Cyberpunk

Well… we made it. 2020 is in the past. There was a pandemic, the virus. It is convenient to smirk and disengage, checking out into mind-numbing spaces of withdrawal. Let me click into a new void of internet exploration. Let me drift away into a new season. Three days become three months becomes a year. Do I still pay rent?

Reading Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a deceptively fun experience for lovers of science fiction. From walls embedded with bioluminescent bacterial colonies that can light dark passages to cyborgs that feel touch so acutely that they can detect the distinct ridges of a fingerprint, the world of Autonomous is packed with fantastical biotechnology.

Congratulations! You’ve made it. After years of grifting, grafting and flawlessly executed, unscrupulous cyberpunk shenanigans, you’re indescribably wealthy and can slip the surly bonds of earth to join us on board our fortress in the sky.

Rachel Beck’s The Glitch Logs are tapping into the same vein as K.C Alexander’s cyberpunk action thrillers. Glitch is a hacker of some notoriety. She’s a famous yet retired gamer girl and a veteran runner. She pulls off jobs against ‘corps that others only hear about in hushed tones.

Sex robots are the future, so David Rutland has a fireside chat with an up-and-coming bedroom developer. Why bother with Tindering, Grindr-ing and dating when it’s easier (and potentially cheaper) to order a willing and compliant non-sentient silicone alternative?

I just finished listening to the podcast ‘The Left Right Game’ on Spotify. I gravitated to it semi-organically, as much as such things are possible nowadays, with so many measured clicks and algorithms tracing our desires and histories. It’s ostensibly a horror story . . . a ghost story, specifically, revolving around an urban legend about a game where you get in your car, follow certain rules, and soon . . . you arrive . . . elsewhere.

Solarpunk flies upon simultaneous internet currents, growing in separate biospheres and concocting a lush new movement. Part fictional literary scene, large part aesthetical fantasy hashtag and also a DIY home and garden blogging niche, the genre unifies in a reblogged hope for the near future. 

If within a grain of sand lies the gate of the universe, then Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths emerges from the center of that grain as a twirling pinwheel. 

Inasmuch as I know a bit of Philip K. Dick and his works, the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch displays a character I recognize. It’s that of an outsider fully ingratiate with fringe topics and weird culture trying to make sense of spiritual experiences he’s personally inhabited while trying to bring them back down to terra firma. 

Perhaps no man of the twentieth century embodied the wholesomeness of the universe more thoroughly than Buckminster Fuller. Inventor, architect, mathematician, spiritualist, educator, author and futurist, Fuller led a famously frantic life.