137 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
137 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0 CHEAP TRUTH 12 $0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
|
|
Award-winning writer, critic, and CHEAP TRUTH shill Candace Berragus, who
|
|
remembers the 1950's personally, turns the skeptical eye of experience upon
|
|
her chosen target:
|
|
|
|
PUNK POSTURES
|
|
|
|
Now that NEUROMANCER has garnered so many accolades, maybe it's time
|
|
to sit back and see just what heights have been climbed. The book has, yeah,
|
|
STYLE -- that gritty fascination with surfaces signalled by the opening line,
|
|
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead
|
|
channel." Wonderful! TV as symbol for numbed reflexes, anomie, pollution,
|
|
savage commercialism. And that slick style carries us forward on a
|
|
garbage-reeking tide for... about a hundred pages.
|
|
|
|
Gibson, like Ballard, concentrates on surfaces as a way of getting at
|
|
essences. All those brand names, Braun coffee makers, quilted consoles,
|
|
obsessive attention to what everyone wears, glistening green ice cities...
|
|
|
|
But then you become uncomfortably aware that Gibson doesn't actually
|
|
KNOW much about computers beyond brand names, and you are enmeshed in a
|
|
standard pulp plot. The last third drags terribly, suspense hissing out like
|
|
a puncture in a bald tire. (Indeed, all the guff about penetrating computer
|
|
defenses depicted as a field of sensations -- this has become an instant
|
|
freeze-dried cliche, a far cry from the actual experience and complexities of
|
|
machine intelligence. Pretty, but not convincing.)
|
|
|
|
The tough characters never gain depth. The protagonist's inability
|
|
to change, or even to shake his drug habit, creates a feeling of immobile
|
|
futility. The promised confrontation of the artificial intelligences occurs
|
|
virtually offstage, and we get no sense of their alienness.
|
|
|
|
Is this "punk SF" as Ellen Datlow keeps calling it? There are
|
|
uncomfortable resemblances between the punk rock style of the '80's and the
|
|
duckass ambience of the '50's, to be sure ... a sense of postures struck for
|
|
rebellion, but without any emotional foundation deeper than distaste. Other
|
|
than adolescent rebellion, soon to be quenched by the ebbing of hormones,
|
|
there seems little heft to all this.
|
|
|
|
There is little true anger in NEUROMANCER or in punk rock. The rest
|
|
is posturing, and finally rings hollow. Even NEUROMANCER's last sentence,
|
|
"He never saw Molly again," echoes the older tough-guy postures of Chandler,
|
|
whose first novel, THE BIG SLEEP, concludes, "All they did was make me think
|
|
of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again." Uh-huh. Gimmie a sim-stim, Fred.
|
|
And double on the ennui.
|
|
|
|
If SF is to give us new lands, it will have to try harder than this.
|
|
NEUROMANCER has little thought in it -- surely the shabby old corporate-run
|
|
future, with Japanese electro-dominance, can't be counted as a new idea? --
|
|
but much attention to the cosmetics of a time only slightly beyond our own.
|
|
|
|
So -- punk WHAT? Actually, what do the purported punk SF writers
|
|
have in common? Stylish Gibson, antic frazzled Sterling, the pure-hearted
|
|
and liberal Robinson, hot-eyed Shirley -- all over 30, perhaps, but what
|
|
else? I see no commonality of vision. Vague similarities -- bedazzled by
|
|
technology, fond of street-savvy brutality, some preference for ravaged
|
|
landscapes -- also link them with a horde of other SF writers.
|
|
|
|
But to become a movement demands some generational agreement, a
|
|
narrative thrust... and something new. Only our habit of roping writers into
|
|
eras makes us unite them. NEUROMANCER's dominance of this rather weak year
|
|
for novels does not herald a revolution or a revelation.
|
|
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
|
|
Undeterred by allegations of critical overkill, CHEAP TRUTH hastens
|
|
to laud:
|
|
|
|
THIS YEAR'S MODEL
|
|
|
|
BLOOD MUSIC by Greg Bear, Arbor House, 1985, $14.95(?)
|
|
|
|
It is sometimes claimed that the future of SF lies on its
|
|
experimentalist fringes; in "magic realism," "postindustrial fiction," or in
|
|
a metaphorical SF hybridizing with mainstream. With his latest novel, Greg
|
|
Bear has dealt this theory a serious wound.
|
|
|
|
To date, Bear has seemed a rather conventional, establishment SF
|
|
figure, cheerily paying his SFWA dues and writing for, horror, ANALOG. He is
|
|
the only "cyberpunk" writer to show no trace of punk attitudes; if anything,
|
|
he seems stuffily right-wing, suspicious of "Naderites" and inclined to give
|
|
good ol' nukes the benefit of the doubt. You will search the Bear opus in
|
|
vain for a chrome stud or coke-corroded razorblade. You are more likely to
|
|
find stiff-necked Poul Andersonian lib-futurists struggling manfully amidst
|
|
a sea of Luddite liberal ignorami.
|
|
|
|
Yet, in a triumph of the human spirit that makes one glow, Bear has
|
|
shattered the limits of formula and is delivering truly superior fiction.
|
|
BLOOD MUSIC in its award-winning short form was a fine, visionary piece; as a
|
|
novel, it's staggering.
|
|
|
|
From the first chapter, one senses Bear's transition from journeyman
|
|
to master. The coda elements are gone, replaced by a cool-eyed analysis of
|
|
motive and character that builds with the graceful solidity of a Gothic arch.
|
|
Bear's characters talk, act, and look like actual human beings. Especially
|
|
praiseworthy is the deft way he captures their occasional realistic bursts of
|
|
pettiness, craziness and stupidity. The book abounds with daring touches
|
|
gracefully achieved, with nuts and bolts research brilliantly integrated into
|
|
the narrative flow.
|
|
|
|
From this solid beginning, BLOOD MUSIC slowly accelerates into a
|
|
pyrotechnic climax of pure visionary transcendance. New extrapolations
|
|
emerge one after another, with steadily increasing speed and impact, until at
|
|
last they are bursting into the narrative like runaway Mack trucks. The
|
|
effect is explosively mind-boggling. There are loose ends, but it would be
|
|
more accurate to describe them as whizzing chunks of shrapnel.
|
|
The prose ranges from the workmanlike to the numinous. There are occasional
|
|
lapses into stream-of-consciousness, free verse, and obscurantist
|
|
"alienspeak," a Bear mannerism that one regrets. But the lyrical description
|
|
of a jet flight over the transformed remnants of Chicago is a classic
|
|
evocation of mystery and wonder; its intensity renders it unforgettable. It
|
|
is hard to imagine any writer doing it better.
|
|
|
|
Bear's career illustrates one of the central struggles of the genre:
|
|
visionary anarchy versus literary discipline. As is common with writers of
|
|
great imaginative gifts, Bear's early works are sometimes byzantine, piling
|
|
ideas, plot twists, and erratic bursts of inspired prose into vast untidy
|
|
heaps. Bear's success and his growing importance as a writer are due to his
|
|
increasing integration of vision and literary skill. This has been achieved
|
|
by sheer hard work, by a painstaking, serious-minded, long-term effort, the
|
|
mark of a committed craftsman.
|
|
|
|
Bear's daring has paid off. He has transcended the limits of the
|
|
hard SF tradition and written an exciting, accessible, modern novel. It's a
|
|
fine book for SF neophytes, free of clannish inbred mustiness or gratuitous
|
|
playing to the faan gallery. It is elegant in the best sense, without excess
|
|
moving parts, expositive lumps, and preachy apologias. BLOOD MUSIC is one of
|
|
the first definitive novels of the 1980's.
|
|
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
CHEAP TRUTH 809-C West 12th Street, Austin, Texas 78701 USA. Vincent
|
|
Omniveritas, editing. Todd Refinery, graphics. "Smugglers in the Marketplace
|
|
of Ideas"
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|