PLANETDAMAGE

The guys at QuietEarth do a decent reading up on Gibson’s blog (which I admit not reading, partly because of the emptiness that Spook Country left in me) and the entry on the 1st of August finally drives the point home: it’s not Gibson who’s working on the movie script for the Neuromancer film project.

I see that I was too gnomic, yesterday, as some people now assume that I, like Warren Ellis, am holed up doing things related to screenwriting. Some even assume I’m doing something related to the mysterious Neuromancer film project, but in fact neither is true. I’m actually holed up (or anyway “distracted”) in the early stages of a next novel, and the recent web-advent of that interestingly monochrome one-sheet for the putative production was the first I’d seen of it. Suffice it to say that I am not much in the loop on that one. But then again I am somewhat the opposite of Alan Moore, in that I regard screen adaptations of my work with little more than simple childlike curiosity. (via quietearth)

I’ve met so many people recently who cannot cope with the shit around or in their life but they only need one spark to let it go, I mean really start things going. This is for them, told by none other than world-acclaimed comics writer Alan Moore, who’s behind Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

From Twitch to QuietEarth and a couple dozens of other sites you could have already gathered: we have the first poster for the Neuromancer movie. And looking at the poster, I didn’t want to post it for a few days, thinking very much it’s a hoax. Because the poster, as you can see, has nothing, nothing to do with cyberpunk at all.

If it were for a steampunk movie, I’d like it. Because how I see it from here, the gears, the nails and all the contraptionry, it has more to do with antique than neonlite and rain. The cranial cables, those are fine. The mood it conveys, could make me remember Straylight. “Based on the book by William Gibson”? Makes me say oh-oh. Hardwired readers say Gibson hasn’t even been asked to work on the movie. (UPDATE 1: According to Indiewire, it is Gibson who’s working on the movie script right now.) The fact that I found out a week ago that Hayden Christensen is not listed as Case on the movie’s IMDB page, it’s mostly discarded by other sites. (Hope, that’s a hard bitch to kill, man.)

By the way, I watched Kahn’s movie, Torque, the one everyone managed to bash. I would so take the helm from him. Give it to Aronofsky. Tsukamoto. Wouldn’t say Cunningham, he’s been long off the job. Give the role of Finn to Iggy Pop. You know why Johnny Mnemonic was a good movie? Because it had the pop sensibility and the iconic guys of its era. You know why it’s going to be hard, trying to revive the Neuromancer spirit? Because we’ve already sped past it.

Hackerek, virtuális valóság, mesterséges intelligenciák, végtelenbe nyúló neonrácshálók, cyborgok, a társadalom mocska a megapoliszokban, nincsenek országhatárok, csak megacégek. A tévé meg a designer drogok adják a pillanatnyi megnyugvást, a nanotechnológia bebújik a bőr alá, az információ meg szabad akar lenni, mindenki elnyom, mi meg harcolunk. Ez az irodalmi műfajként indult, aztán a szórakoztatóipar és a tömegkultúra minden egyes ágában gyökeret vert cyberpunk stílust leíró közhelyparádé. Cikkünkben arra vetünk fényt, hogy mindez hol és hogyan kezdődött.

Aki nem ismerné, örüljön, a japánkulturális Mondo magazin két számát nem kell most megvennie (ne örüljön amúgy, én hiába rovatolok oda, nem szégyellem megvenni, jók ugyanis), ez a cikk ugyanis már publikált anyagokból van összeollózva (copypastelve). 1983-tól 1996-ig taglalom a cyberpunk történetét pár utalással, ha sikerült az agyamról letenni az ékszíjat, majd folytatom tovább is.  A fenti videó a cyberpunk szubkultúra egyik legtöbbet körberajongott jelenete a Johnny Mnemonicból: így nézett ki az internet 1995-ben.

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After unsuccessfully coping with the proper recital of a tale of tribal girls killed, raped and then killed again by stone tree giants and shaven mud monkeys (and then casting them into napalm bath tubs), I’m back with some cyberpunk book generosity. If you all followed Twitter, you probably know if I have less time to update and even if I have time, it’s pretty hard doing it in 35Celsius, when the best thing my brain is capable of is trying to find its way out my ears. And I haven’t taken anything yet, god, no.

So you will receive a brief linkbox now, because my frontal lobes are screaming with caffeine overdose and I’m repeatedly trying to smash the new Baal CD in my mouth. Which makes a lovely picture, and Dead Rock Enemy is quite a hymn to clean out the epic monster lair, by the way.

Mermaid song.

BOOKS: Seeds of Change (Near-future paradigm shifts in everything from race relations (in Ted Kosmatka’s vivid and moving “N-Words,” where cloned Neanderthals encounter violent hatred from Homo sapiens) to the morality of uploaded consciousness (in Blake Charlton’s clumsy but charming “Endosymbiont”), with varying success) via io9, amazon link [xxx] In The Garden of Iden (fantastic novel about time-traveling cyborgs who work for the 24th century Company) via io9, downloadable bookin pdf

Sinred: they still have a copy of Black Man at the bookstore near you.

I’m off for a few days checking out what Bruce Sterling calls the Mafiosi-like features of the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels. (Want more? Click here for the podcast.) According to The Register, Bruce Sterling sez “I’ve been spending a lot of time in Europe and I’m about to write a proposal for a novel set in a future Europe (…) I did a novel called Distraction ten years ago, which is about a future United States - and a sort of political situation - and I’m very interested in European politics and European social organization and I’d like to do some extrapolating along those lines.”

pic by Joi Carey - gallery and iFrau’s LJ here

Newsflash: cyberpunk MMORPG Neocron 2 dies for a week [xxx] hollywood’s take on posthumans with four pieces of evidence [xxx] second life cyberpunk fashion at tsulea and slfaces [xxx] movie gadget friday with johnny mnemonic [xxx] armagideon on neuromancer [xxx] new cp book #1: mirrored heavens by david j. williams [xxx] new cp book #2: multireal by david louis edelman [xxx] trailer for narcosys, a new cyberpunk z-grade movie. i didn’t actually dare to embed the actual video.

Too bad I didn’t get Somers’ first book in Zürich when I had the chance - if I recall this well I had two problems with it: worldshots had only one slot for a book in his bag (and that was for End of the World Blues, which turned out to be more Japanese imaginative literature than cyberpunk) and the typeface was too big for a volume too small, so I though I gonna buy the omnibus in three years’ time. And now IO9 says he has a nano-noir on Amazon and yourmomsbasement has a lengthy interview with him.

The net is vast and infinite and it just gave a me a five-seconds window to the realm of Niigata-based bizarro-writer Made in DNA. Hello there, friendly bastard, I like your twitterfiction and you just gave me another powerboost to research deeper into burst culture. But more about that later, really.

Made in DNA is apparently a telephone stall with a backup speaker (look at his myspace, not lying here) but he’s got quite a hefty collection of outlets - JunkDNA fiction, for starters (that’s a tumblr with lots of fragmented literature, Headshots with Free Headshots for a LIMITED Time is quite a beast) and he’s also publishing to Burst Fiction - which is about brief blirps, really, short stories of 1000 characters or less (if you know the Hungarian writer István Örkény and his concept of one-minute prose, you’re getting there - but this is just for cultural blasé, really. SMS-prose drives the point home as well).

No, we have more, because the telephone of Truth is on a diet of pills the size of baby heads and his cum is sizzling with mescaline drops that kickstart the pain when they meat the urethra. Really, I’ve seen it on the internet, we have separate webcams just for these kinds of things. You also have a Twitterfeed of his fiction Bukkake Brawl at junkdnafiction, which is a very raw piece of work in terms of literary mechanisms and even rawer in terms of approximating it to how we process TV material - and also very, very similar to processing manga. Read this to know how much you can cramp into one image. Make your own. Grow your wings. (And you can read it at his myspace blog, too.) And finally some non-fiction by him about his life in Japan, the blog Moped Ronin. (And order his Media Whores ebook for a $.)

We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks.
We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries.
This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks’ Manifest.

Just came across another manifesto, one written by Christian As. Kirtchev, originally dated to February 14, 1997, reposted a couple of days ago. You can find the original version here and although it really feels outdated at certain points, you’ll so enjoy it when the flavour really kicks in. Get this wisdom.

10/ Every man will be dependent on the net. 11/ The whole information will be there, locked in the abysses of zeros and ones. 12/ Who controls the net, controls the information. 13/ We will live in a mixture of past and present. 14/ The bad come from the man, and the good comes from technology. 15/ The net will control the little man, and we will control the net. 16/ For is you do not control, you will be controlled. 17/ The Information is POWER!

Rioting is so much fun, being nine years old. (You get the quotation source page-perfect, I owe you a beer.)