I’d love to be able to tell you that once “Cyberpunk” finally hit the newsstands, in the fall of 1983, it was an instant runaway success that forever changed my life. However, I prefer to be honest. By the time the issue of Amazing that contained “Cyberpunk” finally appeared in print, more than three and a half years after I’d first submitted the story to Asimov’s, I was…
Well, happy to see it published, yes. But in the intervening years I’d done a lot of other things. I’d gotten married. Become a father. Done a lot of theatrical musical work, and done scores for two short films, which if God is truly merciful are lost forever now. I’d gotten good enough at playing the arts grants and commissions game to realize I really did not want to keep going in this direction, especially with a family to support, and so made a dramatic career pivot and took a job in software development with Passport Designs.
Give me a nudge and I will spend the rest of the morning talking about Passport Designs and how incredibly cool it was to be working there in the early 1980s. A sort of oblique descendant of EML (ElectroComp) and Star Music (Synare), Passport was a pioneer in computer music hardware and software, and produced a series of instruments we called the “Soundchaser” but everyone else called “the poor man’s Fairlight.”
[And at this point I would dearly love to point you to the Soundchaser64 demo video, but when I uploaded it, YouTube flagged it for copyright violation and blocked my publishing it. C’est la merde.]
Passport’s bread and butter, though, was doing K-12 educational software for Wenger/Musitronic, Hal Leonard, and others. Then, a little later, we became the OEM supplier of a lot of first-generation MIDI hardware and software, primarily for Yamaha, but to a lesser extent for Korg and Kurzweil.
[And if you were to give me another nudge, at this point I would happily spend the entire rest of the day talking about how both enlightening and disillusioning it was to be privy to Yamaha’s view of the American musical instrument market. Suffice to say, whenever some well-meaning young person on the Internet starts to tell me about the eccentricities in Yamaha’s MIDI implementation on the DX series, I have the hardest time not channeling for James Doohan in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Relics.” Specifically, the moment when Geordi LaForge is lecturing Scotty about some engineering specification on the starship Jenolan, and Scotty turns to him with a deadpan glare and says, “Laddie, who d’ya think wrote the specification?”]
Passport’s crowning achievement was the music notation system, PolyWriter, which you may know better by its married name, Finale. (And I’m pleased to see that Phil Farrand and John Borowicz are finally being credited as the authors of the original code.) Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that Finale would still be on the market 40 years later.
Then again, never in my wildest dreams would I have dreamed I’d still be answering questions about @#$*(&!! “Cyberpunk” nearly 45 years later, either. So let’s pause a moment, shall we, to catch our breaths, and then get back on topic.
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I’d never planned to become a science fiction writer. In those days I was always going off in six different directions at the same time, so in addition to the scores, the tape tracks, the librettos, and the synthesizer programs, I was writing a lot of fiction, in a lot of different genres. After “Cyberpunk” sold to George Scithers at Amazing in 1982 I continued to write and sell short stories, to a wide variety of markets, and so by the time “Cyberpunk” finally appeared in print in 1983, it was just the first of many stories that were already sold and in the publication queue, waiting to go out into the world. I didn’t think the story was anything special.
The fans did—but not in a good way. According to George, as soon as the story appeared in print, he started getting anti-fan mail, from people who really hated it. True to his prediction in 1980, the hard-core old-school SF fans did not like a story in which the punk kid was winning for most of the story, even if he did get his comeuppance in the end.
A bit later, though, he said he was starting to get mail from people who wanted to read more of Mikey’s adventures at The Academy.
This flummoxed me. I’d thought I’d said everything I had to say in the original story. I’d never really given much thought to The Academy. It was just a place for me to park Mikey, until I figured out a way to bring him back into The World. I always thought the interesting story lay in what happened after Mikey came back home from The Academy, a little bit older, a little bit stronger, and with a much sharper edge on his bad attitude.
But the fans want to see more stories set in the boarding school? Why? What is it with science fiction fans and boarding schools? Are we all still stuck on Starship Troopers?
I decided to pass. My family was growing, my software development career was heating up, and I had plenty of other things I could be doing.
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Meanwhile, down in Austin—that’s Austin, Texas, the home of Austin City Limits, not Austin, Minnesota, the home of the SPAM® Museum—a group of writers were coalescing around Bruce Sterling and his fanzine, Cheap Truth. I knew most of them by their work, as they were selling stories to Gardner Dozois, who’d taken over as editor of Asimov’s after George Scithers left for Amazing — (Did George jump or was he pushed? I never did get a straight answer to that) — and in those years I had a standing subscription to Asimov’s and read most issues as soon as they arrived.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened the May 1986 issue of Asimov’s and on page 180 found:
After that I read a few issues of Cheap Truth, and found it… a bit full of itself. This whole “movement” business and all these manifestos and such these people were issuing: it was just so precious. I talked to a lot of other writers at the time who were quite irked by these people and said they weren’t so much a movement as The Bruce, John, and Pat Clique, or perhaps The Official Bill Gibson Fan Club. I met writers who believed their work was being unfairly overlooked, either because they weren’t part of the club or because their politics were wrong. I met critics who complained that this “movement” fiction was nothing new, and would cite predecessor works to support their arguments, usually Vernor Vinge’s True Names or John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, but sometimes John Sladek’s The Müller-Fokker Effect.
I have no antipathy to the movement writers. I really enjoyed Bruce Sterling’s novel, Schismatrix, and Rudy Rucker’s novel, Software. I always looked forward to reading new stories by Terry Bisson, Lucius Shepard, or Lew Shiner. I respected Pat Cadigan’s work. I found Neuromancer a challenge to get through, mostly because for me it was so depressing, but really enjoyed Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. For a long time I had a signed and personalized first edition of Neuromancer, that Gibson gave me when it was just his new novel and he was hoping to pick up a Nebula rec, but eventually I donated it to a charity auction, along with a box full of other signed books.
I kept my signed and personalized copy of Ender’s Game, though. I liked Orson Scott Card and always got along well with him.
In time, some of the movement writers became friends. Michael Swanwick, for example: which is why I’m happy to recommend his book, The Postmodern Archipelago. If you want to get all academic about cyberpunk fiction, this expansion of his seminal essay, “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns,” which first appeared in the August 1986 issue of Asimov’s, is the place to start.
Nota bene: If, on the other hand, you want to start getting all academic about cyberpunk fiction by delving into back issues of Cheap Truth—I’m sure they’re out there somewhere on the Internet, but don’t care enough about it to find a link—you should know one thing. “Sue Denim” was a shared pseudonym used by certain writers to pimp each other’s work, or sometimes their own. (“Sue Denim” = “pseudonym.” Get the joke?) I have seen academic writers make the mistake of citing and quoting Ms Denim, sometimes even in PhD theses. It’s pretty funny, actually.
As far as the cyberpunk movement goes, I think Tappan King’s critique, as cited by Norman Spinrad, was spot-on. At first, in the mid-1980s, there was this wonderful efflorescence of fresh, new, exciting, risk-taking, and different science fiction. (Which, if you were not reading new SF releases in the late 1970s, was without question a good thing. I mean, just how many rehashes of Conan the Barbarian does the world need?)
Then, after Neuromancer won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards, “cyberpunk” fiction very quickly came to mean Neuromancer fan-fic, and publishers began beating the bushes trying to find more fiction “just like Neuromancer, only different.” As a result a tremendous amount of fiction was published that claimed to embrace high-tech and be cyberpunk, but in actuality was written by people who wouldn’t know which end of a hot soldering iron to hold and were recycling old film noir tropes. Thus by the end of the 1980s the market was saturated, and cyberpunk fiction choked to death on its own excrement.
Sigh. One can but wonder what might have happened if Spinrad’s essay had gotten more traction, and people had stopped calling it “cyberpunk” and started calling it “neuromantic” fiction.
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But they didn’t, and that’s why we’re all here today. Eventually I got the opportunity to ask Bruce Sterling about this whole “cyberpunk” movement thing, and while he was somewhat surprised to learn that I and my story existed—a common problem with being published in Amazing, in those days—he was gracious, and told me he hadn’t originated the term, but rather had gotten it from Gardner Dozois, who’d begun using the word to describe a certain type of story he was seeing with some frequency and wanted to see more of.
When I asked Dozois about it, he hemmed, hawed, tried to change the subject, said, “In fairness, you have to admit…”
Whenever someone leads with that, they’re about to evade and deflect.
Eventually he admitted that he hadn’t originated the word, but had “picked it up on the street somewhere.”
Oh, you mean the street where you were living back when you were doing first-reading for Asimov’s, when I first submitted the story there in 1980?
He then insisted he’d never claimed to have coined the term, but only to have popularized it.
Yet you published Spinrad’s essay without correcting that little detail, didn’t you?
Educational Note for Authors: Editors never forget the writers they’ve had disputes with, even if it was their own fault. There may be an editor out there somewhere who has said, “I’m sorry, I was wrong,” but if so, I’ve never met them. All this interaction did for me was turn Asimov’s from a market I had difficulty selling to to a market I had no hope of selling to. In the remainder of Dozois’s term as editor I only sold one story to him, and it required some subterfuge to do so and he accepted it with the most passive-aggressive acceptance letter I’ve ever seen. Beyond that, while I continued to write and sell short stories into the 1990s, and many of these stories were critically well-received and piled up lots of Nebula recs, not one of them ever made it even as far as the Honorable Mentions list in any of The Year’s Best Science Fiction reprint anthologies that Gardner Dozois edited.
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Meanwhile, back in Minnesota…
I’d kept writing and selling short stories, in-genre mostly to Amazing and Aboriginal, and out of genre to a wide variety of other magazines, some of which I wish I hadn’t and will disavow now. Eventually George Scithers wore me down and convinced me to write more stories about Mikey’s further adventures at The Academy, which in early 1986 led to a novelette, which Guy Stewart remembers as “Junior League Body-Bagging” but was published as “Elimination Round.”
[This was during a phase when I was in the habit of given my works-in-progress ridiculous but descriptive working titles. For example, at about the same time I wrote a John Carter pastiche that had the working title, “Fur-Lined Jockstraps of Mars.”]
The problem was, by the time I finished “Elimination Round” in June of 1986 and sent it off to Amazing, George Scithers had left (this time most definitely pushed), and the new editor, Patrick L. Price, said he was still sorting through all the manuscripts Scithers had accepted but not published, and I should try again in six months. Thereafter I shopped the story around to all the other pro markets then in existence and collected the usual pile of “nice try kid, real close” brush-off rejections—
The fools! The Hunger Games! The Maze Runner! Battle Royale! If any of them had accepted “Elimination Round” they’d have been at least ten years ahead of the curve on the whole “teens hunting other teens for the entertainment of adults” trend!
—except for Asimov’s, where Gardner Dozois sat on the story for six months, then sent it back with a no-comment form rejection. I did get an acceptance letter from a theme anthology being put together by a big-name editor for a major publisher, but they never followed through with a contract, so in time I got tired of waiting and pulled the submission.
In June of 1987 it ended up back at Amazing, where Price accepted it with the proviso that it was going to need some major editing.
What followed was one of my all-time favorite interactions with a magazine editor. Price later told me that copy-editing this story was driving him nuts—until he realized that it wasn’t that I didn’t know how to construct a grammatical sentence, it was that the story was being told in the First Person P.O.V. by Mikey, and he had his own distinctive but internally consistent argot. (I was perhaps over-influenced by reading Tony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.) Mikey routinely turned nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and had absolutely no clue what an adverb was. This was an idea I had fun developing further in the novel, and it still gets a snicker out of me every time I hear someone use a word like “bigly.”
Once Price had that breakthrough, and realized the thing to do was to let Mikey tell the story in his own language, the rest of the process went smoothly. “Elimination Round” was published in the July 1989 issue of Amazing Stories—again, about three years after I wrote it, but I was getting used to the print publication time-lag now—with a great Hank Jankus two-page interior illo, which I’ll try to scan and drop in here, but not right now.
[insert illo here]
Speaking of the three-year time lag: this time I didn’t sit still, but kept working on the story cycle. The story that interested me was that of what happened to Mikey after he came back home from The Academy, and I put a lot of work into developing that world, those ideas, and the overarching plot.
Then, sometime after “Elimination Round” was published—remarkably, I don’t seem to have any notes on exactly when it happened—I was contacted by Jim Baen. He’d heard of “Cyberpunk,” read “Elimination Round,” read a lot of my posts on GEnie, FidoNet, and CompuServe, and wanted first look at the novel I’d said I was writing, even if it wasn’t finished. So I packed up printouts of “Cyberpunk,” “Elimination Round,” and my outline and notes for the further development of Mikey’s story, and sent them off to Jim Baen.
And that’s when the real trouble started.
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2 comments:
Now THAT was a read! Just sharedbit with a few friends.
Fascinating, Bruce; I'm looking forward to the next installment.
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