в наши дни
09:49 | 08-03-2011 | Culturology, Lifeform, Literature | No Comments
Gunhead: One of the biggest things the community has been talking about is the possibility that modern life resembles cyberpunk fiction closely enough for the literary genre to become obsolete. What’s your take on this, and how do you think it’s affecting/will affect cyberpunk literature?
Bruce: Well, there’s really no way that modern life is ever going to much resemble, say, Rudy Rucker’s mathematical visionary cyberpunk fiction. Nobody says the the world is getting more like a Pat Cadigan novel. I don’t see this as a serious problem. No literary movement ever became obsolete because their novels were too realistic.
The world looks a lot like cyberpunk fiction in modern Russia[1], and they never cared much for cyberpunk. I’d say that the people most interested in cyberpunk right now are probably Brazilian and South African. And I suspect that’s because their societies have hit a level of technical transition where people are surprised and excited to see a lot of “cyber” things going on.
People in other countries who might have been cyberpunk writers no longer care much about anything “cyber.” They likely don’t have a lot of time on their hands to write novels. It takes a particular set of historical circumstances to nurture a movement like that. When so many magazines, newspapers and bookstore chains are “obsolete,” and when manual typewriters are unheard of, you can see that the culture that created cyberpunk in the early 1980s is itself obsolete. It’s not that the books were somehow too prophetic, it’s that the circumstances of making books have changed.
так, в общем-то, все и есть.
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[1] — не мог не привести ссылку.