Ask Dr. Cyberpunk: with your host, Bruce Bethke • Last Call for the FAQ

Now that I’m back from Christmas Break…

The impetus to continue writing this column has dissipated. I tried to get back into it, but found that while I still have much left to say, I no longer have a burning desire to say it. My experience with my aborted 1989 Cyberpunk novel, along with my parallel experience of being a short fiction anthology editor reporting directly to Jim Baen, pretty much put my SF career into deep suspended animation for five years, and damn near killed it. 

After the Cyberpunk book deal went south I got offers to ghost-write novels for other people, which was one semi-acceptable way of getting around my being contractually prohibited from publishing novels under my own name, but I wasn’t much interested in doing that. Given the choice, I preferred to write no-byline non-fiction. Doing that work felt about the same as ghost-writing, but paid a hell of a lot better.

I was still writing short fiction and selling every new story I finished, but my dispute with Gardner Dozois meant Asimov’s was effectively closed to me for as long as he remained editor. I continued to collect a lot of, “This was real close, but…” rejection slips from Stan Schmidt at Analog and whoever was the editor du jour at F&SF, but even the nicest rejections aren’t acceptances. 

I sold a lot of stories out of genre, or to obscure markets. Much of the clearly recognizable SF I wrote I sold to Amazing Stories, but their circulation was plummeting as TSR had installed a revolving door on the editor’s office and were struggling to figure out what to do with the thing now that they owned it. A similar number of stories went to Aboriginal SF, which was a magazine I truly admired, but Aboriginal was a phoenix, risen from the ashes of Galileo, and was born sickly and never really financially healthy. 

[To this day, one of my favorite reader reviews of an issue of Stupefying Stories was from someone who said it reminded them very much of the kinds of stories they used to find in Aboriginal, only without the full-color interior illustrations. That comment had me smiling for a week.]

One thing I’d learned from my experience as a short fiction editor reporting directly to Jim Baen was that, at the time, the SF/F publishing business was full of people who either would never work with Jim again or who Jim would never work with again. In developing my idea for a shared-world anthology series based on the works of a certain elderly and much-loved hard SF writer, I’d made the acquaintance of a young writer who presented convincing evidence that he was in fact the ghost-writer who’d been hired to finish writing said elderly writer’s last published novel. 

But when I forwarded his pitch to Jim, it came flying right back at me at high velocity, accompanied by the snarled comment, “Yes. I’ve worked with him. And I will never work with him again.”

In 1994 I finally met an agent who wasn’t afraid to end up on Jim’s list of “People I Will Never Work With Again,” and he was happy to step in and help me resolve my contract imbroglio. Whereupon I returned the favor by writing Headcrash, which was a novel that the agent made a nice pile of money selling in various U.S. and foreign editions. So if you’ve ever read Headcrash and thought you detected a certain heady sense of liberation in that tale—

Actually, the correct word is coartación. 

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Huh. In looking up coartación to make sure I spelled it correctly, I learned that the coartado had to pay the royal sales tax when he bought his own freedom. Talk about adding insult to injury…

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One last thing I need to make clear: it was my fault the Cyberpunk novel deal failed. Jim Baen was a savvy businessman who really understood his customers and the vicarious fantasies they wanted to pay cash money to imagine themselves living out. I was the one who was so hungry for a book deal that I was willing to sign his contract for an as-yet-unfinished novel, and then to go along willingly with every change he asked me to make, right up until the moment he told me to end the book with Mikey going on a shooting rampage inside his school. Even ten years before “Columbine” became a synonym for insane atrocity, I found the idea of writing that ending—and of turning my hero into a mass-murderer of his fellow students—to be abhorrent.

But it was my refusal to bend over and grab my ankles one more time, to shit out the ending Jim Baen specifically told me to write, that killed this book deal and cast me out into the wilderness for five long years. 

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With surprising regularity, people ask, “Well, why not release the Cyberpunk novel you meant to write?” 

The answer is complex.

First off, the original novel no longer exists, in any meaningful form. It never really was finished; at the time I signed the contract, it was still only the skeletal framework of a novel, with stories and scenes hanging off it like bits of muscles and organs here and there. Many crucial parts of the story were sketched out but never developed beyond the annotated outline stage. I may have a copy of my last pre-contract rough draft around here somewhere, but if I do, it’s quite likely on a QIC-80 backup tape, to give you some idea of how old it is, and to be honest, it would resemble a novel in the same sense that an NTSB crash reconstruction resembles an airplane. 

Secondly, releasing that book really is not necessary. Almost everything that was meant to be in the Cyberpunk novel originally reemerged later and in altered form somewhere else. In particular, large parts of my Cyberpunk world-building became elements in the backstory of Rebel Moon and Mark Dreizig, and many bits of business originally planned to be Mikey’s further adventures in Cyberpunk returned in mutated and evolved form as Jack Burroughs’ adventures in Headcrash. If you want a pretty good guess at what my original cyberpunk novel might have looked like, had it ever been completed, read Headcrash, and then subtract half the sense of humor and lard on a thick layer of jejeune self-righteousness.

For that is the third and perhaps most important of the reasons why I don’t try to reconstruct Mikey’s story now. I wrote “Cyberpunk” when I was 24 years old, and when the memories of having the feelings and so-called thought processes of a 15-year-old boy were still accessible to me. Literally, I wrote the novel a lifetime ago, when I was in my late 20s and early 30s.

You meet a lot of Peter Pans in this business: boys who never grow up, and never lose the ability to think and act like a 15-year-old. 

I am not one of them.

I’m afraid I grew up a very long time ago. My oldest grandchildren are now almost the age Mikey was at the start of the original short story. Teenage boys have become alien creatures to me. I now find I have far more in common with—and a far better understanding of—Mikey’s father, than of Mikey himself.

So you see, it’s no longer possible for me to squeeze myself into Mikey’s spatterzag jumpsuit and high-top tennies one more time, to resume telling the story where I left off telling it thirty-five years ago. Instead, I now find it much easier to slip into the mindset and feelings of Mikey’s father. 

The Von Schlager Military Academy?

It’s too good for the little s.o.b.!

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Thirty-five years later, I still don’t know what to do with the damaged Cyberpunk novel. As a 21^st Century bildungsroman, it works, and there are many things in it with which I am quite pleased. All the same, it’s not the novel I set out to write, nor is it a “cyberpunk” novel, in the sense that the term came to be defined by the flood of Imitation Neuromancer novels that hit the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the tsunami of Cyberpunk 2077-inspired fanfic and litRPG that has appeared since. 

To me, it feels like releasing this book “naked” would result in my wasting a lot of time dealing with the unrealistic expectations of readers who come to it with no historical context, expecting it to be “just like Neuromancer, only different.”

Or worse: expecting it to be just like Ghost in the Shell.

Which leaves this alternative: the book I’ve been trying to write and failing to finish for years. It’s my attempt to put the original story and the crippled novel into historical perspective, and to include as much content as I can glean from decades of being interviewed about the @#$*@$!!! thing. “Cyberpunk Revisited,” in particular, is meant to be sort of a be-all, end-all FAQ, after which I will have nothing left to say.

It has been 45 years since I began writing the original story, you know. It’s time to end it.

Therefore, this is the last call for questions. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me about my story, “Cyberpunk,” or the writing thereof, send it to brucebethke.cybrpnk@gmail.com. Given that I want to have this book ready to release in March 2025, I am setting a hard deadline of Saturday, February 1st, 2025. After that date, any and all questions about “Cyberpunk” will receive the same reply: “Buy the book.”

And while you’re waiting for it, considering buying some other books, too, okay? At least, take a look at SS#23, and maybe read “Eddie’s Upgrade,” by Kevin Stadt. If you like cyberpunk, you’ll love that story. 

Categories: ask dr cyberpunk