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

our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As
a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if
there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred.
Jumpstarting Mary Shelley's corpses is the least of our problems;
something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every
day.

Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer
software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a
commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the
contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly
successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned.
The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow
destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems
weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage,
about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big
Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must
triumph.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human
being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to
think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our
eyes.

*This* is cyberpunk.

This explains, I hope, why standard sci-fi adventure yarns
tarted up in black leather fail to qualify. Lewis Shiner has simply lost
patience with writers who offer dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci-
fiberpunk drag. "Other writers had turned the form into formula," he
complains in THE NEW YORK TIMES, "the same dead-end thrills we get
from video games and blockbuster movies." Shiner's early convictions
have scarcely budged so much as a micron -- but the stuff most folks
call "cyberpunk" no longer reflects his ideals.

In my opinion the derivative piffle is a minor issue. So is the
word "cyberpunk." I'm pleased to see that it's increasingly difficult to
write a dirt-stupid book, put the word "cyberpunk" on it, and expect it
to sell. With the c-word discredited through half-witted overkill,
anyone called a "cyberpunk" will have to pull their own weight now.
But for those willing to pull weight, it's no big deal. Labels cannot
defend their own integrity; but writers can, and good ones do.

There is another general point to make, which I believe is
important to any real understanding of the Movement. Cyberpunk,
like New Wave before it, was a voice of Bohemia. It came from the
underground, from the outside, from the young and energetic and
disenfranchised. It came from people who didn't know their own
limits, and refused the limits offered them by mere custom and habit.