A few thoughts on “post-cyberpunk science-fiction”

William Gibson gets a lot of attention for claiming that science fiction is not a genre, but rather a style of writing and a way of looking at technology.  Gibson, of course, does not advance much farther beyond this claim, at least not in the interviews that I’ve read, leaving us only with a glimpse of a provocative idea.  In that sense, this comment is much like his later fiction: all style, little substance.

Neal Stephenson, who gets far less attention than Gibson, is not famous for claiming outright that cyberpunk died in the mid-90’s and shouldn’t be ressurrected.  The few literary historians who do want to take seriously science fiction that has “literary” qualities would classify Stephenson as a second-generation cyberpunk author.  This label isn’t to demean Stephenson, merely to note that as far as chronology is concerned, Stephenson’s two major cyberpunk works appeared in 1992 and 1995 whereas Gibson “founded” the movement/genre (depending on whether you side with the authors or critics, respectively) in 1984.  So while Stephenson had just broken into the world of publishing with a book that is now out of print, Gibson’s Neuromancer was winning all three of the major science fiction annual awards, a feat yet to be repeated.

None of this is to demean Stephenson, however.  I merely want to establish a context for what follows.  So to be fair: Stephenson himself won a Hugo and was nominated for a Nebula for The Diamond Age, a book that has caused strangers to walk up to me and congratulate me on my taste in science-fiction when I’ve been spotted reading it public.  Snow Crash has been praised left and right by critics, both commercial and academic.

And while Gibson gets all the attention among the current generation of McLuhanites who either discuss technology in novels, magazines, and an array of online outlets for making an impressive transition away from cyberpunk in order to found a new literary movement, a post-cyberpunk science-fiction in the present, no one ever mentions the fact that Stephenson published his 1100+ page Cryptonomicon in 1999, whereas Gibson’s post-cyberpunk career didn’t officially begin until 2003 with the publication of Pattern Recognition.  In other words, before Gibson had already begun his “brilliant” literary maneuver, Stephenson has published more material than Gibson has yet to write since (2 novels, at or about 300 pages each and that’s being generous by assuming that the typescript and line spacing are the same).

All of this context begs the question: why the hell don’t more people talk about Stephenson’s work?

Off-hand, I can think of about three reasons.  I’ll just address them in the order they enter my head for now.  First, Gibson is seen as historically more important.  He was the first one to publish something like Neuromancer.  Even though Gibson freely admits to having little to no knowledge of how technology he was writing about actually works, his novel addressed a technology which few had directly engaged (outside of, say, Clark’s HAL9000) at a time when that same technology was becoming something more than a piece of equipment that big corporations used to manage information (like HAL9000) and more like a television set, something that everyone can own.  In other words, Gibson’s breakthrough novel coincided not only with the release of the PC but also with the implementation of TCP/IP protocols over ARPANET (this transition, arguably, marks the birth of what we now call the Internet, which had previously only been gestating).  Thus, Gibson’s novel marks not only a transition in literary history but also in material history.  Speaking as a literary historian, texts which rest along corollaries like this one usually get praised like none other.  And unfortunately, this context positions Snow Crash as a sort of descendant of Neuromancer, making in Platonically inferior to the original form.  Had Stephenson’s book been published in 1984 instead of in 1992, it would have received as much if not more praise than Gibson’s.

Second, Gibson is part of a circle of cyberpunk pioneers whereas Stephenson is by comparison an outsider.  Whenever you read anything on the history of cyberpunk, there’s always a mention of conferences or other more mysterious, shadowy gatherings in which Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and some other, forgotten enthusiasts, discussed how cyberpunk was more than a literary movement and how it shouldn’t be considered just another genre (true to punk: sticking it to the man who just wants to classify it, thus imposing limitations).  I’m not sure when these discussions took place exactly, and who participated aside from cyberpunk’s two leading figures, nor when they stopped and the enthusiasm died down.  The point, however, is two-fold: that Gibson was at some point well-connected among science-fiction circles (and may still be), and that these connections cultivated an attractive, revolutionary image for him that may current and aspiring post-cyberpunk writers look up to.  Jane Tompkins, in a somewhat controversial book, makes a similar argument about Nathaniel Hawthorne.  She is not, of course, challenging his brilliance as a canonical author, but merely pointing out that his social connections helped him to get published and to stay published beyond his death.  In other words, she raises the idea that literary prestige is not wholly determined by literary merit and may be influenced by social relationships.  As far as I’ve been able to determine, Stephenson doesn’t benefit from anything like this.

Third, Stephenson’s novels are fairly technically heavy whereas Gibson’s are technically light.  As mentioned above, Gibson freely admits to being a “late adopter” and not actually knowing much about how computers work.  Stephenson, on the other hand, is a Linux veteran and spent a great deal of time working within his university’s mainframe while in college.  While he may not be a hardcore C coder, writing compilers or OS kernels, Stephenson has advanced beyond the knowledge and skills of your average computer user.  Cryptonomicon displays his technical knowledge and more, advancing into mathematical models and cryptographic theorems that 80-90% of the reading public has probably never heard of.  While this integration of the technical with the aesthetic amuses me to no end (as I similarly come from a technical background into a career involving literature), I’m sure it makes many literary historians uneasy.  Literary historians have a tendency to be luddites.  While I think that Stephenson’s use of technical thinking is aesthetically very challenging and unique, I’m sure that Gibson’s flashy style of weaving together a lot of different ideas without really engaging them too deeply on a technical level is more easily approachable by reviewers and critics.  In particular, this trend frustrates me because I know while reading Stephenson’s work that there is so much more going on within the language and in the conceptual framework than in Gibson’s.  However, I’ll save that line of thought for tomorrow or later this week as I finally wrap up Cryptonomicon.

Taking off my historical cap and putting on my science-fiction reader cap, I want to finish this post up with some more general comparisons.  Gibson’s later work lacks plot.  In fact, I don’t think Gibson was ever much of a plot maker.  In an interview, he even admits to grafting his early impressions of computers onto a heist plot in order to come up with something publishable.  He is, however, a wonderful stylist.  Some of the moods he creates in his short fiction and first two trilogies are amazing.  But more often than not, his books seem to finish suddenly to me.  Or I can’t sympathize with the characters.  Or I just plain don’t care about the ending by the time I finish.  These personal observations are true in both his recent work and in parts of the Bridge trilogy.  While it’s admittedly taken me three tries to bust through the mathematical jargon and get into Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I doubt I would have made it through any of Gibson’s postcyberpunk books if I’d read it first.  I was marginally impressed by Pattern Recognition and not in the least by Spook Country.

In sum, Stephenson feels like a much more mature author to me.  Gibson will remain a figurehead for future science-fiction, or whatever it is that he’s writing now, but I doubt I’ll be buy anymore of his books.  I’ll likely still read them out of a sort of loyalty and nostalgia.  However, I’m already planning to set aside a few dollars out of the next few paychecks to pick up a fresh copy of Stephenson’s new novel when it hits the shelves this fall.