Wednesday 17 February 2016

The Seaside Town that They Forgot to Bomb: On Psychic Distance and Victims of the New


I had occasion to spend the afternoon in Hartlepool today for reasons it's best not to go into. Christ, that place is bleak. I wouldn't say anything more derogatory about it than that (a word beginning with "s" and ending in "hithole" springs to mind) because, let's face it, there are parts of my home town that could easily be described that way, and it always gets my back up when people who don't know the place say bad things about it. Also, we arrived literally seconds after this happened, causing us to have to take a massive diversion through possibly the worst part of town (the kind of place where people have horses in their living rooms and litter all over their front lawns), so I may not have seen a representative sample of the delights the town has to offer.

(There's also an argument to be made that I have a strong and unfair bias against the place after Hartlepool survived in the football league at Tranmere's expense last season, with our former manager at the helm too - the twat. But I digress.)

It is bleak, though. The main street by the train station was just shuttered-up shop after shuttered-up shop. About the only places that were actually open and had people inside were hair salons (I always see that as a bad sign). It was bitterly cold and windswept, with gloomy grey clouds permanently overhead - the kind of Northern English town which seems to be encased in tupperware. It also feels like it's miles away from anywhere: hived off from Middlesborough and Sunderland, which are themselves isolated enough in the grand scheme of things. It's hard to think of a place that is more psychically distant from the trendy multicultural hipster boom-town that the rest of Britain currently presents itself as.

I got thinking about psychic distance and cyberpunk. One of the best pieces of literary criticism I've ever read - which is blessedly short and to-the-point - is Bruce Sterling's introduction to William Gibson's collection of short stories, Burning Chrome (which I would still argue is probably Gibson's best and most cyberpunk-ish book). I've mentioned this before, but Bruce Sterling makes the great and true argument that what makes Gibson's stories so good is that they are not about the elite, but the down-and-outs - the people who are the victims of technological change. Sterling, if I recall correctly, uses the phrase "the victims of the new". That has always resonated with me: The Victims of the New. Gibson was doing something special in shifting the focus of science fiction to them, the forgotten people who get fucked over by what we (nowadays) would recognise as globalisation and post-industrial technological advancements which render their talents and livelihoods obsolete.

What's odd about this, though, is that cyberpunk after Gibson ended up morphing itself into a genre which was very much to do with big cities. Metropolises like Tokyo, LA, London. Possibly Blade Runner is to blame for this, but it isn't at all realistic when we look back at the previous 40 years in the history of the developed world. Big cities are still vibrant, and growing more so. Young people want to move to them, tourists visit them on city-breaks, they're full of bearded tattoo-festooned glasses-wearing intensely-relaxed types with lots of disposable income and occasional jobs as app designers.

The victims of the new aren't really in big cities - except for the occasional ghetto. They're in places like Hartlepool, Grimsby, Fleetwood, Barrow-in-Furness, Margate, Blyth, and Rhyl. Middling-sized places that once relied on a certain industry which no longer supports any jobs and which have been hollowed-out and decayed as a result. Places where family units have been ripped apart, where the schools don't educate the kids, and where the council doesn't have enough money to keep the street-lights on at night. These are the kind of towns that are the proper subject of relevant cyberpunk games nowadays.

I sometimes fantasize about writing a retroclone of Cyberpunk 2020, or just a cyberpunk game in general. If I did, I think it would be vastly more interesting for the PCs to be people in places like Hartlepool who refuse to be Victims of the New - who are using technology to fight, win, and/or steal for themselves and their families and communities a life. I could call it the Anti-Heroes of the New, maybe.

(*I didn't take the photo on this entry and I don't know where it is, but it could be anywhere in a psychically distant corner of modern Britain.)

13 comments:

  1. Full props to Sterling, a loony with amazing insights, but I always disagreed with his "victims of the new" thing. Johnny Mnemonic, Count Zero, and Case aren't left behind by "the New." They're just small fish trying to swim among the sharks. But they're not the sort who've been left behind by the changes around them. They're doing their best to game the system for themselves, and they've embraced the vibe of the times. But the times are harsh like "the old days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days" and those who strive for the big score are likely to end up missing the brass ring and falling into a pit of active chainsaws for their trouble. :P

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    1. Well, I think he was specifically talking about the stories in Burning Chrome, but I take your point - the characters are more like what I mention in this post: the anti-heroes of the new. People who refuse to be victims. Which is the stuff of interesting fiction.

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    2. True. The Black Cyber-pearl is not a story I'm dying to read. ;p

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  2. The older I get, the more I realize I will end up as one of the victims of the new.

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  3. This made me remember a South Bank show about The Smiths that showed Manchester in the 80s that described The city as still being post-war, at best mid 70's, rather than what the media would have us believe the 80s was like.'Dogfight' is my favourite Gibson story, so I agree about Burning Chrome. When there's nothing out there for you, it comes down to grasping at little hollow victories to make some mark on the world, scrawling your name on a bus shelter.
    At one point, living in the Byker Wall was as futuristic as life in the North East could be. I got as far as Teesside Poly.

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    1. Yeah, Dogfight is a brilliant story. My personal favourite is Hinterlands, although it's by no means really a cyberpunk story.

      A friend of mine has an obsession with the Byker Wall. The project seems a bit hare-brained to me, like a lot of what went on in architecture in the 60s and 70s. Part of the reason why so many Northern towns and cities are so bleak is that they look bloody awful.

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    2. Hinterlands really, really wowed me when I read it back in the late 90s. And I agree, it's not really a cyberpunk tale, it's straight-up SF. To me, it fulfils something Philip K Dick wrote about good SF being about 'conceptual shock' - there's a real awe and (better than) Lovecraftian terror in that story. My other favourite from that collection is 'The Winter Market', which is much more cyberpunk. It contains a similar 'artificial consciousness is inherently terrifying' vibe as 'Neuromancer', but in much more condensed form, and also really carries that cyberpunk 'farewell to the flesh' vibe.

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    3. Yes, "The Winter Market" is also great - and really disturbing in its own way. Almost like body horror.

      It's funny, thinking about it, how many of the stories in that collection aren't really cyberpunk at all. "Red Star, Winter Orbit" and "Hinterlands" are straight SF, "The Belonging Kind" is sort of playful SF-fantasy, and "The Gernsback Continuum" is kind of a postmodern take on the SF genre. I'd love to read a William Gibson-penned space opera.

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    4. "I'd love to read a William Gibson-penned space opera."

      Try Blake's 7. (And it certainly seems strange for an American to recommend that to an Englishman.)

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    5. Red Star, Winter Orbit feels fairly cyberpunk to me. The military space complex adapted into something strange and new by people on the fringes of society...

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  4. Neat insights about psychic distance here.

    I have to contest that Gibson's brand of cyberpunk was just as concerned with big cities, though; the genre didn't shift into an urban focus, it started there. The Sprawl Trilogy was set in, well, the Sprawl: the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a vision of big-city expansion that left no room for small towns all across the eastern United States.

    I agree that exploring the left-behind rural areas outside the megacities in a cyberpunk setting could be fascinating.

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  5. A friend of mine is working on exactly this kind of setting - working title is "Rural Impressionist Hard/Soft Cyberpunk Transhuman Outlaws": http://www.thecbg.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=801f7e264ad2361a8a1ac6193fa786ba&topic=210282.0

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  6. I live in Akron. We bleed rust here. Flint Michigan or Manchester, England, the rust belt is the rust belt. There is a dissolute sort of decaying civilization you either get or do not. We are the modern luddites, not wwite grasping why the world has passes us by. However, we will rage against the change.

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