Cyberpunk, as the meme goes, isn't about mirror shades, it's about resisting being colonized by technology.
Since the TV adaptation of Neuromancer’s coming out in January 2027, here’s my cyberpunk reading list. It wears its biases on its sleeve because cyberpunk, in my opinion, is about people trying to survive a world where fascist men leverage technology to colonize and extract value from every aspect of our lives.1
Mirrorshades a cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling (Available at Rudy Rucker’s website.)
Then read Jeanne Gomoll’s response to Sterling’s introduction to his collection of short stories, Burning Chrome, “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ” in the fanzine Aurora.3
The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (as Raphael Carter)
Web of Angels by John M. Ford, which came out before Neuromancer and approaches what would become cyberpunk from a different point of view.
Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan, because I worked at Linden Lab and this novel imagines the complications of virtual worlds (a big part of cyberpunk) better than Snowcrash.
I’m deliberately omitting a couple of popular works because I think they contribute to people thinking of cyberpunk in terms of the surface coolness and visuals.
My friend Jack asked, why not Mona Lisa Overdrive, which may be the best of Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. And yeah, if you have time read them all. The novels work stand-alone, sharing some characters, but mainly the setting. ↩
The issue also has Joanna Russ’ response to Gomoll’s open letter as a letter of comment (LoC.) ↩
I guess she meant it as a joke but… I am sorry that I must once again write about trans things when I could be writing about things I enjoy.
The cisgender men serving in the US military are men. No one is challenging that. Hegseth may think they aren’t “masculine” enough or that they are “weak” or “sissy.” But no one is demanding to inspect their genitals before they use the restroom, suggesting they are better suited to child rearing than piloting fighter planes, or incapable of holding a ‘warrior’ mindset.
Hegseth’s proposal is coercive, and part of the freakish white masculine supremacist evangelical culture which he, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and others want to impose on the military and the US in general, but it is not gender care.
Cis men, in almost every case, do not need masculinizing hormone therapy. They don’t need the toxic culture which Secretary Hegseth wants to impose on them.
On the ephemeral nature of proprietary code, and side projects that live forever
Yesterday, Bandcamp laid off most of the rest of the engineering organization, replacing it with an “AI Center of Excellence.” So that means the most recent production code I wrote before I was laid off, in 2023, along with the rest of the union supporters, a rewrite, with tests, of the system that tracks the number of plays of a music track on the site, to report to artists and rights holders, will be paved over soon.
My friend Lynne Anne messaged me overnight, not about the layoffs, but that on bsky, people were linking to a project I wrote as a quick hack, over 20 years ago: The Unitarian Jihad Name Generator. I still get notifications, a couple of times a month, from the Second Life Marketplace for sales of a scripted, in-world item I wrote in my spare time a decade ago.
There’s at least two generations of iCloud apps replacing the iPhoto galleries I worked on in 2007. I think the contributions I made to Firefox and Bugzilla (bmo.mozilla.org and upstream Bugzilla) are still there.
Banks, insurers, and governments run COBOL that’s older than me. If you work in tech, unless you contributed code to Open Source, it seems that your code is only around until the next VP, the next fad, or the next layoff.
An old NASA safety film brings back some family memories.
This past Friday evening, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, fueled with liquid methane and oxygen, exploded on the pad during a test fire, obliterating the rocket and much of the pad and its ground infrastructure. It may be more than a year before the New Glenn flies again. This will delay NASA’s plan to land people on the Moon for the first time in over 50 years12, but the upside is that there’ll be slightly less Kessler Syndrome bait launched into LEO3.
The next evening, YouTube served up a NASA safety film from the US National Archives4. All about handling all the dangerous propellants used by many rockets-things that my wife, a chemist by training, is glad not to work with-hypergolics and monopropellants. Stuff with lots of nitrogen and oxygens in them. And anything with enough nitrogen in it is angry and does not want to exist.
The opening narration, over the footage of a first-generation Atlas missile exploding on the pad, is “this is not a common occurrence,” and:
My Dad worked at Vandenberg in the early 1960s and according to him Atlases blowing up was a common occurrence.
The Atlas uses kerosene and liquid oxygen; not hypergolics.
The film gets to business and explains why these toxic as anything fuels are used: high specific impulse and no need for cryogenics, and why they are dangerous to people (all those nitrogens, and the oxygens aren’t helping either.)
There are plenty of demonstrations of the hazards, with men (sigh, it’s the 1960s and NASA is not listening to the room) wearing SCAPE suits5. These are the personal-protective gear my father wore when working around hypergolic-fueled Titan II missiles at Vandenberg in the early 1960s6. Dad said you could not use the escape ladders in the silo while wearing one. They are nearly as bulky as a modern EVA space suit.
The film was made at Kennedy Space Center/Cape Canaveral and all the men with speaking roles have that strong Florida white guy accent. Especially the controller in the blockhouse. I’d not be surprised to see them racing souped up cars at Daytona Beach when they weren’t working on rockets.
Maybe China can sell Jared Issacman a Lunar lander and a Long March 10. Yes, I’m 🐱 as anything about this. ↩
I’m laughing too loud to hear you ask “but what about SpaceX’s Starship-derived lander?” ↩
Low Earth Orbit, where most of the thousands of satellites in the billionaire-financed constellations go (so that rich people can day trade from their cabins in Wyoming.) ↩
I guess Musk’s child men in charge of the Purge℠ decided it wasn’t ‘woke.’ ↩
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