Pah

What is New about Neuromancer (revisited)

I’ve been reading posts about Readercon and thinking about Neuromancer and the New Wave. In my post on what is not new about Neuromancer, I claimed that the language would have been new to readers who knew SF as Asimov and Clarke, but not to anyone who had read Ballard and Delany, and therefore that the language was not new. I made this claim from my own position of survey, but by doing so I may have deracinated the texts from their contexts: the letter columns, fanzines, and social consciousness of the time.

Consider these comments from Barry N Malzberg and Karl Frederick:

Basically, after Sputnik and before New Worlds, SF did not refract the reality of the world we lived in. Ballard was writing about the population in post-Hiroshima world. But if we look at Apollo, it was essentially in a recession, even as it seemed to be in the process of being born. Nobody was getting that.

Thinking back to that time, it seems to me that the space program broke away from SFnal themes, and aligned itself with the examination of moon dust. At the same time, perhaps the effect on SF was to turn it in the direction of engineering and science. By the time of the moon landing SF handed off the ideas to the scientists.

The New Wave was contentious in its literary aspirations, subject matter, and blurring of genre boundaries. Writers like Malzberg and Ballard attacking space seems emblematic of a genuine split in SF discourse.

Consider this list of writers who did not appear in Analog in the 60s and early 70s.

At Readercon, John Clute said:

Gibson offended people deeply when his books first appeared. Why were his texts so radically treasonous? It’s possible in Gibson to read a trash can straight out of 20th century modernism that isn’t loyal to SF relationships to things as usable by an engineer protagonist. Neuromancer has someone who is streetwise but does not have a notion as to what the street is. Things envelop us. It’s no longer a legitimate part of the SF enterprise to advocate a particular instrument’s future; texts are now governed by recognition. Demonstrates a sense of a word we are trying to describe, decentred from the story.

The comment about legitimacy suggests that rather than being treasonous, Neuromancer was radically successful where the New Wave was not. Perhaps it was initially offensive, but I imagine it became less so in 1986, the year of its sequel and the Challenger disaster. Perhaps the Campbellian reader then took kindly to the new kind of space on offer by cyberpunk. Much of the literary radicalism of the New Wave (nouveau romans, structuralism, cut-up techniques, metafiction, etc) was gone, replaced with the hardboiled style of Hammett and some lowkey drug imagery; but this was new enough to people who had just lost the stars. This novelty to such a large constituency can’t just be dismissed.

And perhaps in their encounter with this language, the Campbellian reader understood something new that the Moorcockian reader did not?

(Note: this is all speculative fiction by someone who didn’t live through the time and has little access to it.)