PLANETDAMAGE

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.)

William Gibson, the novelist who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novels anticipated the Internet age while home computers were still rarities, received an honorary doctorate Saturday from the university in his hometown.

Describing his “significant contribution to American letters” and “pioneering role in the genre of science fiction,” Coastal Carolina University named Gibson a Doctor of Humane Letters during its 2008 commencement ceremonies.

“I was born here in the middle of the previous century, and spent the last 30 years writing about imaginary versions of the current century,” said Gibson, 60, in a short address. “Somehow I never expected to see Conway in the 21st century. I think it looks very good indeed, and I’m proud to be born here.”

(via - and more on - myrtle beach online)

2008 summer: another Mirrorshade icon hits the market. Black Glass - originally a co-op novel of William Gibson and John Shirley - is published via Elder Signs Press, finished up by Shirley himself. As Shirley states himself, this is both a Lost Cyberpunk Novel and “a pulp of new ideas”.

The excerpts are published in FLURB, an endearingly oldschoolish fanzine of another author of the Mirrorshades fame, Rudy Rucker. (link)

 

The message scrolling on the ceiling read : They backon letting prispissin toletday Caning putre back out bodof mindle.

Terrence Grist reached past Lisha and hit the decrypter. Now the text message read:

They’re putting Candle’s mind back in his body. They’re letting him out of prison. Today.

Grist lay on his back, re-reading the message looping across the ceiling screen; Lisha kept on working, straddling him, keeping his dwindling maleness locked inside the intersection of her womanhood, gazing down at him with a practiced simulation of reverence. She was used to Grist reading and phoning during sex.

He read the message again and, wanting to keep his erection, he continued moving his hips, trying not to break rhythm…

Candle.

You want to keep it up, don’t think about Rick Candle.

He’d penciled this bedding into a busy schedule and he didn’t want to waste it. Lisha was expensive—everything about her. Even her face, which he’d paid for: Grist was in bed with himself.

Vijay had been playing video games his whole life, but he’d never really become addicted to one until the first incarnation of Fuck Me. Adding an element of real-time strategy to the already-frenetic Gestalt Warrior combined construction, emergent behavior, and blob-themed violence in a way that both Vijay and the Selfish GAME found satisfying.

Game addiction burns hot and fast, unless the game itself keeps changing. Having spawned Fuck Me, the Selfish GAME shuffled its pedigree and came out with Super Fuck Me. This led to Ms. Fuck Me, which begat Fuck Me Heels, Fuck Me Millennium Edition, Let’s Have A Meaningful Relationship, and other profane heralds of blob megadeath culminating in Fuck Me Harder, which was too complex for anyone not skilled at earlier iterations. Fuck Me Harder put Vijay’s brain through strange transformations and he did not do well on the phone while playing it.

link

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

According to Lev Grossman, this is the brief summary for Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem - Wikipedia says it’s out on the 9th of September, 2008 and it’s going to be a space opera.

Meglehetős újdonságnak tűnik nekem a Brian Wood által rajzolt aggro-pol-cyberpunk Channel Zero, pedig pont az ezredfordulón adták ki, a híranyagok szerint kultuszképregény, tananyagként használják a Parsons School of Designban, valamint pár díjat is bezsebelt a biztonság kedvéért. Wood most - nomen est omen - a szerzői jogok rászálltával letölthetővé tette a Public Domain c. artwork-albumot, ami a történethez kötődő vázlatokat, képeket, mini-képregényeket tartalmazza. Olvassatok utána, töltsétek, vegyétek meg. Alább rövid szinopszis. Háztetőről guggolva vizsgálódásért ötven jópont, szintlépés.

Special interest groups have bullied the government into passing the Clean Act, effectively killing freedom of speech and silencing the country into submission. TV and God become one and the same as America wages its own Holy War against its citizens. Meet Jennie 2.5, media slut turned info-terrorist, out to save the country from itself, and restore free will and self-expression. (via)