PUNK POSTURES

Award-winning writer, critic, and CHEAP TRUTH shill Candace Berragus, who remembers the 1950's personally, turns the skeptical eye of experience upon her chosen target:

Now that NEUROMANCER has garnered so many accolades, maybe it's time to sit back and see just what heights have been climbed. The book has, yeah, STYLE -- that gritty fascination with surfaces signalled by the opening line, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Wonderful! TV as symbol for numbed reflexes, anomie, pollution, savage commercialism. And that slick style carries us forward on a garbage-reeking tide for... about a hundred pages.

Gibson, like Ballard, concentrates on surfaces as a way of getting at essences. All those brand names, Braun coffee makers, quilted consoles, obsessive attention to what everyone wears, glistening green ice cities...

But then you become uncomfortably aware that Gibson doesn't actually KNOW much about computers beyond brand names, and you are enmeshed in a standard pulp plot. The last third drags terribly, suspense hissing out like a puncture in a bald tire. (Indeed, all the guff about penetrating computer defenses depicted as a field of sensations -- this has become an instant freeze-dried cliche, a far cry from the actual experience and complexities of machine intelligence. Pretty, but not convincing.)

The tough characters never gain depth. The protagonist's inability to change, or even to shake his drug habit, creates a feeling of immobile futility. The promised confrontation of the artificial intelligences occurs virtually offstage, and we get no sense of their alienness.

Is this "punk SF" as Ellen Datlow keeps calling it? There are uncomfortable resemblances between the punk rock style of the '80's and the duckass ambience of the '50's, to be sure ... a sense of postures struck for rebellion, but without any emotional foundation deeper than distaste. Other than adolescent rebellion, soon to be quenched by the ebbing of hormones, there seems little heft to all this.

There is little true anger in NEUROMANCER or in punk rock. The rest is posturing, and finally rings hollow. Even NEUROMANCER's last sentence, "He never saw Molly again," echoes the older tough-guy postures of Chandler, whose first novel, THE BIG SLEEP, concludes, "All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again." Uh-huh. Gimmie a sim-stim, Fred. And double on the ennui.

If SF is to give us new lands, it will have to try harder than this. NEUROMANCER has little thought in it -- surely the shabby old corporate-run future, with Japanese electro-dominance, can't be counted as a new idea? -- but much attention to the cosmetics of a time only slightly beyond our own.

So -- punk WHAT? Actually, what do the purported punk SF writers have in common? Stylish Gibson, antic frazzled Sterling, the pure-hearted and liberal Robinson, hot-eyed Shirley -- all over 30, perhaps, but what else? I see no commonality of vision. Vague similarities -- bedazzled by technology, fond of street-savvy brutality, some preference for ravaged landscapes -- also link them with a horde of other SF writers.

But to become a movement demands some generational agreement, a narrative thrust... and something new. Only our habit of roping writers into eras makes us unite them. NEUROMANCER's dominance of this rather weak year for novels does not herald a revolution or a revelation.