Gibson and Stephenson

For the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that everyone has read both Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's Virtual Light. Given the publication dates (Snow Crash 1992, Virtual Light 1994) it seems logical to assume that Gibson was, at the very least, influenced by Stephenson's work. Given the incredible similarities between the main characters of the novels: in Snow Crash Hiro Protaganist is a hacker/former security guard/pizza delivery guy/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while the spunky Y.T. is a teenage courier and in Virtual Light Berry Rydel is a former copy/security guard/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while his companion Chevette Washington is also a spunky teenage courier. What's really fascinating about the two novels is that while SC is a parody of the cyberpunk genre pioneered by Gibson, VL seems to be a reaction to the excesses pointed out by Stephenson.

While Neuromancer (1984) and Winter Market (1986) both depict a world in which both the highest of the high and the lowest of the low have access to or at least knowledge of, the technology which have altered their worlds, Virtual Light takes a step down, easing away from the excesses of cyberpunk. Unlike Y.T., for instance, Chevette Washington is a street kid who lives rough and makes her courier deliveries on a bicycle, not a semi-magical skateboard. It is her theft of a pair of sunglasses that sets off the action of the novel. But these are not the ubiquitous mirror shades of either Stephenson's SC or Gibson's earlier work. Chevette is so disenfranchised that she doesn't even know what virtual reality (or virtual light as the novel deems it) is. This is a far cry from Gibson's Sprawl universe, in which Winter Market and Neuromancer are set, or even in SC where everyone seems to be plugged in to the technology of the day. Even Berry Rydel, the novel's hero, who occupies a higher economic niche than Chevette, has only just barely heard of virtual light technology. Stephenson's work, while definitely a parody of cyberpunk, qualifies as post-cyberpunk as defined by Lawrence Person. It's characters are integrated into their society, technology in the form of the metaverse is society, and so forth. What's really interesting is that Gibson, the father of cyberpunk has also achieved post-cyberpunk status in his novel Virtual Light.

Blade Runner

Sepia photograph. Faded, tattered and worn. It's interesting that the film chose these types of photos, despite the fact the given the date of Blade Runner, the characters parents and grandparents would appear in modern photographs. So the choice of medium was deliberate. Sepia is unreliable in the same way that human memory is: it gets blurry around the edges, fades in uneven patches and can be almost unrecognizable after the passage of many years. It would be interesting to see how the replicants' memories compared to human ones. Humans, and replicants, might define themselves by their memories, but memories are subjective, flawed, and easily distorted by time and new experiences. Whether human or artificially implanted all memories are for anyone is a "padding," a way to put current reality into some sort of context. Replicants are no less real because their memories happened to someone else. Everyone's memories happened to someone else-their younger selves who oftentimes are incredible different from the current "real" person. If their memories serve to shape their current personalities then they are just as authentic as anyone else's. The fascinating difference between book and movie is that in the movie only replicants have false memories. In the book, through Mercerism, humans share one another's experiences. Iran "remembers" the joy of getting a new animal, not through her own experiences, but through being connected mechanically to someone else. They are also "implanted" with Mercer's memories, which are doubly false, being not their own, and being not memories, but film stock. At least the replicants are receiving real human experiences. Are Rachel's memories of playing doctor with her brother and the spider outside her window any less real than Deckard's just because they happened to Tyrel's niece instead of her? In almost every respect she is Tyrel's niece. What we remember about ourselves helps us to define who we are at the moment. For humans memories fluctuated and warp in the passage of time. I suppose an argument could be made that what makes the replicants other than human, besides their construction, is the fact that they, having computers for brains, would not suffer the sort of memory degradation that afflicts human. It's interesting that in both book and movie the replicants are far superior to the rather pathetic humans. In the book, despite their short life spans it seems likely that the replicants, with their superior bodies and minds, are far more capable of withstanding the dust and kipple that cover the earth. In the movie the replicants are larger than life, living lives far grander and more exotic than that of the humans around them. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." Despite their incredibly short life spans and their deficiencies in empathy, it is very easy to see the seductiveness of the replicants, and why humans despise them so greatly.

Who owns the Machines?

In both William Gibson's Neuromancer and the movie Ghost in the Shell cyborgs and AIs achieve a transcendental reality in which the Net provides them with the ultimate freedom. The AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer merge to form a super AI, an ultimate form of intelligence, who then, in the perfect freedom on the net, discovers and converses with alien life. In Ghost the newly born cyborg/AI hybrid says that the Net in infinite and discards her/his/its old life of service and servitude for an unknown, but presumably freer future. It's interesting that in both Neuromancer and Ghost that it is a hybrid that achieves this ultimate reality. The idea of sex and childbirth have been co-opted and altered to achieve the same ends: a new organism made up of elements of its parents, but unique unto itself. The hybrid imagery present in both of these texts is interesting when it is contrasted with the racial imagery in either Entrada by Mary Rosenblum or Deep End by Nisi Shawl. The hybrid reflects a construction of race that glamorizes the exotic, the half-breed, or the mixed race. This can be an empowering form of hybridization, one that bring the two parent races closer together, or it can simply be another group of people used as objects of fear, fascination, or sexual desire.
A hybrid is a being of mixed race. In Entrada and Deep End race remains deeply problematic for society. It is either a barrier for advancement or a criminalized state of being. Both Neuromancer and Ghost romanticize the hybrid, making it either a creature of great power: Wintermute/Neuromancer, or a post-sexual object of limitless potential: Project 2501/Major Kusanagi. They have, in a sense, transcended race. This is not possible in the world of Entrada in which Mila Aguilar, even if she becomes wealthy will always be primarily defined by the color of her skin. A different problem lies in wait for Wayna in Deep End. She if forced to define race without skin color as a guide. While there is the potential to read a black women in a white body as a type of cyborg, there is certainly nothing liberating about the experience.
Even the liberated cyborgs of Neuromancer and Ghost become problematic when you consider that both are completely reliant on technology for their survival. The combined AI, though free of the corporation that created it, can still only exist in cyberspace, which in turn only exists in the computers of human beings. Its sentience, its very existence is dependent on the human society that created it. As for the newborn of Ghost, it has been illegally downloaded into a child cyborg's body (and wow does that raise issues about the society in question). While the net might be infinite, the body hosting the consciousness requires an elaborate and highly technical support system to maintain it. Both Wayna and Mila, pure racial characters, are far freer at the end of their stories.