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

Bohemia is not some bizarre advent; when cybernetic Bohemians
proclaim that what they are doing is completely new, they innocently
delude themselves, merely because they are young.

Cyberpunks write about the ecstasy and hazard of flying
cyberspace and Verne wrote about the ecstasy and hazard of FIVE
WEEKS IN A BALLOON, but if you take even half a step outside the
mire of historical circumstance, you can see that these both serve the
same basic social function.

Of course, Verne, a great master, is still in print, while the
verdict is out on cyberpunk. And, of course, Verne got the future all
wrong, except for a few lucky guesses; but so will cyberpunk. Jules
Verne ended up as some kind of beloved rich crank celebrity in the
city government of Amiens. Worse things have happened, I suppose.

As cyberpunk's practitioners bask in unsought legitimacy, it
becomes harder to pretend that cyberpunk was something freakish or
aberrant; it's easier today to see where it came from, and how it got
where it is. Still, it might be thought that allegiance to Jules Verne is a
bizarre declaration for a cyberpunk. It might, for instance, be argued
that Jules Verne was a nice guy who loved his Mom, while the brutish
antihuman cyberpunks advocate drugs, anarchy, brain-plugs and the
destruction of everything sacred.

This objection is bogus. Captain Nemo was a technical anarcho-
terrorist. Jules Verne passed out radical pamphlets in 1848 when the
streets of Paris were strewn with dead. And yet Jules Verne is
considered a Victorian optimist (those who have read him must doubt
this) while the cyberpunks are often declared nihilists (by those who
pick and choose in the canon). Why? It is the tenor of the times, I
think.

There is much bleakness in cyberpunk, but it is an honest
bleakness. There is ecstasy, but there is also dread. As I sit here, one
ear tuned to TV news, I hear the US Senate debating war. And behind
those words are cities aflame and crowds lacerated with airborne
shrapnel, soldiers convulsed with mustard-gas and Sarin.

This generation will have to watch a century of manic waste and
carelessness hit home, and we know it. We will be lucky not to suffer
greatly from ecological blunders already committed; we will be
extremely lucky not to see tens of millions of fellow human beings
dying horribly on television as we Westerners sit in our living rooms
munching our cheeseburgers. And this is not some wacky Bohemian
jeremiad; this is an objective statement about the condition of the
world, easily confirmed by anyone with the courage to look at the
facts.

These prospects must and should effect our thoughts and