But I’ve seen stills of the bar and the audience, and those aren’t the people I saw. They’re spliced in very well, morphed enough that no one would recognize them unless she or he had been among them as I had, but it’s not the audience from the purported night. That audience is the original, from the very first Little Latin Larry feature, Rocky’s Roadhouse Presents: Little Latin Larry! It’s OK with me; they were a good audience. Carola’s ancestor must have been in the springtime of his delusions then, and able to imagine, or hallucinate, very strongly.
But as for the rest of it, I have no explanation at all. I don’t know why the damned thing disappears after one session. I know Carola blames me, says that I did something that makes Larry vanish. You’ll notice, however, that I’ve never even been charged with malicious destruction of property. Maybe Carola just doesn’t know how to stabilize blood products properly. I’ve been asked discreetly — i.e., behind Carola’s back — if I’ll analyze a sample, but I’ve refused. I don’t want to know. I suspect it may have something to do with delusions having a shorter shelf-life than real things.
And if that’s so, I don’t want to know. Because what if I have to find out that, say, my man Dylan is actually someone’s delusion and not the man who said that we all had to sing in our chains that everyone must get stoned? Yes, that would be a pretty thorough delusion — but so was Larry. I got all the way into those remakes, that music, those performances. I had a place for them in my mind, and, yeah, in my heart. I feel as robbed as anyone would. It made me think how fragile knowledge can be, especially when you have to glean it from people themselves. Memory recovery is great biotechnology but there’s a need for plain old non-sentient records, the kind of brute hardware that doesn’t have an opinion about everything and doesn’t personalize whatever it touches and records. Something sturdy, too. The kind of thing that can survive the collapse of civilization as we know it and then pop up with, say, accurate maps and —
Well, that’s my new calling. That, and Sky High Theatre. Sky High Theatre is what I’m really excited about. It’s a complete departure from everything I’ve done before. Get this: in Sky High Theatre, there’s one stage, one cast, one performance, which cannot be stopped, paused, or rewound because it is live. And the audience, rather than being individuals within a session rig, are all together in one big room the size of a parking garage, and they sit and watch the live performance without being able to alter it or personalize it in any way. Everyone sees the exact same action at the exact same time.
Don’t laugh. This could catch on.
Kessel to Sterling, 4 June 1986:
“I think your discussion of the novelty of Gibson and the ideational content of this kind of sf is cogent. It strikes me that you and he could do a lot worse than to pursue this line of literary attack. I also agree that sf has open to it opportunities and approaches to writing that are different than those of traditional lit because of sf’s outcast and low-class status, and that these approaches may offer the chance for the production of something genuinely new.
Only time will tell how this will play out. I certainly don’t know. The one thing I do know, however, is that a writer has to follow his own instincts, and I get pretty indignant when somebody presumes to tell me that my honest desire to write what interests me is really just an attempt to toady up to the literary establishment… I do think that there is support for the view that [cyberpunk] is not some wholly new invention exclusive to the sf demimonde…that sf writers, like it or not, are part of the broader world of fiction, though certain kinds of sf may have to be judged by standards different form those of traditional fiction….
A couple of letters ago you said ‘We cannot have it both ways. Either I control my own creations or I don’t.’ I don’t agree with that. We can both control and not control our creations. I’m no Freudian or Marxist. I don’t like any criticism that tells me the writer didn’t know what he was doing. On the other hand, I think it’s futile to deny that many things we don’t intend to express often show up in our work…. Look at the body of work produced in the career of somebody like Heinlein…Starshîp Troopers is both about the virtues of a military social morality and about the eroticism of machines and violence. How can you evaluate one side of this book without acknowledging the other?”
William Gibson
Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City
Though he is the quintessential cyberpunk, the label never encompassed all that William Gibson’s fiction did. Or maybe what Gibson did in his early work was not entirely what people said he was doing. Even at the time he said, “I think that a number of reviewers have mistaken my sense of realism, of the commercial surfaces of characters’ lives, for some deep and genuine attempt to understand technology.” Famously, Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter, and his contribution to Mirrorshades is “The Gernsback Continuum,” which is not about computer hackers slicing into corporate databases, but about “semiotic ghosts” of science fiction past.
If you want to see this story as cyberpunk, look at it this way. It seems to be all about surfaces. It juxtaposes a small portion of the urban landscape with the implied human life within it, exposing this life through a series of images. No human being appears onstage, but in the end Gibson evokes a sense of human tragedy through the artifacts of our culture.
ONE
DEN-EN
Low angle, deep perspective, establishing Tokyo subway station interior.
Shot with available light, long exposure; a spectral pedestrian moves away from us, into background. Two others visible as blurs of motion.
Overhead fluorescents behind narrow rectangular fixtures. Ceiling tiled with meter-square segments (acoustic baffles?). Round fixtures are ventilators, smoke-detectors, speakers? Massive square columns recede. Side of a stairwell or escalator. Mosaic tile floor in simple large-scale pattern: circular white areas in square tiles, black infill of round tiles. The floor is spotless: no litter at all. Not a cigarette butt, not a gum-wrapper.
A long train of cardboard cartons, sides painted with murals, recedes into the perspective of columns and scrubbed tile: first impression is of a children’s art project, something choreographed by an aggressively creative preschool teacher. But not all of the corrugated cartons have been painted; many, particularly those farthest away, are bare brown paper. The one nearest the camera, unaltered, bright yellow, bears the Microsoft logo.
The murals appear to have been executed in poster paints, and are difficult to interpret here.
There are two crisp-looking paper shopping-bags on the tile floor: one near the murals, the other almost in the path of the ghost pedestrian. These strike a note of anomaly, of possible threat: London Transport warnings, Sarin cultists… Why are they there? What do they contain?
The one nearest the murals bears the logo “DEN-EN.”
Deeper in the image are other cartons. Relative scale makes it easier to see that these are composites, stitched together from smaller boxes. Closer study makes the method of fastening clear: two sheets are punctured twice with narrow horizontal slits, flat poly-twine analog (white or pink) is threaded through both sheets, a knot is tied, the ends trimmed neatly. In fact, all of the structures appear to have been assembled this way.
Deepest of all, stairs. Passengers descending.