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GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS

                        February 1985

I'm just back from Boskone, and ideas are
percolating through my head, but the only part
I really want to talk about is one small part,
a panel by the name of "Punk SF".

The audience was perhaps 40 people at most,
the crowd having been thinned out by some
clever scheduling (10 PM on Saturday night).
Many people left midway through the
discussion.  The people who showed up all
seemed to be confused about exactly what punk
SF is.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the
panelists were similarly confused.

And yet this panel struck me as being the
best piece of convention programming I've
ever seen.

The line up:             

    Kevin O'Donnel Jr (moderating),
    Ellen Datlow,        
    Gardner Dozois, and  
    James Patrick Kelly. 
                         
    Lucius Shepard and   
    Jack Dann            

    were also hanging around.

Kevin O'Donnel frankly admitted that the
panel didn't know anything about punk SF,
since "Punks don't go to conventions."
This was immediately greeted with
obnoxious dissension from the punks in
the audience, setting an appropriately
rowdy tone.

The main contention was that there is a
new movement afoot in SF today, best
termed the "cyber-punk" movement.
Cyber-punks, as the name implies, are
punkish in some way, but involved with
technology, usually computers, and are
relatively pro-tech.  Dozois made some
quip about how they actually believe that
technology is ruining the world, they
just like it that way.  He also did an
amusing rap using a tape recorder as a
prop to explain cyber-punk with a musical
analogy ("You see, this is like Issac
Asimov..." followed by a tape of Chuck
Berry.)

Some cyber-punk authors:

    William Gibson,
    Bruce Sterling,
    Kim Stanley Robinson
    John Shirley

I personally would include Charles Platt
in the list.  He seems to have the right
attitude, and he does do things like
write his own software.

Some stray comments about punks being
druggies lead to some cries of "Straight
Edge!" from the audience.  It seems that
there is a (now-dying) movement of punk
rockers who are also straight: no drugs
(including alcohol), and no
promiscuousness.  Supposedly they were
active in Boston and Washington.  I was
amazed to hear of this.  The serial
monogamy bit seemed somewhat fuddy-duddy,
but even so it all sounded a lot like the
lifestyle I'd adopted on my own.  Was I
part of a trend without knowing it?  Hard
to say, because I could make guesses
about what the straight edge punks
thought they were doing, but I couldn't
tell you for sure.  But then, what does
any artistic movement really think it's
doing?  Or political movements, for that
matter.

Perhaps it's time to get down to the
subject of bullshit.  Only four or five
writers... does this really constitute a
"movement"?  Do they really have anything
like a unified aesthetic at all?  And
don't all movements turn out to be rather
ill-defined and pointless in the end?
Isn't it just a silly social game that
people play, pretending that their little
in-group is of great significance?
Aren't movements in some way artificially
generated media events that satisfy a            GENERATING_BEAT
craving for superficial "trends" to
report?  So, isn't this all bullshit?

Probably.

But on the other hand, movements,
sub-cultures, fads... these new waves may
all eventually break on the shore, but
that shore is not entirely unchanged in
the process.  Things filter into the mass
consciousness from the sub-cultures, and
the egotists that tell themselves that
they're the people on the cutting
(straight?) edge do genuinely have an
effect... though not usually the kind of
effect they hoped for.

So, when all was said and done very
little had been said to explain what this
was all about, and yet the name of the
movement (both movements really) kept
running through my head.  Cyber-punk and
straight edge... To me, they seemed to be
related in some way.  Both movements
seemed to suggest a union of Apollo and
Dionysus, of intellect and passion.  The
aesthetics of Punk and Hard SF do have
something in common: both see a kind of             PUNK
beauty in things that the conventional
eye condemns as ugly, and looks away from
quickly with as little thought as
possible.

For the moment I allow myself the fantasy
that the cyber-punks are in sympathy with
my own attitudes, that I'm in some sense
a member of this movement.

I remember things like a letter from John
Shirley stating that he'd given up on
drugs.  And there are some friends of
mine who are nuclear engineers that like
to listen to the Dead Kennedys and hang
out in biker bars.  And there's another
friend of mine into bio-medical sciences,
trying to stay straight but occasionally
indulging in binges of different strange
drugs (not to mention Buddhism, body
building, EST...).  I think about the
venerable tradition of Phone Phreaking
and Computer Crime.  Could it be that
these are the cyber-punks?

Remember that bullshit can be
self-fulfilling.  If people believe that
a cyber-punk movement exists, then it
will exist.

   And then, perhaps the cyberpunks                 BOUNDARIES
   will have to be created.


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