Past÷Future=Collapse
Post-America, Written Too Soon
I accidentally read two books about the collapse or rising irrelevance of America while I was on vacation last month. This is why I can’t do leisure time: I box myself into the grindset by accident. The funnier coincidence about these two books is that they were both way ahead of their times, though they were published twenty years apart. There’s no advantage to being ahead of your time: nobody’s gonna get you until it’s far too late.
The first of these books was Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling, one of the OGs of cyberpunk. I’m a sick person and everyone hates me, rightfully, because I don’t like William Gibson’s writing very much, but I like Bruce Sterling’s work quite a bit, despite its dated and dopey parts. Sterling writes with a consistent interest in the implications of future technology for the Whole World, and while that sometimes arrives in 1980s language that makes my skin crawl down to my ankles, at his writing’s heart I always find Sterling engaged in a sincere attempt to capture geographically- and culturally-determined difference in encounters with technology, modernity, and The Future. He doesn’t always succeed, but he takes big swings which are interesting to watch.
Islands in the Net closes a circuit between the aesthetics of cyberpunk and the perennial SF theme of Encountering the Other. Many times in cyberpunk the Other is an AI or a crazy cyborg, but Sterling keeps our feet firmly on the ground in this book. The Other is the Cybersubaltern: the technologically-enabled denizen of the Global South.
Sterling immediately signals he’s going where SF rarely went in the ‘80s by making Islands’ lead character a woman. Before we get into any criticism of the work let me lead by saying I thought he did an unexpectedly fine job on writing from the POV of Laura Webster, Rizome Industries Group PR operative. Laura does spend a lot of time thinking about her husband and her baby, but that is, to be honest, a perfectly reasonable thing for a person with a husband and a baby to do. She is agential, courageous, sometimes dumb or selfish. She hooks up with a pretty silly Gary Stu character at the end of the book, but it’s forgivable based on the circumstances of her life at that time. Laura Webster is a reasonably enjoyable character to follow throughout her adventures. I can’t even think of a time she examined her own breasts in the mirror, thinking about how a man would think about her body. A couple times she thinks about whether she looks attractive to a person she’s attracted to, but that’s much normaler. At one point we hear a little about the physical experiences of her period and her pregnancy without masco-hysteria, which I appreciated.
Not everything Sterling does in Islands succeeds in hopping my 2020s-calibrated wokeness bar. He writes a lot of pretty corny dialect, deploys some othering language as he describes the Other, launches a cheesy silly subplot about race-bending via magic sunscreen, and boy does he hammer the idea of Africa being an irremediable shithole about thirty-seven thousand times too many. However, the characters Laura meets from the Global South are genuine agents too, wrapped in their own plans and schemes and desires. They challenge her assumptions about who controls the world and her situation, who’s the hero and the villain. If there are an abundance of white people manipulating international events in Islands in the Net, then there is also an abundance of ambiguity about whether they have the right to be there and whether their meddling is going to make things any better. The dated ideas in Islands intertwine uncomfortably with the prescient ones and made me wonder about my own core assumptions about the world, especially which of those assumptions will be mega-cringe by 2060. I know some of them will be, if I’m alive to review them.
I was most compelled by Islands in the Net’s vibe. More than any other future-set science fiction book grasping at realism, Islands in the Net felt familiar. It felt real. It’s not a wildly amplified fantasy of AGI or VR wish fulfilment. It’s a thought-provokingly early consideration of globalization as a destructive, extractive force which transfigures profound violence into material comfort and the illusion of security; Of “The Net” as a tool for homogenization and alienation as much as for connection; Of an America made internationally irrelevant by ultra-powerful corporations, mysterious non-state actors, and environmental degradation; Of a post-Cold War world which is not idyllic and peaceful, but trembling in precarity, spared ultimate desolation by the soft hand of chance. Sterling ends on a hopeful note, but hope is a spare, thin thing in the face of The Net and its many, many monstrous agents.
Nobody I’ve read while retrospecting the cyberpunk genre thus far has captured the sensation of being alive right now better than Bruce Sterling. If only somebody’d listened to him back in 1988. Maybe we would have turned off the internet in time, before it could un-end history.
After Islands in the Net, I read Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. Talk about a book about capital-H History! Not an entirely successful one, but more interesting for it. Liberation came out in 2008, far too soon for anyone to take its contents seriously.
Written in a semi-experimental, dare-I-say-lyrical, style, Liberation concerns the world’s six coolest criminals--the eponymous Slick Six--and their experiences in an America which five years after total currency collapse has become a ravaged Mad Maximalist hellscape. The central protagonist, a Batman-ass Gary Stu named Marco who is the world’s greatest assassin, returns to Manhattan after a long stint on a liberated prison ship to reunite his five friends and restore the idyllic crime family he longed for all his life. However, his friends have other problems: namely, that they’re all stuck in Fucked-Up America and entangled in its newly resurgent system of chattel slavery, which is overseen by their old nemesis/new king of America, New York crime boss “The Aardvark”.
I cannot imagine that in 2008, likely before the financial crisis hit, anyone took what Slattery had to say very seriously. Why would America go belly up crazy-style and in doing so desperately resurrect its most repellant institutions? Why would it submit itself to the whims of a nutty asshole, never coming up with anything better to fill the void of the old society than stale hatred?
Why indeed. Slattery depicts an endless sprawl of immiseration from sea to shining sea, while the whole rest of the world trips along, missing the indispensable nation very little. Climate change receives more than a nod as cause and consequence of the disaster, though we’ll very soon be twenty years on from Liberation’s publication and still have done jackshit to avert that doom.
While it is a densely textual and literary work, Liberation operates on a strangely comic book-y sensibility. Slattery concerns himself most urgently with the visual imprint of his world: hard, bright scenes taking place on flamboyantly-detailed and over-the-top stages. Grand, redemptive acts of violence abound, even as the work argues for the cessation of violence. Magic slinks around the edges of the text, the same slippery presence as in works of “magical realism”, but bearing a sharp black outline.
The ultimate conclusion of Liberation on the matter of America remains a little unclear to me. It does not quite measure up to the heights of works like Little, Big. Little, Big managed get at something both hyper-specific and grandly universal while considering the alien nation of America. Liberation gets caught up in the interpersonal dramas of the Slick Six, most of all Marco, and doesn’t quite find something to say about why slavery and exploitation churn up out of the chum of the American subconscious whenever the going gets tough.
The book finally settles on giving Marco a happy ending, a redemptive softening in the wake of his tortured existence. It’s a somewhat predictable ending which leaves behind the rest of the Slick Six and the rest of America, so the thematic throughline kind of dangles. But it’s like the What-If issues where Batman finally gets to retire and marry Catwoman. It’s nice to see a fucked-up dude take his own edge off.
Maybe that’s the missing throughline. Don’t we all wish America would take its own edge off? Retire to the mountains and work through some shit?
I don’t think I would offer either of these books to a normal person. Islands in the Net pokes interestingly at many cyberpunk assumptions people take for granted, so if your dissertation will be on cyberpunk-as-a-genre or women-protagonists-in-SF you should check it out. But if you’re a general reader, you should start at “Mozart in Mirrorshades”. It’s short and direct satire of the churning unstoppable pace of corporate extraction powered by supertechnology. The incredibly out-there premise keeps the tone much lighter than Islands. It’s kinda misogynist but you can chalk that up to the POV characters as much as the authors.
Liberation offers a few lessons to the aspiring gonzo-weirdo science fiction author. Writing with too much art and not quite enough clarity limits your work’s range, I know, but there should be some pleasure, some freedom to roll together all the things that excite you. The images Slattery summons stand up, even if the threads connecting them don’t translate entirely intact. I’ll remember them, though I can’t think how to recommend the book to anyone I actually know.
Of course, the dollar hasn’t collapsed yet. Maybe I’ll feel different when I’m slogging through the wasteland, pursued by the cannibal circus of the Rust Belt mad. Maybe Slattery’s still ahead of the times.
