Is Cyberpunk ineluctably male? and other generalizations.

[nancylebov]

I'm behind on lj, and this from james_nicoll seemed like enough fun to pull out of the deep past of several days ago.

I don't like most cyberpunk because I don't like noir, and I'm pretty sure that the reason I don't like noir is the implied total lack of safety. In an effort to rationalize my prejudice, I suggest that people don't actually build societies in which it is impossible to raise children. Maybe there are babies in cyberpunk (if there are, please tell me-- I mean babies that need a lot of care from adults, not some techno weirdness so that raising babies is shuffled off onto machines (though I don't think you get that in cyberpunk, either)), but I'm not only not seeing them, the societies seem to have no room for them, and to get the bleakness, you have no hint of something more civilized elsewhere. It's at least conceivable that women get less fun out of imagining such places, though I'm interested in counterexamples.

I've read both Trouble and Her Friends (and disliked it) and The Fortunate Fall (and liked it very much), but I remember very little from either.

Delany's Nova did strike me as something very close to cyberpunk-- there was a lot of cyberpunk tech, but it was also set in a stable, prosperous society, so it didn't feel like prototypical cyberpunk.

And this reminds me of something I think I've noticed. Male writers make a bigger deal of weapons-- they're the ones who write stories with named weapons, doomed weapons, lovingly detailed weapons. There's a notable dagger in Bujold's Miles stories, but iirc it's a ceremonial suicide dagger-- you don't fight with it. There's some drooling over armor Mary Gentle's Burgundy tetralogy [1], but it's armor, not a weapon. As always, counterexamples are welcome, and I'm aware that if people notice this post, there will be some some women writers putting more about weapons in their stories.

And now to magical realism, which I believe is distinguished by a total lack of world-building. Unfortunately for my handy generalization, the world-building in most fantasy is pretty weak. The muggle world and the wizarding world should have had more effect each other. Ratatouille would have been a very different story if people had to take it seriously that rats are sentient. I think the difference between magical realism and genre fantasy is that the fantastic event is right out in public for the whole story, and no one notices that there's anything odd about it.

Addendum: It looks like my theory about women and weapons in sf is wrong-- see comments about some sf by women with named weapons. Also, it wasn't a suicide dagger, it was a seal dagger which was supposed get a little blood when used.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I mean babies that need a lot of care from adults, not some techno weirdness so that raising babies is shuffled off onto machines

There's a fairly recent and very creepy Walter Jon Williams where to protect them from the dangers of space, kids are raised as software in VR until they are adults. Before they become adults and get their own flesh and blood bodies, they have very few legal rights and parents can edit or erase them as they please.

[madfilkentist]

I'm in the middle of reading a German novel, Krabat, which might be considered magical realism. The story is presented from the point of view of a boy who's taken in as one of a dozen apprentices to an evil mage. The setting is medieval Germany, near Poland. They use magic as a tool, and he makes them work hard, though he gives them some magic to keep them from being fatigued. Since the apprentices don't have a lot of contact with the outside world, it isn't clear so far whether people in general are aware of the existence of magic.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

That is really interesting; thank you for posting it.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I dislike cyberpunk and noir for the same reasons. I don't find the eternal night/grundgy cityscape exciting, nor a society that seems to be made up of singles in their twenties and thirties, ho hint of a family anywhere (except as redshirts so we can tell the bad guys from the really bad guys), no one doing laundry, cooking food, tending plants in the (nonexistent) parks.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think the Bladerunner movie launched this subgenre along with Gibson. I find it sterile.

Another generalization to complement yours . . . I've seen that women will write about weaponry, but not in the same way as most men in my reading. Though I disagree with freud on a lot of things, on this one, there seems to be some correlation.

[ozarque.livejournal.com]

And thank you also for the link to the excellent discussion at james_nicoll's journal, which I very much enjoyed reading.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Maybe there are babies in cyberpunk (if there are, please tell me-- I mean babies that need a lot of care from adults, not some techno weirdness so that raising babies is shuffled off onto machines (though I don't think you get that in cyberpunk, either)), but I'm not only not seeing them, the societies seem to have no room for them, and to get the bleakness, you have no hint of something more civilized elsewhere.

Am I misremembering there being babies in Islands in the Net ?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I may be misremembering but I seem to recall Sterling mentioning that the primary reason he does not write the kind of stories he wrote way back when is that he had kids and the tie to the future that gave him changed how he approaches the future.

Andrew Wheeler, my former boss, once mentioned on rasfw that he doesn't take kindly to books whose k3wl s3tt!ngs require the deaths or misery of his kids (born around the turn of the century) to give the protagonists room to swing their swords.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I only read Islands in the Net once quite a while ago, and I only remember a few details, so there may well have been babies in it.

However, I did file it as not-quite-cyberpunk because the society wasn't an awful place to live in, even though it (iirc) had cyberpunk tech. The thing I remember with the most fondness is that there's a solution to the threat of nuclear war. It's never described, but the people in that culture are somewhat snotty about the people who didn't figure it out earlier. This struck me as both psychologically plausible and a really elegant hand-wave.

I don't know if there's an objective way to figure out whether noir is a defining element of cyberpunk.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Can you expand on the differences in the ways that men and women write about weapons?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That sounds like something I'd be interested in. Do you have any idea of the venue or title?

[holzman.livejournal.com]

Some women-written weapons that come instantly to mind:

Need, from Mercedes Lackey's Vows and Honor series and it's sequalae.

The various swords in Elizabeth Bear's Dust.

The eponymous Sword of Winter, by Martha Randall.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

This is generalizing, and I have the flu pretty bad, so I am not thinking well, but to put it bluntly there is a sexual component to so many descriptions of weapons when written by many men. This may be only me, but I noticed once that in several books the length of the weapon, the caliber, and so forth, were mentioned, but none of the women writing action sequences talked about the length of their weapons. I meant to check Susan Brockman again (writes heavy duty action stuff crossed with romance, and I know she researches her weaponry to a faretheewell) to see how she describes the weapons . . . but the fact that I don't remember how she does makes me wonder if she, too, gets them in as part of the realistic detail, but without the lingering attention.

It was not just with handguns and pistols and rifles, I also noticed this within descriptions of artillery.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Incarnation Day", which is in the SFBC's original anthology Escape from Earth: New Adventures in Space, (Aug 2006, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Didn't Cherryh's Morgaine have a Named Weapon?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. My tentative theory was that women see weapons as tools, while men are apt to see them as magic.

How familiar are you with Dean Ing's novels? I remember them as being about men with unusually high combat skills but without any goshwow about it.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Or....

My poor theory! Dead on the ground, killed by named weapons!

[twistedchick]

I think you have a very skewed view of magic realism. Have you read Charles DeLint's Newford stories? Or The House of the Spirits, by Isobel Allende? There's a great deal of worldbuilding going on in magical realism; perhaps you're missing it because it's too familiar?

[twistedchick]

Also, for cyberpunk with women in it, check out the movies of Miyazaki.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Ing, but I like your theory. I wish I wasn't braindead from this disgusting flu, but I wonder if taking the sexual component out (it seems to simplistic even if the reminder crops up...it seems to edit out a host of other impulses, cultural clues, etc) but here's another soundbite theory, just because I can only sit up about ten minutes at a time (but can't retire until I get the boy off to high school) weapons equate power for any writers, but many men tend to describe them in ways that hint at personal power, whereas women don't usually do that. I see women's impulse toward personal power more often in assembling defensive groups. This probably makes no sense.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've read a lot of earlier DeLint, and then lost interest. My tentative theory was that his magic got too rationalized and was too much about morality.

How was DeLint magic realism rather than genre fantasy?

The only Allende I've read was Like Water for Chocolate, which to me like tall tales-- a feature I like, and that only a few writers (her, Lafferty, Helprin) seem to use.

As for Miyazaki, I've seen My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Kiki's Delivery Service, so nothing cyberpunkish. In any case, the point wasn't whether there were women characters, it was whether there was room in the setting for anyone to take care of babies, and whether women are unlikely to enjoy inventing worlds where there isn't.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Which movies of his are cyberpunk? I'm drawing a blank here which makes me wonder what I have missed.

[holzman.livejournal.com]

Yes! Her sword was named Changeling. I think some of the weapons in the Fortress series may have had names as well...

[twistedchick]

The Newford series combines what is essentially everyday Ottawa (renamed, but I know those locations) with Algonquin folklore; they're not the same as the earlier ones. And they aren't genre fantasy unless he's invented a new genre.

Like Water for Chocolate is also magic realism. Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky and Porco Rosso have a strong cyberpunk bent; so does Howl's Moving Castle. There's room for children in all of them.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a notable dagger in Bujold's Miles stories, but iirc it's a ceremonial suicide dagger-- you don't fight with it.

In "A Civil Campaign" it's revealed that the dagger is a seal dagger; the blade draws blood, into which the raised seal is pressed in place of wax and then stamped onto a letter. It's fraught with Spiritual Overtones of embedding one's lifeforce/breath/whatever into the message, testifying its authenticity and intent. As it's Barrayar we're talking about, I suspect it'd also be suitable for fighting and belly-cutting.

-- Steve also recalls it was considered quaint/obsolete, and that only a traditionalist like Miles would consider actually using one in his days.

PS: posting from a public location with weird web permissions, so sorry for the anonymity.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

Speaking of noir, what do you think of Dashiell Hammett?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've read a few of his books a long time ago-- they didn't make much impression.

[avram]

DeLint's Newford stuff is pretty straightforward urban fantasy (as the term is currently used), not magical realism.

[avram]

An interesting feature of both magical realism and cyberpunk: In both cases, the descriptive terms were coined after-the-fact to describe the works of a particular group of authors. The authors who were later described as the early cyberpunk writers thought of themselves as "The Movement", if they thought of themselves as part of anything at all, and it was Gardner Dozois who named the movement after a 1980 short story by Bruce Bethke.

In the case of magical realism, the term was first used (as a term of literature) by Venezuelan critic Arturo Uslar Pietri in the 1960s, got picked up and self-applied by one particular author, and then applied retroactively to earlier authors like Borges.

Anyway, it seems to me that defining "magical realism" as fantasy without worldbuilding takes for granted the notion that fantasy should have worldbuilding. In other words, it's a specifically science-fictionish perspective.

If you were writing a book with elves in the modern world, and you and most other people in your culture actually believed that elves really do exist in the modern world, you probably wouldn't feel like you had to justify the plausibility of this to your readers.

Even if you didn't believe in elves, but you lived in a culture where that belief was traditional, you might be willing to relax and let the tradition carry the weight of suspension of disbelief.

[avram]

None of them.

Steampunk, on the other hand, well, Laputa: Castle in the Sky is the most obvious.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My impression is that genre fantasy has at least a little world-building. Either your vampires and werewolves live in secret or there's general acknowledgement that vampires and werewolves exist. You don't get a centaur just living in current society and everyone just taking it as one of those things.

I think this is typical of the commercial fantasy I've been reading for most of my life, with other standards for world-building in stories which aren't set in our consensus timeline. (LOTR is set in our timeline, but not in a consensus sort of way.)

I'm not saying that fantasy should have world building, thought that's the kind I prefer. I'm saying that magical realism is a different sort of thing.

How would you describe magical realism?

[avram]

Yes, genre fantasy is fantasy for rationalists, and therefore has worldbuilding. That's one of the things that makes it genre fantasy, and why it often shares the shelves with science fiction. (I think of these both as sub-genres of "nerd fiction" -- fiction for people who are obsessed with how the world works, even if they don't actually understand that as well as they like to think.)

Fantasy for people who don't have the same attachment to the rationalist notion of consensus reality doesn't need to be flagged as set in some kind of here's-how-things-would-be-if world.

I'm tempted to say that magical realism is Roman Catholic in its origins while genre fantasy is Calvinist, but that's probably just clever-sounding bullshit.

It also occurs to me that the science-fictional equivalent of magical realism might perhaps be the Edisonade. Or maybe van Vogt.

I think the civilization-sustaining parts are just offscreen

[(Anonymous)]

I always read Gibson's cyberpunk books with the idea that there were stable, happy people having kids and such somewhere (probably as loyal citizens of the large corporations, maybe also just normal countries' citizens who aren't involved in cloak-and-dagger corporate defections), just not in the places where the stories were taking place. This is similar to many other genres. Think of war novels and spy novels, full of messed up people and bleak scenes of death and betrayal and loss of hope, yet presumably existing in a world where people somewhere are still trying to raise kids, grow crops, invent new drugs, etc. And there were some takes on that normal world in some of Gibson's stories--*someone* raised the young cowboy-wannabe in "Burning Chrome," and there was some non-bleak place that the narrator of New Rose Hotel had hoped to end up with his lover. In Neuromancer, there's even a scene in a mall (in which some kind of new-age terrorists trigger a kind of autoimmune reaction by the local SWAT team), which implies that someone, somewhere goes to the mall. (There aren't a lot of malls in Mogadishu, as it turns out.)

Have you read Spider Robinson's _Mindkiller_? That strikes me as having a large streak of cyberpunk without being so relentlessly focused on the bleak prospects of the castoffs of some dystopian corporate feudalism of the future, and without the rather silly focus on cool weapons for the future high-tech underclass. (Okay, so the retractable razorblade fingernails and surgically-implanted mirrorshades were kind-of cool, even if they were also deeply silly.)

--albatross

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

And Miles uses it for a (lethal) variety of information-gathering torture back in Warrior's Apprentice. One of his moral crises; he learns never to do that again.

Being what he is, Miles does not have the usual obsessions about size; he has his very own. (Bujold, however, does point out, I think in Civil Campaign that Barrayaran men made sure that their women had the shorter weapons; this wasn't symbolism, it was ensuring that if it came to violence they would win.)

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

And Miles uses it for a (lethal) variety of information-gathering torture back in Warrior's Apprentice.

I'd forgotten about that incident. So yes, indeed, the seal dagger can be used militarily. (Though it was Bothari who wielded it at the time, wasn't it?)

-- Steve'd like to clarify that the blood used to stamp the document was supposed to be the wielder's own... though the idea of "forging" a signature with one would be interestingly fraught in Barayarran theology, no?

[jimhenley.livejournal.com]

This was really thought-provoking, Nancy. Thank you. I mean, the weapons thing aside, the cyberpunk comments seem acute.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

True enough, my error; Miles doesn't have the skills of his pet psychopath. (Yes, I acknowledge the description is...incomplete.) But, unlike the real world, he is responsible for what he orders.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

They are, I think, where the idea that you have to make your own safety comes from. He began in Red Harvest with a town where the crooks are the town leaders, both the town government and the businessmen; even where that's not true, you can assume, as in Maltese Falcon, that the cops are corrupt, and who have to make your own deal, and your own code.

[ndrosen.livejournal.com]

"The Girl Who Was Plugged in" may be the founding cyberpunk story, and it was written by a woman (Alice Sheldon, writing under the pseudonym James Tiptree).

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

The muggle world and the wizarding world should have had more effect each other.

Bear in mind that Rowling mostly chose to give us a children's/adolescents' eye-view. Societies often shield their young from certain realities, especially those they are not comfortable with, and the wizarding world was *definitely* not comfortable with the muggle world in the books.

What I'm trying to say is that the lack of effect between the muggle and wizarding worlds may have been a failure of execution on Rowling's part--not necessarily a defect that undermined the plausibility of the fantasy.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's what I call "cognitive fiction"-- it includes sf with world-building, some (most?) mysteries, some historical fiction....

There may be two slightly different flavors of the nerd thing as you describe it: how the world works, and "OOOHH, SHINY FACTS!"
The Pope said something recently about conscupience of the intellect, and while I'm presumably more in favor of it than he is, I do think it's a strong motivation for some of us.

I'm pretty sure your Catholic/Protestant split doesn't hold up. I've been using "purity" as a marker for Catholic authors. This doesn't mean all Catholic writers have it-- I don't think Tolkien does.

I'm pretty sure Jews have the idea of unclean, but don't have the idea of super-clean. There's polluted, and there's the world. Ok, there are the Kohanim, but (and this may be ignorance speaking) the idea is weaker than the Catholic idea of purity. That's for the religion-- I haven't seen the idea of unclean play strongly in fiction by Jews, but maybe I haven't seen enough by Orthodox writers. In general, I don't think evil/unclean has a strong an imaginative charge for Jews as it does for Christians.

Re: I think the civilization-sustaining parts are just offscreen

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Comes to that, I'm not fond of war novels and spy novels, either, though for other reasons. In war novels, not only does too much hurt, but they call for a degree of visualizing tactics which is too much like work for me. Spy novels tend to have too little sensory input.

I don't know if I'm taking noir the way it's intended, but I get the impression it has an underlying premise of "this is the way the world really is".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I believe that a more realistic world built on Rowling's premises would have the children bringing in more wizarding/muggle overlap because they're recruited at high enough ages to end up bi-cultural.

I also think the wizards would use and abuse muggles a great deal more than they do. And that the muggles (assuming a world closer to the Potter books) would know a lot more about wizards than the wizards think they do. It would be like the Victorians and sex-- people know, but they don't talk about it in public.

The world in the Potter books was immersive enough that what I see as implausibility doesn't undermine my enjoyment of them.
I don't think fiction needs absolutely meticulous world-building.

[(Anonymous)]

It's also in Rich Horton's Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

Paul Clarke

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

I believe that a more realistic world built on Rowling's premises would have the children bringing in more wizarding/muggle overlap because they're recruited at high enough ages to end up bi-cultural.

In some ways. I think there would be a lot of pressure for wizards to hide themselves from the muggle world--that part of Rowling's premise I buy. So I don't think there would be public abuse of Muggles, or a lot of wizard/muggle relationships. (Though the story of Voldemort confirms that there were certainly some, even if we didn't hear about them. Remember, in some ways Harry's led a sheltered existence and is naive for his age--and the books show us the wizarding world mostly through his eyes.) I suppose some wizards might engage in covert muggle abuse--practical jokes and the like. But given how hard the Aurors clamp down on extracurricular uses of magic, probably not.

But I agree with you that the lack of interest the wizard kids in Rowling's books display for the muggle world, and muggle technology, is highly implausible. Real wizard teens, I'm sure, would be smuggling in laptops and iPods, spending spare cash on hidden stashes of manga and graphic novels (even if they are primitive by comparison to holographic wizard media pics), and trying to figure out how to wire Hogwarts for Internet with a combination of magic and tech. Even if tech was treated as contraband. *Particularly* if tech was treated as contraband. :-)

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the books despite this kind of issue. But the existence of this type of implausibility bothers me a bit more than it bothers you.

[avram]

Well, I see two obvious nerdly attractions to certain kinds of fiction: world-building and puzzle-solving. Mysteries can scratch a puzzle-solving itch, and certain kinds of SF can do both.

I'm not saying that all Catholic authors write magical realism, or that all magical realism authors are Catholic (although the latter might actually be true; I dunno). I'm saying that maybe magical realism comes out of a particular way of thinking about the world that I associate with Catholicism -- I think tolerance for mystery is the primary characteristic I'm thinking about. Ambiguity and paradox, too. Fiction with more rigorous world-building seems more Calvinist to me, more literal-minded, with less tolerance for ambiguity. (Keep in mind that, while Tolkien was Roman Catholic, he was also British. Britain has a complex religious history.)

But like I said, this is probably just clever-sounding bullshit.

[avram]

Speaking of fiction that doesn't need meticulous world-building, I've been reading up on (and watching occasional episodes of) the old Star Trek, and wow, they were just making it all up as they went along for the first season! It's eighteen episodes in before they even mention the Federation -- up till then, it's clearly all just Earth. McCoy makes a comment in one episode about the Vulcans having been conquered.