“The cyberpunk lifestyle reads a whole lot better in fiction than as a lifestyle manifesto. Take it from someone who’s lived through it.”

“Picture this: you’re a former drug dealer who has turned to hacking for a living. You’re crashing in an apartment a bit older than Texas, surrounded by about seventeen computers, sleeping on a futon with a girlfriend with metre-long purple dreadlocks, and planning your defection from one net-based futuristic corporation to another over Korean take-away food. It sounds like something out of an early story by William Gibson, but the reality is a whole lot less glamorous. I’ve been there; I speak from experience. Cyberpunk is very nineteen-nineties: as a lifestyle statement it leaves something to be desired. Given that the late seventies and early eighties are the height of fashion right now, I reckon we’re about fifteen years away from the inevitable revival — I’ll be there, doddering around on a Zimmer frame and waving my fist at those young punks who’ve never used a command line interface.”

All the heroes of cyberpunk really epitomize the romanticization of a lifestyle that can easily become rather unpleasant. Whether it’s being a bike messenger, an anime otaku (or any kind of otaku, really), a punk rock musician, or simply homeless, it’s really not that great. Living in a squat with a dozen other people is all well and good until someone steals your stuff or the police show up and forcefully evict everyone.

I was going through some old papers and chanced across a copy of 21C magazine that included that quote. Interestingly, while some things seem dated, the 21C interview with John Shirley seems as relevant today as it did then.

“I mean, a subculture is by its nature reactive, which is one of its limitations. If you’re always reacting, you’re limited in how much insight you can have, and how much objectivity and how conscious you can be.”

“The fringe becomes the mainstream sometimes. Even where it doesn’t become the mainstream, the social organism feeds from the fringe in some way. It’s like a starfish. You have these weird little tendrils on the exterior of its body that takes in little bits of things and eventually it metabolizes the little pieces into the heart. The social organism is almost that cohesive and organic.”

But Shirley has always been the one who put the punk in cyberpunk with his rock musician sensibility and his Eclipse (Song of Youth) books remain some of the most important books of the Cyberpunk movement.

Recently, he revisited some of his other ideas and his novel Black Glass is both a look back at some of those ideas while retooling them in a thoroughly modern fashion. Talking about the book with H+ Magazine, on writing Black Glass, he said:

“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 defiance. That’s not very Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow — guys who personified the 2007 paradigm to me.”

I’m always fascinated by ideas and Shirley’s thinking about the present is definitely food for thought:

“We shift our center of identity into digital representations. We overlap with our technology. And sometimes that’s a useful enhancement — other times it only magnifies what’s wrong with us…”

For other reading and further thoughts, check out EdgeTrends online magazine.

As a writer who is very knowledgeable about future trends and an active imagination (a necessary prerequisite for any science fiction writer), you should give him a read over at Contrary Brin.