Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356
64 Feb 2009 e arly 1980s, I was sitting in my West hollywood apartment with William gibson and a certain movie director who had some buzz going. More than one kind of buzz. We were talking about adapting a story from burning Chrome for this guy — a story that was as cyberpunk as anything is — and my defi ning recollection is how frequently the director excused himself to the bathroom only to come back sniffl ing, trembling and talking with even more rapid-fi re megalomania than before. besides adapting the story, I pitched him a script, which was then rather blandly called Macrochip, based on some idea sessions bill gibson and I had, and that Peter Wagg (producer of Max headroom) had optioned. And I remember that this director, who enjoyed macho posturing, said, "Just as long as it's got big fucking balls!" he didn't use our script, nor get back to us about Macrochip, and gibson's career became stratospheric (gibson earned it, by dint of talent and hard work). he was soon occupied, say, helping "Mick and Keith" with their stage design for a major tour, and didn't have a lot of time and… we never did anything else with the story. In the late 1990s I made a feint at turning it into a novel, which I called black glass, but by then my writing had sidestepped into a kind of urban fantasy and I wasn't thinking cyberpunk. but last year, gazing about me at the great wide world, I remembered black glass and was inspired to fi nish it — because black glass dramatizes technology as metaphor, a phenomenon coming clearer every day. not that technology as metaphor is new. going way back, there was the symbol of the steam train chugging across the plains, literally the embodiment of industrialization imposing its badass steel wheels on the natural world. In Lang's Metropolis and Chaplin's Modern Times, machines were metaphors for the mechanisms of plutocratic repression. but sometimes we miss the corollary, that real-world technology itself is metaphor, quite outside of drama, as much as that steam train was. Technology is an innately dramatic expression of our condition. Think back to when technologies were imposed on us that passed labor along to the consumer — when we all began doing unpaid work for corporations. Customer service personnel were replaced by programs that required us to press 1 if we wanted this, 2 if we wanted that, 7 if we wanted to scream. We now do the work of gas station employees, conducting the money transaction ourselves, fi lling our own tanks. Supermarkets started self-service lines where you and a laser scanner do the checkout person's job, and airlines now make us check ourselves onto fl ights at a touch-screen throuGh BlACK John Shirley on reanimating lost Cyberpunk for the 21st Century I do write prose. I'm not sure if it's fi ction. I believe anything you can imagine fully is true. --Richard hell, in a letter to the author, 2/17/87