Review By: Mr. Roboto

Authors: Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele (illustrator)

Year: 2006, 2009

Category: Cyberpunk Books; Graphic Novels

NOTE: This review will cover both graphic novels The Surrogates and The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone.

Synopsis: Lieutenant Harvey Greer investigates the destruction of two surrogates that is first attributed to a “flash storm.” A data-recording unit on one of them shows that they were actually destroyed by an electrical discharge from someone or something that would be called the “steeplejack.” Greer suspects that the steeplejack may be working for a religious cult called The Church of The Prophet, aka the “Dreads,” who are known to have a history against surrogates.

As Greer delves deeper into the mystery, his own surrogate is destroyed by the steeplejack, who plans to disable or destroy all the surrogates. Instead of replacing it, he decides to continue without it, and does find who is behind the steeplejack and the anti-surrogate plot.

In the prequel, Flesh and Bone, a homeless black boy is beaten and killed by rich white kids using their parent’s surrogates. This causes the Dreads’ anti-surrogate movement to swell, leading to a riot when the most reliable witness to the beatings is killed before them. After some negotiations, the Dreads are allowed to leave the city and setup a “nation” where they can govern themselves. In this book, Greer is a patrolman waiting to hear back about his detective test.

Back Stories. In between the chapters of ink-on-single color pages come some ephemera that sets a bit of background: A research paper on the benefits of surrogates, a questionnaire, news clippings, and even “pamphlets” from Virtual Self, Inc. (Life… Only Better) and The Church of The Prophet (The Dreads). These add to the story by filling in some back details about how and why the surrogates became so popular and despised. In particular, a news transcript about Zaire Powell III proves quite revealing on how he murdered his baby sister and then set fire to his home killing everyone else. After his release he founded the Dreads movement.

But is it cyberpunk? If you need to ask, you must not be paying attention. I can say with confidence that *YES*, The Surrogates series IS cyberpunk. If the beating at the beginning of Flesh and Bone didn’t beat that point home, consider this: Greer’s wife commits suicide when her surrogate is disabled.

But, there are still some questions left; Will the movie follow the novel(s)? Probably not exactly, but Blade Runner didn’t follow Phillip K. Dick’s novel exactly either. Will the movie be any good? I’ll let you know this weekend…

Among the latest in CP. In my last book review (The Shockwave Rider), I covered what is undoubtedly THEE prototype cyberpunk work. Now I give you a recent work from one of Boing Boing’s co-editors, Cory Doctorow, as he tells the story of a tech-savvy teen’s battle with Big Brother in a post 9/11 America. Though targeted to a younger audience, old farts out there should give it read as well.

Synopsis. The story is told through the eyes of Marcus Yallow, aka “w1n5t0n,” a San Francisco gamer who ditches school with his friends to participate in an alternate reality game. Things go bad as a terrorist attack mobilizes the DHS, who kidnap Marcus and company and threaten to “make them disappear” if they tell anyone about their captivity and torture. When an injured friend isn’t released, Marcus wages a personal war against the DHS, who have turned the Bay Area into a police state, by using the various technologies available such as Linux for the Xbox and trusted networking.

A Call To Action. A brief essay from Doctorow about his book shows that Little Brother isn’t just a novel written for entertainment; There’s a definite purpose for the book’s existence:

How do kids figure out which search-engine results to trust? What happens to their Facebook disclosures? How can they tell whether a camera, ID check, or rule is making them safer or less safe? In the absence of the right critical literacy tools, they’ll never know how to read a Wikipedia article so that they can tell if it’s credible. They’ll never know how to keep from ruining their adulthood with the videos they post as a teenager, and they’ll never know when the government is making them safer or less safe.
…
The difference between freedom and totalitarianism comes down to this: do our machines serve us, or control us? We live in the technological age that puts all other technological ages to shame. We are literally covered in technology, it rides in our pockets, pressed to our skin, in our ears, sometimes even implanted in our bodies. If these devices treat us as masters, then there is no limit to what we can achieve. But if they treat us as suspects, then we are doomed, for the jailers have us in a grip that is tighter than any authoritarian fantasy of the Inquisition.

The book was intended to get the youngsters to thinking about their security and privacy in a tech-saturated world of paranoia, and to have them and their parental/guardian/mentor units discuss the point of how to better secure liberty and freedom on this prison planet.

Conclusion. If you or someone you know is old enough to use technology, or needs to know about the consequences of its usage, this book is a necessary read. With the holidays coming up, this book would be an excellent gift for the hacker, gamer, or net surfer in your tribe. It just might open your eyes to the eyes of Big Brother.

Cyberpunk before cyberpunk. Before the word was ever coined, John Brunner created a world so close to what we now consider to be ‘cyberpunk’ that it needed to be read to be believed. It has a computer network that virtually… and literally… permeates American society, while secret government projects try to squeeze the best minds for all their knowledge to try to monitor a society uprooted by a massive west-coast earthquake. About all that’s missing are the cybernetic implants, although there are bio-engineered people and animals that seem to behave almost human.

What you have is THEE definitive blueprint of cyberpunk, even though nobody knew it for another decade.

Synopsis: The Pacific coast finally experiences “The BIG One” that kills millions and displaces millions more leaving them with nothing to live on except welfare. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation is experiencing their own kind of “overload” as varying levels of data access has left some without a permanent residence while the “privileged” live in their own kind of haven. To help cope (or, more like, to exploit) this flux, the US Government, under control of criminal elements, began programs to identify potentially “gifted” students to cultivate their “wisdom” to further the Government’s cause.

Nicholas Kenton “Nickie” Haflinger is the product of this program. His talents were being wasted in a failed education system where intelligence made you a target of gang violence. At the novel’s start, Nickie is back at his old academy at Tarnover where he is about to undergo a form of interrogation where his memories are replayed on a data-analysis system while he is unconscious. When Nickie was awake, he was subjected to further questioning and moral arguments with Paul T. Freeman, who is another of the program’s “graduates” from a place called “The Electric Skillet.”

Between the regression flashbacks and the moral point/counterpoints, we see how Nickie managed to elude the authorities while making a living (several, actually) using the skills he learned at Tarnover… and why he ran away to begin with.

Now for the good stuff! So, how did Nickie manage to elude capture for so long? Among his skill-set is the ability to program the data-net using nothing more than a touch-tone phone (PHREAKY!). That, and a high-level access code he stole. With these tools, Nickie was able able to quickly change identities to avoid being captured by creating… wait for it…

WORMS!

That’s right, worms! Those self-propagating programs that hog bandwidth are the result of this book. Nickie programmed his worms to erase all traces of his old identity and to create new ones when needed. He also creates a “super worm” that discloses information that the government has been trying to keep secret.

Another proto-cyberpunk classic for your bookshelf. Make some space next to True Names in your library. The Shockwave Rider is a book that must be in your collection.

‘How Stuff Works,’ Cyberpunk edition. Perhaps better known for his “How Stuff Works” website, Mr. Marshall Brain has since started his own site with some essays and stories. Out of curiosity, I did a search for “cyberpunk” on HowStuffWorks.com and they returned an article on “How Hackers Work,” so he/they seem to have an idea about cyberpunk. Manna also reflects this.

Synopsis. The story is told first-person by Jacob Lewis105, a burger-flipper at Burger-G when, on May 17, 2010, the end began. A simple PC in a back corner of the Burger-G had software installed on it called “Manna” (as in manage) that could micro-manage the workers via voice synthesis through headsets. Before long, other businesses replaced managers with Manna and clones. Eventually, this lead to a two-tiered society of the uber-rich execs and the minimum-wage slaves… until robotic technology advanced to the point where the slavers are no longer required, and a good portion of the human population ended up in unemployment tenement “projects.”

Short, but sweet. Brain’s story is surprisingly good, but the ending did leave me wanting more. I wanted to see if the Manna-net would try to take over the paradise Jacob finds. But for eight “chapters” of 2-3 pages each, it is a good, easy read. If only it was in PDF or some e-text form…

Book Review By: Mr. Roboto

Author: Vernor Vinge

Year: 1981

Category: Cyberpunk Books

This opening paragraph pretty much describes the premise of True Names. This novella, released three years before Neuromancer, gives us a cyberspace adventure that has influenced many a cyberpunk writer… possibly even Gibson himself.

Synopsis: Roger Pollack is a computer wizard who frequents the “Other Plane” as “Mr. Slippery” and has other wizard friends whose “true names” are kept secret, even from each other. He is confronted by agents of “The Great Adversary” (The US Government) who has reason to believe that another wizard named “The Mailman” is recruiting other wizards for some type of coup on the net that can lead to control of reality.

Everything you’d expect from cyberpunk… and then some. The “Other Plane” connects to many nets, nodes, and databases. Anyone who has the ability to connect and control them can become a virtual god, and when Mr. Slippery finds out who… or what… The Mailman is, you’ll understand why this novella is definitely cyberpunk.

Don’t believe me? Read it online. (BIG ACK signal to “The Rectifier,” though I have yet to find the zip file he mentions.) You can still find the story for sale by itself, mostly online, or as part of a collection like True Names & Other Dangers and True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.

Read it and see how cyberpunk it is!

Book Review By: Mr. Roboto

Author: Richard Morgan

Year: 2002

Category: Cyberpunk Books

The next generation of cyberpunk has arrived… in 2002. Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel has brought forth a new era of cyberpunk literature that has already produced dividends from Ryan Span (Street: Empathy) and Mr. Morgan himself with two sequels and an unrelated book. JIVE Magazine has gone so far as to name him The New King of Cyberpunk Fiction. Even now, a movie is being made from this book (IMDb reference - Empty for now) due to be released in 2009.

Cyberpunk is said to have that “noir” atmosphere about it, borne of hardboiled detective tomes. Altered Carbon takes the noir factor and overclocks it to make it read like a detective novel. Or, maybe it’s a detective novel that takes the cyberpunk factor and overclocks it to make it read like a cyberpunk novel. However you want to look at it, Altered Carbon is a novel that needs to be read, then read several more times.

They wear their stacks on their sleeves. To better understand the premise of the novel, a quick overview of the key technologies featured…

First, you have “sleeves,” cloned bodies for when you die. For the sleeve, there’s the “stack,” a recording device that’s implanted at the base of your brain when you’re born. The stack records and stores your every thought, emotion, sensation, memory, etc. Your digitized brain can then be uploaded to virtuality, or transmitted (”needlecast”) across the galaxy, where a new sleeve awaits your arrival on another planet.

If your meat body dies, the stack is removed and “re-sleeved” (implanted into a new clone body) so you can continue your existence. That’s IF you have the insurance, loving relatives, or a sleeve-fund ready to pay for the new bod. Otherwise, you go into storage, possibly for centuries. Also, the stack itself can be corrupted or outright destroyed, resulting in “real death.” Some are fortunate, and rich, enough to have their stacks backed up like you would back up your hard drives. Backups are done every couple of days, so if your stack is destroyed, the backup is re-sleeved and you loose a day or two of memories. For someone who has the cash, they can have several sleeves at the ready along with a backed up stack, theoretically enabling them to live forever. Those who have lived through several sleeves are known as Methuselahs, or simply “Meths.”

One such Meth is Laurens Bancroft. Bancroft recently had his head destroyed, along with his stack. Because he had a backup of his stack done a couple of days before, he was able to be re-sleeved, but has no memory of the events leading up to his “death.” The police said Bancroft committed suicide, but he doesn’t believe them and hires an outsider to conduct his own investigation. That outsider’s name: Takeshi Lev Kovacs.

The universe through Kovacs’ eyes. Kovacs is a former U.N. “Envoy,” a form of super-soldier who undergoes special spiritual/psychological training to prepare them to adapt new new bodies quickly for interstellar deployment. Often these new bodies are augmented with neuro-chemical implants to enhance their sleeve’s senses and abilities. Because of their training Envoys are banned from holding government jobs on any world and tend to turn to a life of crime upon leaving the corps. Kovacs was serving time in storage for an unspecified crime when he gets needlecast to Earth and re-sleeved as Elias Ryker, a Bay City (San Francisco) cop, to investigate Bancroft’s death.

From the prologue, where Kovacs is killed, to the end of the novel, we get to experience Kovacs’ adventure through his senses. In a way, this book may actually be Kovacs’ stack transmitted back from 500 years in the future. During his investigation, we see how his Envoy training serves him, especially during a particularly nasty torture in virtuality.

Catholics… or How religion poisons the future. An interesting thread in the novel concerns Resolution 653, a case in a U.N. court where a dead Catholic is going to be subpoenaed and made to testify by re-sleeving. The Vatican has decried re-sleeving as blasphemy, claiming that a human soul is not saved on the stack but goes directly to God upon death. About the only good news about this is that Catholics are easy targets for murder, since they won’t be re-sleeved to testify against their attackers.

This book needs to be imprinted upon your stack. If you preferred to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? over watching Blade Runner, Altered Carbon is something to put on your “must read” list. Just like reading cyberpunk novels? Here you go. Want to see what the next generation of cyberpunk fiction is like? Take a look. Prefer detective novels over cyberpunk? You’re at the wrong site, but Altered Carbon is definitely noir enough for you.

Page 2: Quotable quotes from Altered Carbon –>>

Book Review By: Mr. Roboto

Author: Ryan A. Span

Year: 2008

Category: Cyberpunk Books

Website: Street of Eyes

Reports of cyberpunk’s death in literature are premature. Even now, there are writers who have been inspired to write their vision of a techno-dystopic near future, like Mr. Ryan Span (aka “Winter”). His Street Of Eyes website has the serialized version of this soon-to-be released book, and a second book in progress waiting to appear on the site.

Much of what you would expect in cyberpunk literature is here: Hackers, cybernetic soldiers, polluted planet, grim future… along with a couple of (relatively) new elements like telepathy and nanotechnology thrown into the mix. To say Empathy doesn’t bring much new to the table may not be far from the truth, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of the novel. Many have been inspired by the works of Gibson, Sterling, and company, but don’t have the talent… or balls… to put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard these days) and write such works. Ryan Span seems to have the balls to do so, and the talent to make a pretty good story out of it.

The cast of characters. Here now is a brief review of the upcoming dead-tree edition, only with a focus on the main characters to limit spoiling the storyline:

Not quite Neuromancer, but definitely worth reading. While cyberpunk fans wait for the next Neuromancer or Blade Runner to get excited about, Street may be something to pique their interest.

And who knows… in twenty years, somebody may write a cyberpunk novel or film a movie based on Street.

Overview: Akira Club is an art book featuring cover art, sketches and outtakes from the paperback Akira collections. It’s a little pricey at thirty bucks when most the artwork is in black and white, and another set back is the format, which doesn’t match the Akira books. Though mostly presented in black and white, Otomo Katsuhiro’s artwork will blow your socks off. The artwork in Akira Club is incredibly detailed and the author’s commentaries and sketches really show you how much work has been put into the product. While penned many years ago, it doesn’t look a bit outdated. Akira is an epic piece of work at over 2000 pages and has won awards and prestige around the world. The animated movie based on the manga re-introduced the west to Japanese animation in the nineties. The quality of animation mirrors that of the manga and although large parts of the manga were cut from the movie, it still gets the story through to the viewer pretty well.

Background: The world of Akira is set after world war three and the destruction and rebuilding of Tokyo. Themes include transhumanism, corruption, low life and high tech and Akira comes across as incredibly cyberpunk, mostly focusing on the life of those on the ground in a super industrialized and militaristic Neo Tokyo. The artwork in Akira Club pretty much represents these themes in great detail. There’s a contrast between the giant, symmetrical skyscrapers which dominate the Neo Tokyo skyline and the life on the ground where there are a lot of organic and seemingly random shapes. There’s also a recurring theme of order put in chaos, like the front cover image; smooth motorcycle parts are jumbled together in a giant mess creating disarray where there once was a finely tuned machine, everything put together neatly.

A lot of the magazine covers show a destroyed Neo Tokyo behind mostly young people. The city being destroyed by a secret weapon created by the government, this gives a pretty strong image of the world being handed over to future generations ruined by our predecessors’ lust for more power through technological advances.

The Sections: The book is divided into four sections:

• Section One: The first section collects several full colour paintings of magazine and book covers, T shirt designs and promotional posters, supplemented with preliminary sketches and short comments from the author; Otomo Katsuhiro.

• Section Two: The second section is the biggest and focuses on the covers used for each chapter when Akira was serialized in Young Magazine. These weren’t included in the paperback collections because they’d break up the natural flow of the story, so having them collected here is kinda nice as the artwork is generally stunning. These do not include comments on the artwork but little musings on life by the author, which I personally found incredibly uninteresting.

• Section Three: The third section collects all sorts of odd artwork used in advertising and merchandise, there’s a lot of great art, but all in all it’s not as interesting as the last section of the book. Also included here are notes on the translation of Akira.

• Section Four: The fourth section is probably the coolest out of the whole book, although I wish it were longer. Titled, “Unpublished Works,” it shows panels and scenes that were never included in the finalized Akira comic books, some pages include parts that were included in the serialized version of the comic, but were cut from the paperback collections.

The Bottom Line: Having “read” through the book, I feel a little let down; it’s like there’s something missing. The artwork, though awe-inspiring, is as noted mostly in black and white, and I feel there could have been more colour illustrations put in to compensate for the large number of cover illustrations from Young Magazine. The last part of the book could also have been a little longer. At two thousand pages, I’m sure there is more unpublished material than on display here. I’d like to see the parts excluded from the paperback collections in better detail, preferably in entirety, as I’m sure others are as well. I’ve only had access to the translated collections and would like to know what I’ve been missing out on.

Should You Buy It? All in all, Akira Club is really for those with specialized interests, such as rabid Akira fans, anime historians and artists looking for inspiration in cyberpunk drawings of landscapes and dystopic scenarios. And even for these select few, the book isn’t perfect. However, I think of it as a nice addition to my bookshelf and I browse through it regularly, still “Ooh’ing” and “Aah’ing” at the incredible art. I wouldn’t say this is a must for cyberpunk or indeed Akira fans, but if you think you can afford it, it’s a good purchase and a great gift for those already familiar with the universe and story, be that through the manga or the anime version of Akira.

I’ve never been to Los Angeles but I tend to believe everything that’s written about it. It’s so easy to buy the idea that Americans would take heaven on earth (the beautiful oceans on one side, the awesome mountains on the other) and then slap their own putrid media hell right in the middle of it. Pat Cadigan’s future LA is actually a lot more pleasant than some cyberpunk futures. It’s not yet a dystopia. In fact there are plenty of worse places to live in our present reality. The worst things would seem to be terrible television (which is dominated by various subdivisions of porn and live action news reports) and appalling traffic control software (though why people don’t just ignore it I don’t know), not the terrible things you would expect to see in a grim future vision.

The plot here is this: a multinational corporation called Diversifications (also known as “The Dive”) buys a small conglomerate that have managed to invent a computer 2 brain interface but fail to foresee the consequences. It’s up to an adhoc group of hackers and video producers to put the genie back in the bottle. When I originally read the novel it didn’t occur to me to question this but where are the authorities in all of this? They’d just sit back and let the network go down the tubes? Where are the hackers from other parts of the world, or even other parts of the USA? Or even Diversifications themselves? Where are all these people when the net goes down?

In terms of technology, all information seems to be carried over an internet style network, whether it be TV or GridLid (the useless traffic monitoring system) or email or videos. Videos have, for the most part, replaced live performance and are made by the “Synners” of the title using various techniques including full body motion capture “hot suits”. There are video games (some of which use “hot suits”) but there don’t seem to be any coherent 3d game worlds or Virtual spaces in the net. Whether the network is meant to be our current Internet is unclear to me but it would certainly seem very similar. It also seems to have some unusual properties though: there’s a virus (Dr Fish) that appears to be able to mutate itself and penetrate any number of systems. This leads to the creation of some kind of AI that lives, in a distributed form, all around the net. This is one of a number of really shaky ideas in the novel. AI is not an emergent property of networks. Other ideas are pseudo technical nonsense. At one point Sam, trying to combat the metaphorical “Genie” in the net:

[…]Finding alternate routes of communication. She’d just never tried it with such a widespread virus waiting to pounce.
The virus had a sort of three-dimensional perception that required her to keep shifting her own antiviral protection in a cycle that seemed random with sudden bursts of regularity.
[…]
Within a couple of hours, she had achieved a point where she could open an access anywhere in the net and remain undetected, provided she didn’t try to do anything else except sit like an immovable bead on a string.
[…]
Some hours later she had managed a routine of virtual sympathetic vibrations, a kind pf virtual music. It wouldn’t accommodate real-time communication, only short messages in quick bursts.

I’m not sure this stuff is even meant to be believable. I won’t go into where the “virus” in this quote comes from (it’s not DR. Fish) but I will say that it’s pretty unlikely that a virus could come from there, the net and computers would have to work in a vastly more complicated way than they do in reality. This is where I suspect I will disagree with many people: sometimes a thing doesn’t have to be technically true to be poetically true. The intellectual bobbing and weaving conducted by the hackers in the book is a pretty good representation of the way hackers would like to see themselves; innovative, tireless problem solvers who can crack anything given enough caffeine.

Where Cadigan gets things right is in terms of consumer electronics. People carry “chip players” which are somewhat like MP3 players in that they are just a unit of storage with the specialised hardware to play audio files. I don’t think this idea existed at the time. No one bothers with desktop machines either, even the computers that appear to be desktop consoles are laptops. As previously mentioned TVs are just simplified computers attached to the net. People have been predicting that TVs would end up with huge flat screens since the 1950s so I can’t give too much credit for Cadigan’s use of them here but credit should be given for using (I don’t know who invented it) the term “narrowcasting” before it was anything like a buzzword.

The frequent references to porn are worth discussing, if only to give credit where it’s due to Cadigan for realising that the net would be dominated (at least for a while) by it. It’s clear that mainstream TV is meant to have emulated the look and feel of pornography in it’s mainstream shows while, simultaneously, the viewing public have opened their minds to such an extent that they can be aroused by almost anything. The actual form of “food porn” or “war porn” is not discussed but, from the way it’s described, I don’t think it’s meant to be nude women covered in stuff, just long, lingering lustrous shots of gammon steaks or corpses. (Whether this could actually be described as “porn” (which seems to me to be a very specific thing) is open to debate. I don’t think it makes sense to broaden the definition of a word to the point where in means nothing). While TV already seems to be about gluttonous consumption in the real world I’m not convinced that we’ve gotten to the point where people are actually masturbating over pictures of car tires and anchovies. I guess we’ll see if we get there from here. It’s interesting that there don’t seem to be too many characters in the novel who actually watch all this porn, after all TV can’t survive without someone watching it. I guess the unwashed masses who don’t have any say in anything (including the novel, really) must be consuming it.

In spite of some unreasonable technology and the standard “loveable cyberpunks beating the corps” plot I actually really like Synners. It’s all about the characters. Gabe Ludovic, the commercials producer, is a rounded character, kind of dork. His legally emancipated ex-daughter, Sam, is a realistically know-it-all teenage hacker. His wife is a one dimensional cut glass bitch. Gabe’s co-workers have accurate office politics. There’s a great scene in the Dive’s lunch area where media-whore types are just sitting ’round shooting the shit in exactly the way that I imagine they do. The relationships are well handled, particularly that between Visual Mark (video producer and one of the first to receive the c2h sockets) and Gina Aeisi(another video producer). The protracted rituals of these character’s lives, in which they circle around each other but never quite “connect”, seem very real to me. Bosses dump on underlings before being dumped on themselves.

If you absolutely demand technology that seems real and avant-garde plotting then you best read something else. Otherwise you could do worse than read this.

You can tell when a particular movement, genre, or meme has reached mainstream status; They do parodies, and write books on how to make it (or fake it) in the group. It should come as no surprise that cyberpunk had its turn in 1995. With movies like Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, Strange Days, and Virtuosity in theaters that year, there was no question that cyberpunk had arrived.

And with it, this book.

The Cyberpunk Handbook was written primarily as a spoof; A way for newbies and the clueless to become familiar with the genre without having to actually immerse themselves in the nuances. In other words, how to fake it until one makes it, assuming one wishes to risk his/her life by faking it around real cyberpunks (Some at the time were not hip to cyberpunk suddenly being mainstream).

One way the book does this is by rating media and tech like we do on Cyberpunk Review, only they use shuriken (one to four of them) instead of a scale of ten stars, plus they also use one to four beanies to indicate “nerdly interests.” The required stuff is here; Neuromancer (four shuriken), Snow Crash (also four shuriken), Blade Runner (another four), Johnny Mnemonic (only two, plus one beanie), and others. They also rate certain tech of the times a cyberpunk would need like a laptop, heads up display, and personal communicator.

The Cyberpunk Handbook also gives some overview as to how cyberpunks dress (black leather jacket, boots, mirrorshades, laser pointer.) with details for certain sub-genres like ravers and goths. It also reveals certain character traits like the subdued swashbuckling, quiet assurance, and a touch of menace. There’s some info on comics, music, and food (Ramen noodles and Jolt) that cyberpunks would be interested in. Also revealed are the real reasons why cyberpunks attend cons and the “secret” hierarchy of the cyberpunk ranks from newbie to elite. There’s even a special “Parental discretion section” featuring politics, religion, SEX, and a couple of recipes. Finally, a couple of crossword puzzles, just to see what you’ve learned.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? The book’s information seems relevant enough… for 1995, but for 2007, it doesn’t quite hold up and it’s age does show. For one thing, the book tends to assume that cyberpunk and hacking are the same. That might have been true then (may still be today), but now there’s more to hack besides computers. Personal devices like iPods, multi-function cellphones, and Blackberries are now the cool toys, cybernetic implants are available as RFID chips, advances in nanotechnology are almost daily, and while you can’t reprogram your genes to become an X-Man, biotechnology is making strides to make better medicine… and electronics.

The Cyberpunk Handbook hasn’t withstood the test of time, but the authors could hardly be faulted for that; They could only work with the tech of the time. After all, the book was released four years before The Matrix, when nanotechnolgy was still a science-fiction concept, the technology for brain-computer interfacing was primitive at best, and the human genome was still being mapped out. If a person wants to be a cyberpunk today, they can take an English literature course in college (maybe they offer it as non-credit extended education), or save a few thousand by perusing sites like Cyberpunk Review. It would be interesting to see an updated version for post-Matrix cyberpunks. Still, The Cyberpunk Handbook is an interesting look into our 8-bit past as it offers a glimpse into our mid-90s breakout.