Dogfight
William Gibson began publishing short fiction in 1977, but his reputation was made with his first novel, Neuromancer, which appeared in 1984 and has since earned the status of a revolutionary work of contemporary science fiction. The book, which won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, became the bible of the cyberpunk movement, and an important breakthrough novel that seeped into the cultural mainstream where the many concepts it explored—cyberspace, virtual reality, the internet, computer crime, artificial intelligence—were fast making the transition from speculative fancy to irrefutable reality. A fusion of the hardboiled detective narrative and the cutting-edge science fiction story, Neuromancer and the two follow-up novels with which it forms a loose trilogy—Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive—blazed trails through the hitherto unexplored frontier of computer technology and microchip-driven telecommunications. It popularized the concept of “plugging in” to link the human brain directly with the neural network of computer systems. The human/machine interface it envisioned, though built on traditional science fiction themes, marked a conceptual shift that turned science fiction’s normally outward-looking perspective inward. The complex and often inscrutable reality it extrapolates is one where traditional geographic and cultural boundaries have disintegrated and been reshaped by the uses and abuses of computer-generated data. The hacker subculture dominates the world of these novels, and its often criminal members have the status of outlaw heroes. The novels are also memorable for their dazzling, kinetic styles, which update the stylistic experimentation of the New Wave movement with contemporary techno-jargon, and narrative cuts and splices characteristic of video and computer entertainment. The impact of computer technology has been as inescapable in the rest of Gibson’s fiction as it has in the modern world. The Difference Engine, which he wrote in collaboration with Bruce Sterling, is a celebrated “steampunk” novel that projects the world that might have been had Charles Babbage’s early work on computers taken root in Victorian England. His novels Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties all share characters and explore a variety of computer-oriented themes, including nanotechnology, computer personality constructs, and “nodal points” or fluxes in the data stream that are auguries of transformational events in history. Gibson’s short fiction has been collected in Burning Chrome, which includes “Johnny Mnemonic,” the basis for the Robert Longo film of the same name.
Michael Swanwick emerged as one of the stunning new talents of science fiction in the 1980s initially through the publication of his richly allusive, multilayered short stories, which show the influence of literary postmodernism as much as the traditions of fantasy and science fiction. The best of his short stories have been collected in Gravity’s Angels and Tales of Old Earth, which includes his Hugo Award–winning “The Very Pulse of the Machine.” His work as a novelist is equally unconventional, ranging in its approaches from cyberpunk to heroic fantasy and focuses on the interplay of new science and old social structures in their shaping of a civilization and the individual. His first novel, In the Drift, is set in a postapocalyptic America where nuclear catastrophe creates a fragmented society struggling to stabilize. Vacuum Flowers, Griffin’s Egg and the Nebula Award–winning Stations of the Tide all are explorations of the impact of cataclysmic natural disasters and sociopolitical events on human societies established in alien worlds that have grown estranged from the mother planet’s influence. Swanwick has also written Jack Faust, a modern variation on the Faust theme, and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, an epic hi-tech high fantasy. He is the author of several provocative and controversial essays on the craft of fantasy and science fiction, several of which have been collected in A Geography of Unknown Lands and The Postmodern Archipelago. He is also a recipient of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.
HE MEANT TO keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long as he didn’t stop riding, he’d just never get off—Greyhound’s Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn’t mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover—Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.
Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.
“Tha’s right, Tiny,” a kicker bellowed, “you take that sumbitch!”
“Hey,” Deke said. “What’s going on?”
The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt cap. “Tiny’s defending the Max,” he said, not taking his eyes from the table.
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Mérite divided among its arms.
The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man’s khaki work shirt would have hung on Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he’d seen on his way down; of that weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they’d been borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale—a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all—for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man’s face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration spreading from the corners. . . .
“You dumbshit or what?” The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke’s Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. “Why don’t you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.” He turned back to the dogfight.