I’ve never been to Los Angeles but I tend to believe everything that’s written about it. It’s so easy to buy the idea that Americans would take heaven on earth (the beautiful oceans on one side, the awesome mountains on the other) and then slap their own putrid media hell right in the middle of it. Pat Cadigan’s future LA is actually a lot more pleasant than some cyberpunk futures. It’s not yet a dystopia. In fact there are plenty of worse places to live in our present reality. The worst things would seem to be terrible television (which is dominated by various subdivisions of porn and live action news reports) and appalling traffic control software (though why people don’t just ignore it I don’t know), not the terrible things you would expect to see in a grim future vision.

The plot here is this: a multinational corporation called Diversifications (also known as “The Dive”) buys a small conglomerate that have managed to invent a computer 2 brain interface but fail to foresee the consequences. It’s up to an adhoc group of hackers and video producers to put the genie back in the bottle. When I originally read the novel it didn’t occur to me to question this but where are the authorities in all of this? They’d just sit back and let the network go down the tubes? Where are the hackers from other parts of the world, or even other parts of the USA? Or even Diversifications themselves? Where are all these people when the net goes down?

In terms of technology, all information seems to be carried over an internet style network, whether it be TV or GridLid (the useless traffic monitoring system) or email or videos. Videos have, for the most part, replaced live performance and are made by the “Synners” of the title using various techniques including full body motion capture “hot suits”. There are video games (some of which use “hot suits”) but there don’t seem to be any coherent 3d game worlds or Virtual spaces in the net. Whether the network is meant to be our current Internet is unclear to me but it would certainly seem very similar. It also seems to have some unusual properties though: there’s a virus (Dr Fish) that appears to be able to mutate itself and penetrate any number of systems. This leads to the creation of some kind of AI that lives, in a distributed form, all around the net. This is one of a number of really shaky ideas in the novel. AI is not an emergent property of networks. Other ideas are pseudo technical nonsense. At one point Sam, trying to combat the metaphorical “Genie” in the net:

[…]Finding alternate routes of communication. She’d just never tried it with such a widespread virus waiting to pounce.
The virus had a sort of three-dimensional perception that required her to keep shifting her own antiviral protection in a cycle that seemed random with sudden bursts of regularity.
[…]
Within a couple of hours, she had achieved a point where she could open an access anywhere in the net and remain undetected, provided she didn’t try to do anything else except sit like an immovable bead on a string.
[…]
Some hours later she had managed a routine of virtual sympathetic vibrations, a kind pf virtual music. It wouldn’t accommodate real-time communication, only short messages in quick bursts.

I’m not sure this stuff is even meant to be believable. I won’t go into where the “virus” in this quote comes from (it’s not DR. Fish) but I will say that it’s pretty unlikely that a virus could come from there, the net and computers would have to work in a vastly more complicated way than they do in reality. This is where I suspect I will disagree with many people: sometimes a thing doesn’t have to be technically true to be poetically true. The intellectual bobbing and weaving conducted by the hackers in the book is a pretty good representation of the way hackers would like to see themselves; innovative, tireless problem solvers who can crack anything given enough caffeine.

Where Cadigan gets things right is in terms of consumer electronics. People carry “chip players” which are somewhat like MP3 players in that they are just a unit of storage with the specialised hardware to play audio files. I don’t think this idea existed at the time. No one bothers with desktop machines either, even the computers that appear to be desktop consoles are laptops. As previously mentioned TVs are just simplified computers attached to the net. People have been predicting that TVs would end up with huge flat screens since the 1950s so I can’t give too much credit for Cadigan’s use of them here but credit should be given for using (I don’t know who invented it) the term “narrowcasting” before it was anything like a buzzword.

The frequent references to porn are worth discussing, if only to give credit where it’s due to Cadigan for realising that the net would be dominated (at least for a while) by it. It’s clear that mainstream TV is meant to have emulated the look and feel of pornography in it’s mainstream shows while, simultaneously, the viewing public have opened their minds to such an extent that they can be aroused by almost anything. The actual form of “food porn” or “war porn” is not discussed but, from the way it’s described, I don’t think it’s meant to be nude women covered in stuff, just long, lingering lustrous shots of gammon steaks or corpses. (Whether this could actually be described as “porn” (which seems to me to be a very specific thing) is open to debate. I don’t think it makes sense to broaden the definition of a word to the point where in means nothing). While TV already seems to be about gluttonous consumption in the real world I’m not convinced that we’ve gotten to the point where people are actually masturbating over pictures of car tires and anchovies. I guess we’ll see if we get there from here. It’s interesting that there don’t seem to be too many characters in the novel who actually watch all this porn, after all TV can’t survive without someone watching it. I guess the unwashed masses who don’t have any say in anything (including the novel, really) must be consuming it.

In spite of some unreasonable technology and the standard “loveable cyberpunks beating the corps” plot I actually really like Synners. It’s all about the characters. Gabe Ludovic, the commercials producer, is a rounded character, kind of dork. His legally emancipated ex-daughter, Sam, is a realistically know-it-all teenage hacker. His wife is a one dimensional cut glass bitch. Gabe’s co-workers have accurate office politics. There’s a great scene in the Dive’s lunch area where media-whore types are just sitting ’round shooting the shit in exactly the way that I imagine they do. The relationships are well handled, particularly that between Visual Mark (video producer and one of the first to receive the c2h sockets) and Gina Aeisi(another video producer). The protracted rituals of these character’s lives, in which they circle around each other but never quite “connect”, seem very real to me. Bosses dump on underlings before being dumped on themselves.

If you absolutely demand technology that seems real and avant-garde plotting then you best read something else. Otherwise you could do worse than read this.

After writing Hardwired Walter Jon Williams wrote this novel, set 100 years on. Perhaps it’s a comment on the possibility of a plateau in technological development but nothing much new has come along. Many more people live in space and a larger number of planets have been colonized. Interstellar travel has also been developed but it is only used by a small number of people. A certain amount of genetic engineering has taken place, though not with any great success. In Hardwired there were a couple of characters whose minds had been recorded and transfered into new bodies when their old ones died. This is still going on 100 years later and Ettienne Steward bought clone insurance just before leaving to fight in a war. He’d been a gang member in the urban hell of Marseilles and was looking for some rigidity in his life so he signed up with Coherent Light as an “Icehawk”, a sort of SAS style special ops unit. Obviously when the clone insurance kicks in after you die they make you a new body and, by some appalling means, overwrite whatever nascent consciousness is in it with your last recorded scan but Steward never updated. When he dies and his Beta is born his memories are 15 years old. It’s at this point, the birth of the “Beta”, that the novel starts.

Steward finds that his Alpha has been murdered and that the war on Sheol had been a Vietnam style disaster that ended with the arrival of the planet’s original inhabitants, the aliens referred to as “the Powers”. Then in quick succession his therapist, Dr. Ashraff, is murdered and he receives a mysterious video message from his Alpha, giving Steward tantalising details of his fatal last mission. This is the murder mystery that, in part, sustains the novel.

Then Steward meets Griffith, a friend of the alpha from the Icehawk days, who offers him a convenient way to get into space and find some answers to his questions.

“The Competent Man” is one of the major bugbears of the 1980’s Cyberpunk authors. Seeing themselves as literary and avant garde they rebelled against the military and paramilitary figures who dominated precyberpunk novels in the 1960’s and 70s’ who would save the world while the thankful common man (and/or lady) looked on helplessly in awe. The underlying idea (never actually lying that far underneath of anything) was one of obeyence to a sort of unquestioning and invulnerable facist military elite.

The typical Cyberpunk response to this was a character like Deckard in Bladerunner, an apparently faded cop, brought back for one more case straight out of film noir. A complex guy (or android perhaps) in a morally complex world. Case and Molly Millions, not out to save the world but to survive and maybe make some cash along the way. Turner in Count Zero was William Gibson’s attempt to write a “competent man” and push him to pieces. Morally complex people living in difficult, complex worlds where it was hard enough to know where the next meal would be coming from let alone what “right” and “wrong” might mean.

Steward is the “Competent Man as lunatic obsessive”. His belief in the purity of his own actions has made him totally corrupt. He has been indoctrinated into believing that anything is justified in the cause of achieving his objectives, that his “mission” is more important than lives or property or friendship. His attitude is that of the terrorist, indeed he is actually used in the book as a paramilitary terrorist to further one policorp’s goals but, perhaps because it is written from his point of view, the book treats him as a hero. This brings me to an impossible question:

…are we supposed to admire Steward?

When I read the book as a 17 year old I did. I guess this is the appeal of extremist causes to the young, the admiration for living without compromise. I only realized recently, while rereading the novel, what an asshole Steward is. There are small cracks in the narrative through which we get a glimpse from the other side. Dr. Ashraff, Steward’s therapist immediately after he is born has this to say about him:

“You fell for their program.” Steward felt surprise at the apparent feeling in Dr. Ashraf’s voice. It was hard to remember Ashraf ever being emotional about anything.

“Coherent Light taught you martial arts and zen,” Ashraf said. “Zen of a certain kind.”

“Mind like water,” Steward quoted. “The unmeaning of action. Union of arrow and target. The perfection of action, detached from anything except the spirit.”

“They were programming you,” Ashraf said, “with things that were useful to them. They taught you to divorce action from consequence, from context. They were turning you into a moral imbecile. A robot programmed for corporate espionage and sabotage. Theft, bomb throwing, blackmail.”

Steward was surprised by the harshness in Ashraf’s voice. He turned from the window and looked at him. The doctor’s fingers were steepled in front of his mouth, but Steward saw the anger in his eyes. “Let’s not forget murder,” Steward said.

“No,” Ashraf said. “Let’s not.”

“I’ve never pretended to be anything but what I was,” Steward said. “I’ve always been honest about what I’ve been.”

“What’s honesty got to do with my point?” Steward felt himself tense at the attack on Coherent Light, at the things that still provoked his loyalty. He forced himself to relax.; Coherent Light was dead, dead in the long past. Mind like water, he told himself.

“You’ve been programmed to divorce corporate morality from personal morality,” Ashraf said. “You’re a zombie.”

Steward frowned at him. “Perhaps,” he said, “morality is simply latent within me. You’re awfully combative for an analyst, you know.”

“I’m not here to analyze you. I’m here to give you a crash course in reality and then kick you out into the world,” Ashraf carefully flattened his hands on his desk. He looked up at Steward.

Mind like water, Steward told himself. Trying to stay calm.

It didn’t work.

There’s also the relationship with the Alpha’s ex-wife Natalie, who see’s through him. Whether it’s Alpha, Beta or even Gamma she knows what Steward is.

The reason that I focus on morality at all is that it’s one of the key issues in Cyberpunk. Science fiction is always much more a reflection of the time in which it’s written than the future. The 1980’s were a time of moral disinterest and one of the key concepts of Cyberpunk is the idea that if a thing can be done it will be done whether it’s humane or not. It’s one of the things that dates stereotypical Cyberpunk fiction because people in general are much more aware of, and resistant to, the potential horrors of new technology now. Not many people believe that the future is inevitable anymore. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in a morally ambiguous universe but the above passage humanises it.

Like Hardwired before it Voice of the Whirlwind is a piece of first class commercial writing in the Cyberpunk genre. Where it’s predecessor replaced the film noir stylings of William Gibson with a western theme this is a murder mystery espionage thriller in space. A damn good one in fact.

Hardwired was born in the aftermath of Neuromancer and shares that novels idea of a central relationship between a man and a woman in which the man is a techie and the woman the hardass. Fortunately it doesn’t share much else, it’s tone being less film noir and more dime store western. That’s not necessarily a criticism because Cowboy, the central male, clearly sees himself as a product of the dream of the American west. He used to be a pilot flying home-built deltas to make sure the mail got through but when that business got destroyed by the orbital Soviet he and others like him switched over to driving tricked out hovercraft called “Panzers” with which they try to smuggle cargo across “the line”, the border between the real west and the midwest.

You’ll notice the reference to an “Orbital Soviet”, the idea being that the communist Soviet block survives into the middle of the 21st century and prospers in space leaving the foolish and impoverished capitalist nations to wallow in the mud at the bottom of the gravity well. We forget just how unassailable the soviets looked up until the end of the ’80s and it’s not uncommon in CP literature of the time to find a depiction of a futuristic Communist state because everyone in the world of Cyberpunk literature just assumed they’d keep on being an important Superpower forever and that therefore they had to be depicted.

At one point Cowboy, flying in a delta (a kind of futuristic jet fighter built in a garage out of carbon fibre and epoxy resins) shoots down an unarmed private jet because one of the people on it has been trying to kill him. At no point does he try to find out who else is on the ‘plane. He has no moral qualms about it either, he just wishes it had been a more satisfying fight, yet elsewhere we find him worrying about the welfare of children who live (apparently as sex slaves) with his benefactor Rune.

While Cowboy sees himself as a man of principle (despite his unacknowledged lapses) “in it for the ride, not the cargo” Sarah is a prostitute and assassin (tricked out with a bizarre throat mounted cyberweapon) willing to do pretty much anything (undergo extensive plastic surgery to get close enough to an aging man who’s been cloned into a young Asian woman’s body to kill him/her) to get herself and her appalling brother Daud off of Earth and into orbit where everyone important seems to live. She strikes me as more of a cipher than Cowboy. I don’t believe that anyone in her position would be quite as resolute as she is.

The two protagonists come together in the context of a botched delivery, go on the run together and then separately until there appears to be a way to to fight against the particular block of the orbital Soviet that is trying to kill them. There is no commitment romance and economics and a perverted/happy ending. Like a lot of other ’80s Cyberpunk it’s an extrapolation of then current morals into the future. There’s almost moral vacuum where the novel’s soul would normally be.

While it’s hard to get excited about the tech on display in the novel at our point in the 21st century The handling of Cowboys enhanced sensorium (as when he plugs himself into the Panzer and Delta) are well handled and the idea of people prolonging their “lives” by downloading recordings of their brains into clones of themselves was newish at the time. Also the way economics is used as the most dangerous weapon in the endgame is clever.

Hardwired is several notches above journeyman cyberpunk. Walter Jon Williams may have written space opera and an earthquake novel since he wrote Hardwired but he seems to have grasped most of the essential elements of ’80s CP.

It may be coat-tail riding but it’s a really good ride.