After Cyberpunk?

'Texts Without Context'

‘THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.’

— Michiko Kakutani, ‘Texts Without Context’, The New York Times, 17/03/2010

2 years ago 1 note

Borges (…) describes an empire in which the craft of cartography attained such precision that its map has emerged as large as the kingdom it depicts. Scale, or difference, was now replaced by repetition. A model within itself, such a map embodies the dissimilarity between reality and its representation. The Internet (…) has become such a map of the world, both literally and symbolically, as it traces in an almost 1:1 ratio every event that has ever taken place.

– Neri Oxman, ‘How Has the Internet Changed The Way You Think?’, Edge World Question Center 2010

2 years ago

'The Couplandization of Douglas Coupland'

“To that end, JPod abounds with odds and ends of contemporary culture. There’s a page that consists entirely of the words “ramen noodles.” Others that reproduce famous spam e-mails for penile enlargement and the Nigerian oil scam. Obscure phrases from video games such as Tony Hawk Pro Skater (“Grind the molten bucket”) appear throughout, as well as Chinese characters representing “Cosmetic Surgery” and “Boredom.”“

— Michael Agger, Slate, 31/05/2006

2 years ago

'Notes for a Projected Science Fiction Novel'

‘… Lemme know if you can think of more of these. Especially something that could plausibly replace the Westphalian system, somewhere in the 21st century, without anybody much noticing.’

— Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond, 09/03/2008

[With hindsight, we can presume that this was part of Bruce’s research for The Caryatids - a moment that is interesting to contrast with his experience of an acceleration & thinning (?) of the writing process.]

2 years ago

'Icon Minds: Design Fiction'

‘If you were a science fiction writer and you were reading, say, Scientific American you would have at least an 18-month lead over the general population in which you could write a story about something in a laboratory and it would appear in a pulp magazine and people would read it and they would be surprised by it because they’d never heard of it. That is not possible [any more], the sluggishness that allowed that particular set of reactions is just not there. I mean now if I blog something that’s going on in somebody’s lab I’m going to get an email from the guy: “Ah, Mr Sterling, thank you for putting my photon experiment on wired.com, would you like to meet my photon friends? I see you’re in London today, how about dropping by the pub.” This is a small foretaste of the kind of trouble we’re getting into.’

— Bruce Sterling, Icon 078, Dec 2009

2 years ago 1 note

'When Lit Blew Into Bits'

‘The Internet (…) invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.’

— Sam Anderson, New York Magazine, 06/12/2009

2 years ago

This is how high bandwidth science fiction works. If some item baffles you, rush on or rejoice in the confusion; or, if you are an obsessive, Google on it.

– Damien Broderick, Unleashing the Strange (Rockville, MD: Borgo Press, 2009), p. 88.

2 years ago

'Texts Without Context'

'The Couplandization of Douglas Coupland'

'Notes for a Projected Science Fiction Novel'

'Icon Minds: Design Fiction'

'When Lit Blew Into Bits'

After Cyberpunk?

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