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| CodexFetishist | Cyberpunk. Or maybe not. | 2 | Mar 18 2008, 1:01 PM EDT by kevin_of_los_angeles | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 18 2008, 12:24 PM EDT
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Your reference to Bruce Sterling's novel as "cyberpunk" is a bit problematic, considering that it is a term with which Sterling himself has taken issue. In "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (see links above), Sterling writes,
"Public disavowals are useless, very likely worse than useless. Even the most sweeping changes in our philosophy of writing, perhaps the weird mid-life-crisis conversions to Islam or Santeria, could not erase the tattoo....Seen from this perspective, "cyberpunk" simply means "anything cyberpunks write." And that covers a lot of ground. I've always had a weakness for historical fantasies, myself, and Shiner writes mainstream novels and mysteries. Shirley writes horror. Rucker was last seen somewhere inside the Hollow Earth. William Gibson, shockingly, has been known to write funny short stories. All this means nothing. "Cyberpunk" will not be conclusively "dead" until the last of us is shoveled under. Demographics suggest that this is likely to take some time." According to Sterling, cyberpunk as "a voice of Bohemia--Bohemia in the 1980s," and many of the techno-social phenomena it could only have imagined--or equally alarming phenomona it couldn't imagine--have now come to pass. For this reason, it may be more useful to think of cyberpunk fiction as a literary movement lasting from 1985-1995, and the former cyberpunks, once again, simply as writers engaging their world and imagining new ones.
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| CodexFetishist | Medium, Shmedium | 2 | Mar 15 2008, 11:27 PM EDT by cyborg_not_a_goddess | ||||
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Thread started: Mar 11 2008, 12:52 PM EDT
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Wouldn't a project like this be more effective as a printed essay? Something you could actually publish? I mean, seriously. I know you're interpreting a science-fiction novel here, but isn't the Wiki form just a technological gimmick? The form-content conversation has never been able to keep the attention, let alone influence the methodology, of the academic sphere in any serious way. Leave that to the creative writers, I say. I don't see how you can make any concrete, sustainable claims, at any rate, when any non-credentialed activist can come in and modify the text of your project. With state-budget crisis after state-budget crisis threatening to shut our humanities departments down, the last thing we need are scholars and grad students in our own departments opening the door to our last closed space: our writing.
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Keyword tags:
Dissent
Form-Content
Media Theory
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