Ask Dr. Cyberpunk: with your host, Bruce Bethke • from initial concept to published story

Here’s one of the little secrets of science fiction.  

While we sci-fi writers routinely set our stories in the future, no writer I know—at least, no sane writer—seriously believes they can predict the future. We’re entertainers, not prophets. The entire point of beginning a story with “Once upon a time,” or “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” or “Sometime in the early 23^rd Century,” is to insert aesthetic distance. We set our stories in strange times and places, not because we’re trying to foresee the actual events that will occur in those times and places, but because we’re either playing the “What if” game or else using that distance to hold a warped fun-house mirror up to contemporary reality, and to tell our readers a story that works better if it’s not set in the readily recognizable here and now.

Any time a sci-fi writer makes a semi-informed guess about the future, then, and actually gets something right—well, it’s cause for celebration, yes, but it’s also more likely the result of luck than brilliance.

Case in point: in February of 1980, when I wrote the first rough draft of the original “Cyberpunk” short story, it was an exercise in “what if,” not an attempt at serious prognostication. I began with three givens, and a question.

Given:

• That children learn new languages more easily than do adults
• That this ability is not restricted to “organic” languages
• That mastery of a new technology often results in gaining power over others
  

Question:

What happens when the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21^st century come into conflict with the first generation of children who have grown up truly “speaking computer?”

That, in one tiny nutshell, is the core idea behind the story. Everything else you see in it is merely a matter of working out the permutations on this idea, or else set-dressing, put there simply to establish that this story takes place in the future, but not the distant future. When I wrote “Cyberpunk” in 1980, I figured I was telling a story set about 40 years in the future.

The problem with writing fiction set in the not-too-distant future, of course, is that eventually reality catches up with and then laps your story.

§

Looking at “Cyberpunk” now, from the vantage point of 2024, I can’t help but feel strange. There are a few things in the story I got really right, and I’m proud of those. There are other things in it that I got laughably wrong, and I’m a bit chagrined by those. But the one thing I utterly failed to foresee was how that little story was going to change my life.

In the spring of 1980 I sent the story off to George Scithers at Asimov’s, who sent it back with a rejection saying that while he liked it, Asimov’s readers would never go for a story that ended with the punk kid winning—but if I could come up with a better ending, he’d like to see it again. After thinking it over a bit, while wondering what sort of revised ending might appeal to Lt. Col. George Scithers, US Army (Reserve, Retired), I slapped on a coda in which Mikey gets his comeuppance and gets packed off to a military boarding school. I resubmitted the story to Asimov’s, and this time Scithers held onto it longer, but finally sent it back with a rejection saying he’d shown the story to a real mainframe computer expert, and the whole idea of punk kids running around causing serious trouble with cheap, portable, personal computers the size of notebooks was just too far-fetched to be credible.

Thereafter I sent the story off to the next magazine on my target list, either Analog or Omni, I’m not sure which. The point is, between the summer of 1980 and the summer of 1982, every pro magazine editor then working in SF publishing got a look at this one, and most sent it back with the traditional, “Nice try, kid, real close,” dismissive brush-off. In July of 1982 it landed at Amazing Stories, which had just been purchased by TSR (the makers of Dungeons & Dragons), and the new editor, George Scithers again, loved it, had to have it, and wanted to know where I’d been hiding all these years.

I didn’t tell him the truth until after his check cleared the bank.

Scithers bought the story in July of 1982, and it was published in the November 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, which was actually on the newsstands in September. Back in the days of pulp fiction print publishing, the cover date on a fiction magazine was basically the “sell by” date.

And that, I thought, was the end of it.

There have been times when I was more wrong, but not many.

§

COMING NEXT SATURDAY: This is only the beginning! Join us next week as we follow “Cyberpunk” from published short story to career-crippling novel! Until then, if you have a question you’d like to ask Bruce about anything cyberpunk-related, send it to brucebethke.writer@gmail.com.

Categories: ask dr cyberpunk