The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

 

I found this novel to be... fine. Admittedly the ending is very well done indeed, but I'm nit inclined to use any superlatives. It was good, that's all. Which is... not how I was expecting to feel after reading a novel which is not only one of the most famous works of alternate history ever written but also an absolute pioneer of the Steampunk here.

Might this, though, be an example of the "Citizen Kane problem"? Said film pioneered so much in the way of cinematic technique yet, in a world where such technique has long been commonplace, the film looks unremarkable? Could this be the case here?

There is a plot, yes, or rather a few broadly linked narratives. Yet the plot is merely a pretext for the real point- the worldbuilding. I cannot comment on its riffing of Benjamin Disraeli's "Sibyl", but I can certainly be impressed and, indeed, dazzled by the cleverness and complexity of the alternate history that is built here. We have Babbage, Byron, Keats, Ada Lovelace as sort of Victorian versions of Steve Jobs and Woj.

Victorian mores, too, social and sexual, are well sketched, alongside a convincingly Victorian kind of radicalism.

In 2025, though, a world beginning to fear the possible consequences of AI, the ending of the novel is enough to make one shudder. We can, perhaps, be grateful that Charles Babbage did not in reality build his Difference Engine.

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

 "Ghost in the machine..."

Let's admit it: this isn't exactly the greatest film ever made. But it's a fascinating one. 

This is the most cyberpunk film I've ever seen, from a time when cyberpunk was, at a stretch, still pretty much a thing in its original form, and it's helmed by a director best known for making the music videos for R.E.M, which in itself is pleasingly '90s. Even better, it's an adaptation of a William Gibson short story (I've read it, but we're talking thirty odd years...) with a screenplay by Gibson himself.

It's not exactly great, despite all that- it lacks a certain sparkle in dialogue, direction and performance (although Henry Rollins is great) and, given the cast, I suspect that last flaw is down to the director. Yet this isn't by any means a bad film either, simply promising but flawed. And it shows, perhaps, that the script is by a novelist who isn't used to writing for the screen.

Yet it's fascinating to see this imagined cyberpunk future of 2021 (there's a pandemic!), with corporate rule enforced by Yakuza, intelligent savant dolphins (shades of Halo Jones there), and, er, VCRs! The internet is shown with trippy visuals and imagined in such a quaint, 90s, virtual reality way. It's all so... cyberpunk.

Yet the ideas are often great. Uploading extra memory capacity to one's brain. An electronic virus. A cyborg preacher. This is a flawed film, but I'm glad it exists: a film that is the cinematic epitome of cyberpunk itself.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

 I last read this novel in something like 1996. That was long ago, and the world has changed. We all live our lives, to a large degree, within the Internet, and it’s strange to see elements of this here, in the first major novel to predict the kind of technological future we ended up having. Not that it uses its crystal ball with perfection: this is a future very much forged in the anxieties of the ‘80s, with fear of nuclear war (a limited exchange took place in Germany but it rightly not much dwelt upon, corporate power and the rise of Japan. Everyone still smokes.

Yet this, along with Blade Runner, is the traditional starting point of Cyberpunk, perhaps personified by the cyborg, beshaded sexiness of the awesome Molly. 

Oddly, the tropes of cyberpunk- the cyborg surgery, the Matrix, the corporate dominance- are all very much fully-formed here, but they are primarily visual, and this novel is not. It is deeply clever and contextual but the prose style and narrative do not hold our hand. This is a supremely effective prose style but one which leaves much to the reader. It is also a prose style that would simply confuse and annoy if used by a lesser writer- as it would be, often, in the following decade.

This novel is at once cutting-edge cool and rather difficult. You can definitely see the much-discussed influence of William S. Burroughs. There’s a reason that a novel so famous has never been filmed: much of it takes place in confusing, abstract and dreamlike landscapes. It is, nevertheless both phenomenally important and a work of pure genius.