How the father of cyberpunk was made
Wen 丨 Wave Taste Immortal
In literary works, science fiction has always been a very unique theme and category, which has always been closely related to the development of science and technology in reality, related to human imagination and exploration of the future, and human imagination always promotes cultural change and social development. The perception of technological development by science fiction writers has produced many classic science fiction concepts, such as robots, spaceships, etc., which are new things that appear in science fiction, which in turn inspire people to turn them into reality.
Inspired by Asimov's 1950 novel "I, Robot", the "father of robots" Joseph Engelberg developed the world's first industrial robot "Unimette" in 1959.
When science fiction literature developed into the 1960s, science fiction writers began to move closer to mainstream literature, began to expand from the technical basis of the past to pay attention to psychological, social and political aspects, and shifted from single storytelling to literary carving, hoping to enhance the literary status of science fiction and form a "science fiction new wave movement". But soon in the 1970s, the philosophically obscure and fragmented new wave of science fiction came to an end, and the lack of attention to scientific and technological connotations erased the uniqueness of science fiction. Readers are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo of science fiction; some science fiction writers are even more reluctant to this status quo, hoping to return to the early hard science fiction style. They set their sights on a series of new sciences that had developed around them at that time, such as cybernetics, information theory, computers and networks, bioengineering, etc., and created a large number of unique styles of works, which not only brought readers great spiritual enjoyment, but also greatly affected the future development of computers (such as virtual technology), which is "cyberpunk science fiction".
The term "cyberpunk" first appeared in a short story published by Bruce Bask in 1983, "Cyberpunk", and later, the science fiction writer Gardner Duzois, who edited many science fiction anthologies, borrowed the term "cyberpunk" to describe a group of grotesque, tough science fiction writers emerging in the 1980s, making the term "cyberpunk" enter the public eye.
Published in the November 1983 issue of Amazing Story, Cyberpunk is about a group of teenage teenagers who are wreaking havoc online, creating the typical hacker image with a purple mohican haircut.
These emerging writers are a group of people with similar goals and aesthetics, who write hardcore high-tech, focus on counterculture, marginalized figures, and strangely combine "high-tech" and "low life" to form a "cyberpunk literary genre". Cyberpunk literature focuses on the "near future" that is different from traditional science fiction, the advanced technology in the novel is around people, computers, information networks, and media culture penetrate into all aspects of modern people's lives; cyberpunk no longer pays attention to outer space travel, but "explores inwards", explores the real prosthetic limbs and biotechnology implants, etc., focusing on the impact of technology on people. The literary movement was unstoppable, bringing together the cultural waves of the 1980s and becoming "an entire subculture emerging at the odd intersection of technology and connected computers with mind expansion, psychedelics, music, and fashion." Cyberpunk culture extends throughout society, a phenomenon that has not been seen in any previous genre of science fiction.
△ The 1986 cyberpunk literary anthology "Mirror Shadow", edited by american science fiction writer Bruce Stirling, contains 12 short stories written by different cyberpunk writers.
If Bruce Bask gave this unique style of science fiction literature a name, then the person who created the cyberpunk body has to mention the science fiction master William Gibson. Gibson's novels truly revolutionized science fiction literature by making words like cyberspace, surfing, ICE, retrobraination, and neural implants buzzwords, and popularizing concepts such as cyber consciousness, virtual interaction, and matrices. His work gave birth to the film The Matrix, influenced the development of Cyberpunk in Japan, and is the well-deserved father of cyberpunk.
△ The 1999 science fiction film "The Matrix", from the setting to the characters, borrowed from Gibson's work.
Gibson's ups and downs, rich experience, from an early age to absorb a lot of literary nutrients, SAT writing scored 148 points (150 out of 150 points), is a loyal punk music lover, engaged in the hippie and punk movements of the sixties and seventies, on the side of the counterculture... In his body, we can see a lot of "cyberpunk factors" appear, and he seems to be the genius writer of cyberpunk who is destined to stand out.
△ William Gibson as a young man.
Born in South Carolina in 1948, William Gibson moved frequently as a child, but spent most of his time in the small town of Westville, Virginia. After Gibson's father died unexpectedly at the age of six, he and his mother moved back to Westville, where he later recalled that it was this sudden exile to the past that opened his relationship with science fiction. Gibson had no father, was quiet, and was often left alone, seeking refuge by reading science fiction novels—H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and so on—and at the age of twelve he was very eager to become a science fiction writer; he spent most of his time in his room listening to records and reading books. Fearing that he had developed an "introverted, super-reading" Lovecraft-esque personality, his mother sent Gibson to a boys' boarding school in Arizona, and at the age of fifteen he became interested in the Beat Generation, exposed to the works of Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, whose influence on Gibson was particularly profound, and made him impressed with science fiction literature.
△ On the right is william Gibson as a young man
At the age of eighteen, Gibson's mother died of illness, and he left school without graduating from high school. In 1967, he moved to Canada, where he worked as an administrator of a cannabis-themed peripheral store, reading the works of the postmodernist novelist Thomas Pynchon and the Argentine literary hero Borges, and watching punk performances. By the 1970s, Gibson made a living by scouring The Salvation Army thrift stores for low-priced crafts and selling them to specialized dealers at high prices. Later, he found that it was much easier to get a good scholarship than to earn money at work, so he enrolled at the University of British Columbia, and in his science fiction literature class at Susan Wood, he was encouraged to write a story instead of an analytical paper, so he wrote his first science fiction novel, "Holographic Rose Fragments.". In 1977, Discovery magazine published the novel, and Gibson began his career.
△ 1977 "Discovery" magazine cover recommended short story "Holographic Rose Fragments"
After that, he meticulously completed the pioneering cyberpunk work, Memories of Johnny, which took four years from its first draft to its publication in Mystery magazine in 1981. This is the first short story in the "Mansheng Metropolis" series before the short stories "The Whole Collapse of Kolomi" and "The New Rose Hotel". In The Whole Of Coromi, William Gibson created the "Cyberspace". The light-emitting diodes on the matrix simulator glow red and green, the matrix unfolds in jack's consciousness, and the network cowboy Bobby steals data and money in cyberspace, in 1982, before the World Wide Web was invented. This directly affected the development of computers and networks in the future.
△ The adaptation of "Memories of Johnny", Defending Secrets (1995), starring Keanu Reeves and Takeshi Kitano.
1984 was the year that made William Gibson famous. With his first novel, "Neuromancer", he won three awards in one fell swoop: the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Philip Dick Award, which shook the science fiction literary world like a supernova. The work became the foundation of the cyberpunk movement, not only allowing William Gibson to start the cyberpunk movement almost single-handedly, but also encompassing the basic settings of cyberpunk: cyberspace, cyber cowboys, Japanese elements, underworld, illicit drugs, leather jackets, reflective sunglasses, weird hairstyles, human body modifications and implants, powerful technology companies, artificial intelligence, and so on, which had a profound impact on later culture.
" One of the 100 Best English Novels Since 1923 " Cyberpunk Bible " Neuromancer " , the first edition of Gollancz in 1984 , now costs from hundreds to thousands of dollars on the Web
At the time, Gibson was writing this book under tremendous pressure. After the publication of The Whole Colomy, science fiction editor and writer Terry Carr invited Gibson to write a book, which he agreed almost without hesitation, but then he was trapped by a project he wasn't sure what he had prepared, with a "blind, instinctive fear" of the task of the novel, and he didn't even know how many pages a manuscript should be to write a book. He was anxiously aware that he had to write something, and that there was an attraction on every page. So he looked at the stories written at that time and tried to find out what worked for him. In Memories of Johnny, he wrote the character "Molly", and in "The Whole Colomy" he depicted the environment of the cyberspace, so he tried to put these elements together. It can be said that without the inspiration and accumulation of early short stories, there would be no famous "Neuromancer".
Gibson used the Hermes 2000 typewriter when he wrote Neuromancer.
In 1986, William Gibson's collection of short stories, Holographic Rose Fragments, was published, the only collection of short stories in his decades-long career. The book includes ten of his early short masterpieces from 1977 to 1986, including his debut novel Holographic Rose Fragments, the aforementioned "Vines" series, co-authored works with science fiction writers Michael Swanwick, Bruce Stirling, and John Shirley, as well as three unique masterpieces of gensbach, the Wild Lands, and Winter Market.
△ ALL SCIFI's "William Gibson Works Ranking", "Holographic Rose Fragments" ranked first.
These short stories show William Gibson's excellent imagination and creative abilities, and they herald the writer's brilliance in the science fiction literary scene of the 1980s, bringing a blow to the increasingly depressed New Wave of science fiction in the 1970s. His debut novel, Fragments of holographic roses, is like DNA foreshadowing the basic characteristics of his future works, "typical Gibson characteristics have taken shape: the combination of modern pop culture, high technology and advanced literary expression, which together constitute the complex attributes of his work". Before the appearance of the long-form work "Neuromancer", Gibson's talent was already on display. This book offers a glimpse of the amazingly rapid growth of a remarkable writer, in the words of Bruce Stirling: such an opportunity is rare.
In the process of reading the book "Holographic Rose Fragments", we can imagine and marvel at the same time: Gibson, who did not touch the computer and finished the creation with a typewriter, applied these inspirations to his novels by observing the scenes of children playing games in the video game room, observing their dodging and twisting their bodies, as if they were on the other side of the screen; he applied these inspirations to his novels in the early eighties before the Invention of the World Wide Web. Scratching out infospace and dataspace on sticky notes creates a new vocabulary for that space behind the screen, he listens to Joy Division on the streets of Vancouver at night, blending the perception of skyscrapers and slums to present us with his fascinating cyberpunk world. "Cyber dolphin" in "Memories of Johnny", the airplane game on the pool table in "Air Combat Game", "Controller-Agent Mode" in "Wild Lands", editing dreams in "Winter Market"... The distillation of Gibson's early decade of fiction is brought together in this book, allowing us to see in one fell swoop the whimsy of science fiction while witnessing "how the father of cyberpunk was made."
Burning Chrome
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