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

Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this
imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D
team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well
wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having
done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North
Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never
vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They
are next to us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have
been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured
worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have
lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants.

In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we *already* know Things
We Were Not Meant To Know. Our *grandparents* knew these things;
Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds
long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there
are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no
sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.

Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak
and mortal, but it's not the holy will of the gods; it's just the way
things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically
unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but
because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically
a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed,
and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end.

This "anti-humanist" conviction in cyberpunk is not simply
some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact
about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn't invent
this situation; it just reflects it.

Today it is quite common to see tenured scientists espousing
horrifically radical ideas: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonic
suspension of the dead, downloading the contents of the brain...
Hubristic mania is loose in the halls of academe, where everybody and
his sister seems to have a plan to set the cosmos on its ear. Stern
moral indignation at the prospect is the weakest of reeds; if there were
a devilish drug around that could extend our sacred God-given
lifespans by a hundred years, the Pope would be the first in line.

We already live, every day, through the means of outrageous
actions with unforeseeable consequences to the whole world. The
world population has doubled since 1970; the natural world, which
used to surround humankind with its vast Gothic silences, is now
something that has to be catalogued and cherished.

We're just not much good any more at refusing things because
they don't seem proper. As a society, we can't even manage to turn