Journal #2: A Strange New World

In the book Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling I found it quite elaborate for the time that the book was written. Mirrorshades was written in the 1980’s. Subsequently, the short stories and the innovations that were talked about in this book have already become a reality. In the preface of Mirrorshades Bruce Sterling says that cyberpunk is, “widely known for its telling use of detail, its carefully constructed intricacy, its willingness to carry exploration into the fabric of daily life. It favors ‘crammed’ prose: rapid, dizzying bursts of novel information, sensory overload that submerges the reader in the literary equivalent of the hard-rock wall-of-sound.”

After reading this quote from Bruce Sterling, one cant help but feel that this a is profound statement in the sense that cyberpunk is indeed woven into the fabric of science fiction novels. The first person to do this very well in the book was indeed William Gibson who did the short story on The Gernsback Continuum. This story was very bizarre in the sense that I could not really imagine how the objects would look. The way that Gibson explained things was as if he mixed surreal thoughts with a utopian environment and the product of that was cyberpunk. For example William says, “my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.” Thinking rationally about this I came to the conclusion that either the person in The Gernsback Continuum is a robot or is another class of human being who is a more evolved human. The same way that Neo must have felt when they were trying to lock in on his frequency in The Matrix.

The reason that this book fits into the cyberpunk genera is due to the use of intricate details in these stories. In the story Snake-Eyes I felt as though, that I was their experiencing the look and the texture of things. Especially near the beginning of Snake-Eyes Tom says, “At the armored heart of Athena Station sat a nest of concentric spheres. The inmost sphere measured five meters in diameter, was filled with inert liquid fluorocarbon, and contained a black plastic two-meter cube that sprouted thick black cables from every surface.” This is a very detailed description of an object that you could imagine in something such as Star Wars or on Star Trek. Tom even goes into great detail as to explain the size of the sphere that houses some type of liquid. The liquid was needed for the sphere to function properly, which is how most machine could be cooled later and even now. In the book, Tom Maddox talks about the use of liquid fluorocarbon being used inside of a sphere, which reminds me of water coolers that keep the motherboard at a stable temperature to keep from overheating.

The collection of authors in Mirrorshades seem optimistic that most of these ideas expressed in this science fiction novel will come to pass and will indeed be apart of everyday life. William Gibson made this clear when he gave his interview about his new book Spooky Country. Gibson said that technology will take us to a certain point and then from there we won’t be able to recognize the advancements of technology. And vice versa the advancement of technology won’t be able to recognize us because they will be so far advanced. And with this comment by Gibson I would have to agree once again that technology will advance so great that we will become so unconscious of the fact that we will in fact be one with technology.