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

Not much SF is really Bohemian, and most of Bohemia has little
to do with SF, but there was, and is, much to be gained from the
meeting of the two. SF as a genre, even at its most "conventional," is
very much a cultural underground. SF's influence on the greater
society outside, like the dubious influence of beatniks, hippies, and
punks, is carefully limited. Science fiction, like Bohemia, is a useful
place to put a wide variety of people, where their ideas and actions can
be examined, without the risk of putting those ideas and actions
directly into wider practice. Bohemia has served this function since its
start in the early Industrial Revolution, and the wisdom of this scheme
should be admitted. Most weird ideas are simply weird ideas, and
Bohemia in power has rarely been a pretty sight. Jules Verne as a
writer of adventure novels is one thing; President Verne, General
Verne, or Pope Jules is a much dicier proposition.

Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia -- Bohemia in the 1980s.
The technosocial changes loose in contemporary society were bound to
affect its counterculture. Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of
this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is still growing.
Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less
respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of
people you might not introduce to your grandma.

But today, it must be admitted that the cyberpunks -- SF
veterans in or near their forties, patiently refining their craft and
cashing their royalty checks -- are no longer a Bohemian underground.
This too is an old story in Bohemia; it is the standard punishment for
success. An underground in the light of day is a contradiction in terms.
Respectability does not merely beckon; it actively envelops. And in
this sense, "cyberpunk" is even deader than Shiner admits.

Time and chance have been kind to the cyberpunks, but they
themselves have changed with the years. A core doctrine in
Movement theory was "visionary intensity." But it has been some time
since any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-blowing story, something that
writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and shattered the furniture. In
the latest work of these veterans, we see tighter plotting, better
characters, finer prose, much "serious and insightful futurism." But we
also see much less in the way of spontaneous back-flips and crazed
dancing on tables. The settings come closer and closer to the present
day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleashed fantasy: the issues at
stake become something horribly akin to the standard concerns of
middle-aged responsibility. And this may be splendid, but it is not
war. This vital aspect of science fiction has been abdicated, and is open
for the taking. Cyberpunk is simply not there any more.

But science fiction is still alive, still open and developing. And
Bohemia will not go away. Bohemia, like SF, is not a passing fad,
although it breeds fads; like SF, Bohemia is old; as old as industrial
society, of which both SF and Bohemia are integral parts. Cybernetic