It must be September. The geese are flocking up in the cow pasture and beginning to work out their migration formations. The cranes and egrets have already left. The vegetables in the garden are ripe and ready for harvest, some of the more highly stressed trees are already beginning to turn colors and shed leaves, and the first of this semester’s new crop of “Dear Mr. Bethke” messages have already begun to show up in my email inbox.
There is a certain charmingly naïve sameness to them. “Dear Mr. Bethke,” they all begin, “I am a [academic major] student at [insert school name here] and I am writing a paper on…”
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Okay, “the time has come,” the Walrus said—or was it “Goo Goo G’joob?” I must confess now to not having paid nearly as much attention to walrus vocalizations over the years as I perhaps should have—
The time has come, to finish this damned book.
I’ve been puttering with this one for years. Never finishing it, because I’m not as interested in my own history as other people seem to be, but it’s time to admit that if I don’t finish it now, I probably never will. This book was always intended to be the definitive text of the original short story, as first published in Amazing in 1983; the complete text of the Baen-damaged novel that grew from the original short story and its cycle of sequels, some published and some not; and then a rather longish coda that explains how the story came to be in the first place, what went wrong with the novel, and then attempts to make some sense of what it’s meant to me personally to have spent the past forty years—forty! Holy Crap, where did the time go?—being known all over the world as “the guy who wrote ‘Cyberpunk’.”
The problem with this book has always been that the coda keeps growing beyond control, much like that anise hyssop patch in the northeast corner of my backyard.
Ergo, the time has come. Let’s put a stake in it. Let’s finish this thing. This is your big chance: if you’ve ever had a question you wanted to ask me about the c-word, ask it now. Ask me anything. No question is off-limits, although I can’t promise I’ll answer. Ask me a really good question that provokes an interesting response and I’ll give you a shout-out in the Acknowledgements section.
Oh yeah, and you probably want to know how to contact me. You can either post your questions in the comments here, tag me on either the Bruce.Bethke or StupefyingStories facebook pages, or by email to brb [at] rampantloonmedia [dot] com. I suppose you could also post them on the Stupefying Stories Twitter thingie, but I can’t guarantee I’ll see it there. I continue to have a loathe/hate relationship with Twitter.
So, ready? Then let’s get this thing wrapped up.
Thanks,
Bruce Bethke
15 comments:
Dear Mr. Bethke, I'll be short and sweet: "Is cyberpunk dead?"
@Alex -- No, it just smells funny.
I mean, the story's always been about teenagers - they smell funny even when they try to use cologne to smell better than their overactive sweat glands make them smell no matter HOW many fluid ounces of Axe they spray on themselves or how many times they shower during a day. They smell funny - and not just in the locker room. In the cafeteria. In the hallway. Even in the chemistry lab...which has an amazingly complex odor to it in the warm spring before the school AC kicks on and after doing a lab synthesizing banana esters...
@Alex - Slightly more seriously: I've seen cyberpunk declared dead at least three times now. What it usually means is that some self-appointed tastemaker has decided that cyberpunk "as *I* mean it and like it" has become passé. (Usually with the subtext, "So you should all forget about cyberpunk and pay attention to this new thing that *I* like and have some vested interest in.")
Thankfully, though, most tastemakers have far less influence than they like to think they do. The people who buy books have far more influence, and they keep the trope alive. True, the definition is slippery and keeps changing, and people will argue -- sometimes quite passionately -- that things like Ready Player One are not true cyberpunk.
But that's the cool thing about the "punk" part. The readers get to tell the critics to get stuffed, and have the power to reject any formal definition of the term.
To attempt to slip into Mikey's persona one more time (albeit a slightly older and somewhat more thoughtful Mikey):
"Yeah, about that label. Understand, words are plastic. They change shape, they deform, they react to outside pressure, they get worn down by use. What a word means today is what it means to us, when we use it.
"You gonna insist that a word means exactish what it meant to you forty years ago? Good luck with that, pops. I'll send a box of Depends to your room in the Old Sci-Fi Writers Home."
Four decades of cyberpunk. Could you name a movie per decade that causes you to say “That’s what I was getting at”? I ask for movies because it is a faster medium to consume, but if a written form was better, that serves. Have any of them been successful? Have any featured Keanu Reeves? Which made you most proud to have spawned the genre?
@Leatherwing > I really liked Dredd -- the one with Karl Urban, not that mess with Sylvester Stallone. I think CHAPPiE is terribly underrated and well worth watching, too. And I thought the original 1987 RoboCop was terrific, but all the subsequent sequels, spinoffs, made-for-TV movies, etc., etc., progressively sucked worse.
If you can find the original Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, that is definitely worth watching, provided you can get past the early Doctor Who-grade sets, costumes, and visual effects.
I really liked The Matrix at first, but as the series went on I thought the thing suffocated under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Then I had the bad luck to read a review in which the reviewer mentioned Headcrash and observed that there were so many bits in The Matrix that (in the reviewer's opinion) were "obviously" lifted from Headcrash.
Which got me wondering: whatever did happen to all those copies of Headcrash that Warner Books sent over to Warner Films, in hopes that someone at WB would be interested in obtaining the film rights?
> Which got me wondering: whatever did happen to all those copies of Headcrash that Warner Books sent over to Warner Films, in hopes that someone at WB would be interested in obtaining the film rights?
Seeing how the genre has developed since publication, do you have any faith that a hypothetical big screen adaptation of Headcrash would be any good? It's been years since I read it but I remember the humor being something that set it apart from modern cyberpunk, which tends to take itself too seriously. Ooo look at me I'm so cool and transhuman and I wear shades indoors
@Benn S > Do I have any faith that a hypothetical big screen adaptation would be any good? No, none at all.
Look at the movie adaptation of any novel you liked. How many of them came even remotely close to whatever it was that made you like the book? Or ask the authors: get Barry Longyear going sometime on what he thought of the movie adaptation of Enemy Mine, or David Brin going on what he thought of The Postman, or Hewlett & Martin going on what they thought of Tank Girl, or get a ouija board and ask Robert Heinlein what he thought of Starship Troopers.
I've only known one author who was completely happy with the way the big screen adaptation of his book turned out, and his reason for being happy amounted to, "They gave me a hundred thousand dollars and took my name off the script credit, and their check cleared the bank, so I'm happy."
To play devil's advocate, I want to say I remember Stephen King commenting positively on a couple film adaptations of his work (like The Mist) but having never read any King and seeing a number of King-adapted films countable on one hand, I have no real horse in that race.
That is fair though, by and large film adaptations are reliably garbage. I felt legitimate anger in my heart when I saw what they did to Artemis Fowl (a childhood favorite of mine).
Follow up question then, if you were to have any of your stories adapted by a trustworthy third party, which story and what medium would you choose?
My job is 90% online (I also mail things, buy paper towels, and hang blinds). The Creature thinks he's going to make a living gaming. Are we living cyberpunk?
@Kersley, I had breakfast with a friend today. We both used to work for a digital marketing firm that used scripts to track what you look at and for how long on websites, then packaged ads tailor-fitted to you. We talked about how high-frequency tones are used in television and streaming ads that your phone "hears" and reports back (so they know all the phones that were in the room, what ad played for how long, etc.)
Considering all the activity that we do via internet (I started to say "by computer" but really most of what we do is just the browser) and all that is monitored via phones and tracking scripts, we are in some combination of Cyberpunk and 1984.
@Kersley > I think the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s more accurately predicted the near future than most sci-fi tropes of the past century have. I don't think that was because of any particularly brilliant prescience on the part of the writers.
@Leatherwing > Add Alita: Battle Angel to the list: the 1993 anime version. I haven't seen the 2019 version so can't comment on it.
@Benn S > I keep wanting to do an audio book adaptation of Headcrash, but given my background in theater and public radio -- and my deep-seated fondness for the Firesign Theater -- my vision of the adaptation keeps evolving into a full-blown radio play, complete with a full cast, sound effects, and original music. In other words, it would be something insanely expensive to produce that would probably never earn out.
Okay, whenever I get down to clicking on the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, I keep wishing for an option that reads, "I'm not a robot -- but I want to be."
Does anyone else ever wish for other options, or is that just me?
E.g., "I'm not a robot -- I'm a wooden puppet that wants to be a real boy!"
Or, "I'm not a robot -- I'm a meat popsicle!"
Headcrash was my second venture into the genre as an impressionable teen, and it remains at the #1 spot in my top three favorites of the genre, because I adore the humor. It has influenced my own writing in a massive way (I find it difficult to allow many of my stories to take themselves too seriously). I was previously unaware of the short stories. Are these available anywhere? An anthology perhaps?
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