to read.
And of course Mr. Doctorow’s books are full of hard SF — even if it’s projections of just the next six months — with its paranoid jailbreaks of X-boxes of Little Brother, free wi-fi of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, or homebrew biotech and 3d printering of Walkaway.
The point is that science isn’t the story, it’s the color. How we react to it, and how it changes the characters, is what makes it wonderful. That’s why I’d much rather read Hugo-winner Memory of Empire than Hugo-winner Rendesvous with Rama.
Cyberpunk and technology––it all sounds so interesting. Are there any women?
We learned on the job. Charlie Stross switched from his job as a pharmacist and became a computer programmer. Wikipedia says he enrolled in a university computer course two years after qualifying as a pharmacist; was he doing computer work before then? It’s certainly possible — I spent 8 years in a mix of QA and development before doing night school — but I’m not sure he’s an example. I also note that the bleedover was happening before cyberpunk was noticed; those 8 years started in 1980, after 4 years as a research chemist, and ISTM that a lot of my contemporaries were also drifting into computer work in the 1970’s after getting degrees in more-established sciences.
I was unfamiliar with the Gibson quote about the “poetics of technological subculture,” but really appreciate how neatly it encapsulates what it’s like to ride a computer program in cyberspace in Neuromancer. Gibson is invested in capturing what it feels like to experience such technical mastery. If I can be so bold, Ms. Cadigan, I thought that Synners was participating in a similar project.
But I’m still a bit unclear why post-cyberpunk writers have largely abandoned such a “poetics” in favor of what strives to be straightforward technical rigor.
I am currently reading Accelerando for the first time. I am enjoying the book but, I must say, the style of the info dumps remind me of the sort of slick, overwhelming techno-babble that one might experience firsthand if one was working for a tech company. In which case, the arc of post-cyberpunk is following the arc of Silicon Valley: from startups that profess to exist in some revolutionary (or, at least in the case of the startups, libertarian) “outside” to the monopolies that have dissolved the distinction between inside and outside altogether.
In a time when few people had access to computers authors could get away with magic disguised as technology. Books about programming by people who know nothing about it don’t work any more in a time when many people (especially SFF fans) know how programming really works.
Pat Cadigan wrote:
“Cyberpunk and technology––it all sounds so interesting. Are there any women?”
Not many. Sadly like RL, where the industry is going backwards, it seems, and “the boys” treating the women so poorly that most bail out early. Really, really sad.
In the greater World of Science: well. Two women shared the Nobel in Chemistry this year. Woot!
@@@@@ PeteTillman: She’s highlighting the discrepancy. Pat Cadigan herself is an important cyberpunk/post-cyberpunk writer who was writing at the same time as the men Doctorow cites as so technical and creative; in fact, she wrote my favorite-ever cyberpunk book (Synners; it’s brilliant). Her point is that there WERE and ARE women writing in this genre, often contextualizing and conceptualizing the cyber-world differently from the men.
In 90s post-cyberpunk, you can find equally powerful novels spanning the range from hard-tech to tech-as-poetics written by women, too. I can cite plenty of counterparts. Pat Cadigan wrote rock-star cyberpunk protags (Gina and Virtual Mark, in Synners); Nicola Griffith wrote criminal low-lifes (Spanner and Lore, in Slow River); Melissa Scott wrote queer underworld hackers (Trouble and Cerise in Trouble and Her Friends); Linda Nagata wrote revolutionary leaders (Phousita, in The Bohr Maker); and additionally, the non-binary author Raphael Carter wrote… well, I’m only halfway through The Fortunate Fall right now, but I’m in awe of the reporter speaking truth to corporate and global power, Maya Andreyevna. The Fortunate Fall is already one of the most poetic books I’ve ever read, Synners draws characters and places them in the high-tech world moving on without them better than any cyberpunk work I’ve ever read, Trouble and Her Friends hits hard the feeling of a queer friend group targeted by regressive laws that will destroy their way of life and force them to do under-the-radar work over the internet, in a way that felt so compelling and real.
It’s not a clear progression from more poetic and imaginative -> more technical and real-tech-driven; different stories do different things. Trouble and Her Friends was fully imaginative cyberspace-as-the-wild-west, but the emotional feeling of being in the glittering cyberspace world harkened back to Gibson-like images; The Bohr Maker explicitly drew a parallel between nanomachines and magic; while Synners really delved into what having the implant technology would really be like, making it one of the least dated 20th-century cyberpunk books I’ve read, which is an impressive feat, and in the same way Stephenson went into in-depth long exposition about Turing machines and VR mechanics, Nicola Griffith in Slow River gives the same gritty realism technical depth to wastewater treatment technology.
(And that’s not even mentioning other cyberpunk(-ish) writers like Maureen McHugh, Malka Older, Kelly Eskridge, Sarah Pinsker… yeah, they exist, and provide a fuller picture of cyberpunk and its genre progress than just a few male names.)