VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)
By:
July 2, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
SNOW CRASH | NEAL STEPHENSON | 1992
The first place I heard the term “cyberpunk” was in a graduate seminar at Yale University in the 1980s. I’d like to say it was Hillis Miller or Paul de Man — or even a visiting Derrida — who uttered it. But no, just a fellow grad student, making some point about Wittgenstein. Still cool! I was a SF/F nerd from way back, like so many other philosophy students I would meet as I engaged the tricky thousand-plateaus video game of academic life. Press play! Win the boss battle, and you will level up! Outnumbered by the hordes? Failed to find the health pack? Game over, player one…
The label was coined in a 1983 short story by Bruce Bethke, we’re told. But obviously the idea of reality-distorting technology, virtuality, disgruntled loners, and dystopian postmodern hellscapes is neither new nor confined to the “combination of low life and high tech,” that Bruce Sterling associated with colleague William Gibson. The subgenre was alive and well already in the work of Zelazny, Ballard, Ellison and especially PKD. Still, the 1980s offered up a special brand of nihilistic nostalgia for the future, of a piece with intellectual currents of anti-globalization, deconstruction, and cyborg politics.
Stephenson’s Snow Crash is named for the fuzzy dead screens of seized-up Mac computers, like the boxy one I used to write my doctoral dissertation. Published in 1992, it’s a half-gen younger than Sterling/Gibson, and frankly not as good. But the relation of mind to politics is more prominent here: Stephenson’s inspiration is Deleuzian, or maybe Lacanian. He saw glitches, not success, as the vehicle of insight. System failure is revelatory because it exposes the structure of thought. (Stephenson would acknowledge his debt to Julian Jaynes’s “bicameral breakdown” theory of mind.)
The sprawling narrative is wracked by emergent anxiety about connection, intelligibility, action, and power. What if we come unmoored from familiar structures of belief and coordination? What if sense-making proliferates rather than contracts? The story of Hiro Protagonist, katana-wielding freelance hacker and Mafia pizza delivery-boy, and his sidekick, skateboard courier Y.T., is a kind of Pynchonesque quixotic dream-quest. Their search in the Metaverse for the Snow Crash datafile, which may be all of a program, a drug, and a religion — what’s the difference? — becomes just a loose frame on which to hang a series of hipster flags of wonder. And yes, there is a boss battle at the end.
In 1998, the philosopher Richard Rorty gave Snow Crash a new currency. In his slim book Achieving Our Country, Rorty notes how Stephenson’s vision of a balkanized, corporate world, where nation-states have been supplanted by transnational capital and local strongman politics, is all too close for comfort. Rorty deplored the book’s “self-mockery,” but that does a disservice to Stephenson’s dark vision. The novel’s mission is the same as all dystopian speculation: not to predict, still less to dismiss, but to afflict the complacent.
The slang, the jokes, and the sexual politics have all aged poorly, alas. But the insights about democracy’s spectacular decline into spectral politics of identity, the dissolution of citizenship in a flurry of tech, power, and tribal enthusiasm, remain on point. Crash, burn, repeat.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on THE DOMESDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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