Tag: William Gibson

The return of OMNI and unexpected happy

I am, dear reader, not a happy person. Not to get too personal, but I have of late been dealing with rather major life-altering situations, in addition to having people I love and care deeply about also dealing with major issues. To make it plain, I am a deeply unhappy, depressed person.

But today, I found a glimmer of happy that is touching me in very deep, profound, if likely brief, ways. I picked up the first copy of the return of OMNI Magazine to print.

OMNI was the first non-kids magazine I ever got. Something about the cover appealed to me, something about science or aliens or something I’m sure, and so my mom bought the 12 year old me my first copy, around 1983. And I was hooked, hard. And for the next 6 or 8 years, I had a continuous subscription to the magazine. I kept every one in stacks, in boxes. I waited for each new issue with anticipation and greeted it with glee. I have the most fond memories of my teen years around OMNI….

It’s where I first learned of the author and grandfather of cyberpunk, William Gibson; it’s where I read stories by Stephen King (well, aside from every book of his I bought during the same ages); discovered the biohorror art of H.R. Gieger; and it’s also where I fell into mad crush with editor Ellen Datlow. (Yes, teenage me recognized editor’s contributions to magazines and actually crushed on one — I wear the nerd mantle with pride.) I was sad when the print OMNI shut down in the 90s, and tried to keep up with the changes it went through online, but nothing ever stuck.

Then only a couple of days ago I heard of its return after more than 20 years to print! I was overjoyed! And so today, on a long-needed “day off” from life, I stopped into my area Powell’s Bookstore, and there it was. Glorious and beautiful, the quasi-futuristic font of the title as I remembered it sitting atop some surreal art cover. It’s a bit pricey for even a quarterly magazine, I think, but I happily plunked my $11 down to contribute to the funding of something that had made my teen years far more rich and interesting, and is now trying to come back in this age of dying print.

Naturally, being a cynic, my excitement was tinged with expectation of being let down by it being a shadow of the former (remembered) glory. Would the new iteration measure up? Would it be a cheap ploy for the parent company to capitalize, for maybe a short-lived issue or two, on nostalgia?

As I sit here flipping through the contents and the masthead, my glee solidifies! There’s an interview with William Gibson of all people! One of the fiction contributors is Nancy Kress. There are thoughtful articles on A.I., time travel, and deep space exploration. And, what’s that?? Ellen Datlow is the fiction editor? The eff you say!

But, since “growing up” and becoming a hardcore skeptic, something I had to come to terms with the old OMNI of my youth was that it often put good science fact alongside sensational pseudoscience and absurdity. (Which really is the worst… with sites like Natural News you know pretty much everything they publish is complete BS, but when a source mixes good science with bad, the bad gains some amount of unearned credulity.) So my heart skipped a beat when I saw one of the new magazine’s contributing editors is a skepticism hero of mine, Michael Shermer!

And wait, what’s this I see? All the chief editors and directors are women! Half the staff and contributing editors are women! The feminist in me cries for joy!

Welcome back, OMNI magazine! You seem to be marrying the foundation and nostalgia of your heyday with a modern, aware, and rational new outlook and approach. With that, I am now happily looking for subscription information….

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Walking Away With Cory Doctorow

Cory on the right

Last week I saw Cory Doctorow, for my second time, at Powell’s City of Books. The first time was just about a month or two after moving to Oregon, not quite three years ago. (I write a bit about it in the blogpost Best Week Evar! On that tour, he was promoting his non-fiction work Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free.) This time, he’s touring his new adult fiction novel Walkaway. It’s a … well, he accepts that it’s a “utopian” novel. (And that sentence should prompt paragraphs of discussion because of everything “utopian novel” implied and leaves out. And I swear to god I wish I’d taken Professor Burling’s class on distopian/utopian fiction. In other classes I recall him discussing utopian fiction is usually ironic or is in opposition to the implied dis- or anti-utopian world that the work either is a reaction to or implies.)

I’ve not yet read far into Walkaway, but from what I gather at the talk, the book features a culture of people who have, in the near-future, walked away from the postmodern capitalist world. Have, instead of fought against the hegemony and the cultural logic, done the most efficient and effective thing and disengaged from it entirely to create a society that uses gift economy.

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Best week evar!

So, I may have mentioned that I’m in Portland and loving it. There’s been so much to report and talk about, and I’ll have to parse it out over the next few days as I post more (promise!), but for this one, I want to report on the best week ever!

Where to begin….

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An Omnibus of OMNI!

Just learned today something I should have known for a very long time but for some reason has completely escaped my radar. Every edition of OMNI Magazine is available for free on the Internet Archive! How has that missed me completely? Thank you Io9 and Patrick. (When you click on the Internet Archive link, you need to scroll down and click “more” to get to the full magazine archive.)

I started reading OMNI when I was about twelve, around 1983. I remember taking the long road trip from Colorado to Missouri to visit family, and the parents allowing us kids to get a magazine. The cover of this OMNI magazine in the rack was compelling and promised SF fiction and science news, so I convinced her to get this somewhat pricey glossy mag for me. I was hooked! I begged for copies every month after until finally I was gifted a subscription. It was probably the longest subscription to a magazine I ever had (mainly because until I was old enough to have a job, it was paid for by someone else) and I think I was getting them right up until about 1989.

I don’t really recall OMNI being on shelves much after that. But those formative six years entrenched OMNI as being an integral part of who I am. Yeah, weird, huh? But it’s from OMNI that I learned about William Gibson’s fiction and started me on cyberpunk, made me familiar with the name Ellen Datlow and made a teenager a fan of an editor, of all things. (Wow, I was and am such a nerd!) …and I’m still a huge fan. The magazine was a slick, stylish, almost exploitative companion to the SF genre and exploding science culture. I believe it was a forward-thinking contribution, years ahead of its time, to the cool-making of geekness. Back then, in the 80s, it was still a social stigma to be geeky or nerdy, to be too into computers and genre fiction, and know more about the space program than what was mentioned in weekly readers regarding the shuttles. If you read SF and liked Carl Sagan, you were pariah as a kid.

But little did we know that in 15 or 20 years, geek would be chic, and OMNI helped lay the groundwork for that! Loving looking through these very familiar past issues that I’d read and reread so many times as a young nerd.

 

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“Blade Runner’s” 30th anniversary and cartoonists with projection issues

Well, yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the release of “Blade Runner” — the film I have, since I saw it when I was 11, invariably listed as my favorite film of all. Like most people (who weren’t up on the latest literary scifi trends) at that time, circa 1982, I had no experience or knowledge of “cyberpunk.” But the style and themes of “Blade Runner,” despite having had only 11 years of safe, middle-class life experiences to draw upon, etched themselves into my mind and from that moment, converted me from a die-hard Ray Bradbury fan to (although I didn’t yet know it) a die-hard William Gibson fan. After “Blade Runner,” my scifi aesthetic became dark as an alley and bright as neon. I didn’t yet know it, but the seeds of appreciation for the posthuman were planted, the seeds for understanding postmodern capitalism were planted — albeit deeper.

Though, on the surface, what that 11-to-13-year-old me most loved, was most amazed by, was the very, very, un-Star Wars, un-Star Trek view of the polluted and dying megalopolis depicted in the film. A film with the symbol of human progress and science: the flying car, set, unexpectedly, among the decay and nihilism of the cyberpunk world.

Thanks to having my awareness primed by “Blade Runner,” when I did finally come across William Gibson in the fiction pages of OMNI magazine just a couple years later, the short circuit was made and I became. I began to truly understand what it meant to question being human, what it meant to fear the future and question the myth of the bright and glorious future of humanity.

And, over the 30 years, every time I revisit “Blade Runner,” by accumulated life experiences informs my appreciation for the film and those questions and fears even more — and more deeply.

Gareth Branwyn wrote a short essay on BoingBoing.net a few weeks ago, remembering the truly sublime, life-altering experience seeing “Blade Runner” for the first time was for him. He had the life experiences to allow him to have that sublime epiphany in the moment. I had to draw that moment our over three decades into growing awareness punctuated by moments of, “Ooohhh, yyeeaahh….” (Be sure to read that BoingBoing article! Emotional.)

The latest stage of my developing awareness came, funny enough, toward the later years, when I discovered the works of the man whose novel, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, inspired the film. Philip K. Dick. There is no “Everything happens for a reason,” but it’s difficult to ignore the feeling that my history with “Blade Runner,” Gibson, cyberpunk, didn’t lead me to where I could encounter PKD prepared to appreciate and understand his work, his themes, his intent, from the first word of his I read.

Naturally, the plot of “Blade Runner” diverges from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep somewhat significantly. But when you examine it, and realize Ridley Scott had to pare a novel down to a two-hour audio-visual version, it really is an excellent, and indeed, faithful translation. And from the script he read and the dailies he saw, PKD thought so as well until he passed away so close to the premiere.

And this is where my assessment appears to diverge greatly from that of cartoonist John Bonner. In his one-page comic, “Comic Crits Classics: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick,” Bonner speculates that PKD would have loved the style of the film (which he did), but would have ultimately been disappointed and even betrayed by the lack of certain thematic elements. Not only is Bonner likely wrong about what PKD would have thought (based on PKD’s own words), but he’s factually wrong about the film not including some of the themes he seems to think it missed.

He has his Philip lamenting the film’s lack of “kibble” (sic) and the “exploration of the android-human dilemma.” In fact, he projects that his idea of Philip would be “heartbroken” at the loss of supposedly nearly everything from the book that didn;t make it into the film. Well, allow me to address Bonner’s errors.

The so-called android-human dilemma is at the very core of the film. In fact, the primary theme of the film centers around the dilemma of androids who are more human than human and yet are considered less-than human by the cold and resentful humans that created them. The entire film asks, “What does it mean to be ‘human’?”

And the kipple? (As it’s properly spelled.) The film is wall-to-wall with it. A couple of years ago I wrote a paper for grad school titled, “The Ubiquitous and Panasonic Kipple: Tracing the Consumption of Death, from Philip K. Dick to Don DeLillo’s White Noise.” As the title suggests, I deal with the concept of kipple a wee bit. From Do Androids, here’s what it is:

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up in the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”

“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives our nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”

“So it has taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.” (57)

In Androids, PKD has to, naturally, explain what kipple is and that the world is filled with it. It’s a novel. Ridley Scott, however, is (despite the heartbreakingly disappointing “Prometheus.”) an expert filmmaker. He doesn’t need to tell you about kipple, he shows you. Every set, every scene of the film is wall-to-wall kipple. The streets, Deckard’s apartment, Sebastian’s apartment, Zhora’s dressing room, everywhere except Tyrell’s conference room is littered with kipple in a claustrophobia-inducing crush. Scott doesn’t have to tell you that the decaying Earth is being weighted down by the cast-off corpses of consumerism — it’s evident in every shot. It seeps into the subliminal awareness of the film like the way kipple seeps into our lives. Scott “gets” it. And that’s probably one reason PKD did indeed love what he saw of the film:

I came to the conclusion that this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of BLADE RUNNER is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field. Since I have been writing and selling science fiction works for thirty years, this is a matter of some importance to me. In all candor I must say that our field has gradually and steadily been deteriorating for the last few years. Nothing that we have done, individually or collectively, matches BLADE RUNNER. This is not escapism; it is super realism, so gritty and detailed and authentic and goddam convincing that, well, after the segment I found my normal present-day “reality” pallid by comparison. What I am saying is that all of you collectively may have created a unique new form of graphic, artistic expression, never before seen. And, I think, BLADE RUNNER is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, canbe.

Let me sum it up this way. Science fiction has slowly and ineluctably settled into a monotonous death: it has become inbred, derivative, stale. Suddenly you people have come in, some of the greatest talents currently in existence, and now we have a new life, a new start. As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by BLADE RUNNER. Thank you.

And:

“I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull’s special effects for Blade Runner on the KNBC-TV news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.”

Mercerism was an, admittedly, prominent and important aspect of PKD’s novel, but to attempt to include that would require a film twice as long. And from PKD’s appreciation of the script he read:

After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know.”
[…]
“You read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact. It’s just exciting.

…I think PKD was perfectly okay with their not including that half of the book in this film.

So, I have a feeling that Bonner was personally disappointed by what he felt the film missed from one of his favorite books, and decided to project that disappointment into the voice of the author — despite the author’s own well-documented opinions of the film.

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William Gibson, The Art of Fiction

Paris Review has a great interview with what is, in my opinion, one of the great postmodern authors (regardless of if you classify him as a “genre writer” or a literary author). William Gibson has always had this incredible ability to really get at and critique the culture without making it obvious. Under the guise of gritty scifi called “cyberpunk,” was at the core a brilliant indictment of global market capitalism and the schizophrenic cultural logic that emanated from it. His later works, Pattern Recognition especially, is a deconstruction of the current culture we’re in the middle of and are too close to see the overall pattern to make sense of it.

See the documentary interview film, No Maps for These Territories. It’ll really make you think, and see things in a new way.

Here’s the beginning of the Paris Review interview

INTERVIEWER

What’s wrong with cyberpunk?

GIBSON

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

INTERVIEWER

What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?

GIBSON

I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.

 

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