Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/356
65 WWW.hPLUSMAgAzIne.CoM GlASS: station. It can seem like we're serving the machines at least as much as they're serving us. but it's the corporations we're serving. All that technology is itself, metaphor for our submissive relationship to the multinationals. Recently a news story from Tokyo fl ickered through internet news pages: A 43-year-old Japanese piano teacher's sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital persona, police said Thursday. The woman has been jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer… The lady identifi ed with the virtual world so thoroughly that her online reality had become more real to her than the "meat" reality. I know: happens every day. but how very metaphorical indeed… now, the underlying story and premise of black glass was conceived in an era when cyberpunk writing was more about the existential poetry of science-fi ction, more about the sheer sociological drama of technological impact, than about the possibilities of technology or glorying in prediction. We took a step back from it all. Late 1970s and well into the '80s, bill gibson, bruce Sterling and I used to correspond. (Using physical "snailmail" letters, in those days.) Around the time neuromancer was published, I wrote to gibson speculating on how using a word processing program would affect prose writing. he wrote back to me, as always, on a manual typewriter: "If someone's going to have style at all, they'll reach a point where the recording medium is 'transparent' anyway...My aversion to the thing is pretty mild… computers per se bore the shit out of me, all that techtalk and the furious enthusiasm of the hobbyist…I think I'll probably get one before I need to have one…I think a processor might affect my style for a little while…" Yet he invented the word 'cyberspace' on a manual typewriter. We weren't very deep into technology then — we were deeper into observation, and experience. Cyberpunk writers were infl uenced by James M. Cain as well as Alfred bester, and black glass refl ected that. gibson was typically all about "the street's uses for technology" and I was about two-fi sted men and women struggling with repression in a near-future dystopia. but was that even relevant anymore, when I returned to black glass in the year 2007? My sensibility was more or less hard-nosed pulp, with surreally artistic overtones, the way that punk rock is largely structured noise elevated by the poetry of defi ance. That's not very neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow — guys who personifi ed the 2007 paradigm to me. Yet when I looked around at the great wide world of 2007, I found black glass in it. The novel is a futuristic cyberpunk tale about a man emerging from the four-year dormancy of a special prison where his mind was shut down and his body was ordered to work for the state. on release, this ex-cop, Candle, gets embroiled in a fi ght with one of the 33 corporations that control the world, til both he and the corporate overlords are blindsided by an unexpected nemesis: a 'mindclone'. More properly: this is a 'semblant' program — a program that sends an indistinguishable realtime animation of you to virtual conferences, say, or takes webcam calls for you. It knows what you'd say and says it for you, and no one's sure if it's really you or not. but a new 'multisemblant mindclone' composed of certain powerful men and women, combined into one program, degrades into a psychopathic personality that takes on a life of its own...and in the background street rebels allied with Candle operate a black Stock Market using cloud computing. The consciousness-suspension prison is an obvious metaphor with technology is an innately dramatic expression of our condition