"Bruce Sterling - Cyberpunk in the Nineties" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

paradoxical hazards of "movements." An avalanche, started with a
shout and a shove somewhere up at the timberline, cannot be stopped
again with one's hands, even with an audience of millions of mundanes.

"Cyberpunk," before it acquired its handy label and its sinister
rep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and
anarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-
band 70s punk music. Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ,
"CHEAP TRUTH," was given away free to anyone who asked for it.
CHEAP TRUTH was never copyrighted; photocopy "piracy" was actively
encouraged.

CHEAP TRUTH's contributors were always pseudonymous, an
earnest egalitarian attempt to avoid any personality-cultism or
cliquishness. CHEAP TRUTH deliberately mocked established "genre
gurus" and urged every soul within earshot to boot up a word-
processor and join the cause. CT's ingenuous standards for SF were
simply that SF should be "good" and "alive" and "readable." But when
put in practice, these supposed qualities were something else again.
The fog of battle obscured a great deal at the time.

CHEAP TRUTH had rather mixed success. We had a laudable
grasp of the basics: for instance, that SF writers ought to *work a lot
harder* and *knock it off with the worn-out bullshit* if they expected
to earn any real respect. Most folks agreed that this was a fine
prescription -- for somebody else. In SF it has always been fatally
easy to shrug off such truisms to dwell on the trivialities of SF as a
career: the daily grind in the Old Baloney Factory. Snappy
cyberpunk slogans like "imaginative concentration" and "technological
literacy" were met with much the same indifference. Alas, if
preaching gospel was enough to reform the genre, the earth would
surely have quaked when Aldiss and Knight espoused much the same
ideals in 1956.

SF's struggle for quality was indeed old news, except to CHEAP
TRUTH, whose writers were simply too young and parochial to have
caught on. But the cultural terrain had changed, and that made a lot
of difference. Honest "technological literacy" in the 50s was
exhilirating but disquieting -- but in the high-tech 80s, "technological
literacy" meant outright *ecstasy and dread.* Cyberpunk was *weird,*
which obscured the basic simplicity of its theory-and-practice.

When "cyberpunk writers" began to attract real notoriety, the
idea of cyberpunk principles, open and available to anyone, was lost
in the murk. Cyberpunk was an instant cult, probably the very
definition of a cult in modern SF. Even generational contemporaries,
who sympathized with much CHEAP TRUTH rhetoric, came to distrust
the cult itself -- simply because the Cyberpunks had become "genre
gurus" themselves.