Cyberpunk Books

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 While penned many years ago, it doesn’t look a bit outdated.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.

After writing Hardwired Walter Jon Williams wrote this novel, set 100 years on. Perhaps it’s a comment on the possibility of a plateau in technological development but nothing much new has come along. Many more people live in space and a larger number of planets have been colonized. Interstellar travel has also been developed but it is only used by a small number of people. A certain amount of genetic engineering has taken place, though not with any great success. In Hardwired there were a couple of characters whose minds had been recorded and transfered into new bodies when their old ones died. This is still going on 100 years later and Ettienne Steward bought clone insurance just before leaving to fight in a war. He’d been a gang member in the urban hell of Marseilles and was looking for some rigidity in his life so he signed up with Coherent Light as an “Icehawk”, a sort of SAS style special ops unit. Obviously when the clone insurance kicks in after you die they make you a new body and, by some appalling means, overwrite whatever nascent consciousness is in it with your last recorded scan but Steward never updated. When he dies and his Beta is born his memories are 15 years old. It’s at this point, the birth of the “Beta”, that the novel starts.

Steward finds that his Alpha has been murdered and that the war on Sheol had been a Vietnam style disaster that ended with the arrival of the planet’s original inhabitants, the aliens referred to as “the Powers”. Then in quick succession his therapist, Dr. Ashraff, is murdered and he receives a mysterious video message from his Alpha, giving Steward tantalising details of his fatal last mission. This is the murder mystery that, in part, sustains the novel.

Then Steward meets Griffith, a friend of the alpha from the Icehawk days, who offers him a convenient way to get into space and find some answers to his questions.

“The Competent Man” is one of the major bugbears of the 1980’s Cyberpunk authors. Seeing themselves as literary and avant garde they rebelled against the military and paramilitary figures who dominated precyberpunk novels in the 1960’s and 70s’ who would save the world while the thankful common man (and/or lady) looked on helplessly in awe. The underlying idea (never actually lying that far underneath of anything) was one of obeyence to a sort of unquestioning and invulnerable facist military elite.

The typical Cyberpunk response to this was a character like Deckard in Bladerunner, an apparently faded cop, brought back for one more case straight out of film noir. A complex guy (or android perhaps) in a morally complex world. Case and Molly Millions, not out to save the world but to survive and maybe make some cash along the way. Turner in Count Zero was William Gibson’s attempt to write a “competent man” and push him to pieces. Morally complex people living in difficult, complex worlds where it was hard enough to know where the next meal would be coming from let alone what “right” and “wrong” might mean.

Steward is the “Competent Man as lunatic obsessive”. His belief in the purity of his own actions has made him totally corrupt. He has been indoctrinated into believing that anything is justified in the cause of achieving his objectives, that his “mission” is more important than lives or property or friendship. His attitude is that of the terrorist, indeed he is actually used in the book as a paramilitary terrorist to further one policorp’s goals but, perhaps because it is written from his point of view, the book treats him as a hero. This brings me to an impossible question:

…are we supposed to admire Steward?

When I read the book as a 17 year old I did. I guess this is the appeal of extremist causes to the young, the admiration for living without compromise. I only realized recently, while rereading the novel, what an asshole Steward is. There are small cracks in the narrative through which we get a glimpse from the other side. Dr. Ashraff, Steward’s therapist immediately after he is born has this to say about him:

“You fell for their program.” Steward felt surprise at the apparent feeling in Dr. Ashraf’s voice. It was hard to remember Ashraf ever being emotional about anything.

“Coherent Light taught you martial arts and zen,” Ashraf said. “Zen of a certain kind.”

“Mind like water,” Steward quoted. “The unmeaning of action. Union of arrow and target. The perfection of action, detached from anything except the spirit.”

“They were programming you,” Ashraf said, “with things that were useful to them. They taught you to divorce action from consequence, from context. They were turning you into a moral imbecile. A robot programmed for corporate espionage and sabotage. Theft, bomb throwing, blackmail.”

Steward was surprised by the harshness in Ashraf’s voice. He turned from the window and looked at him. The doctor’s fingers were steepled in front of his mouth, but Steward saw the anger in his eyes. “Let’s not forget murder,” Steward said.

“No,” Ashraf said. “Let’s not.”

“I’ve never pretended to be anything but what I was,” Steward said. “I’ve always been honest about what I’ve been.”

“What’s honesty got to do with my point?” Steward felt himself tense at the attack on Coherent Light, at the things that still provoked his loyalty. He forced himself to relax.; Coherent Light was dead, dead in the long past. Mind like water, he told himself.

“You’ve been programmed to divorce corporate morality from personal morality,” Ashraf said. “You’re a zombie.”

Steward frowned at him. “Perhaps,” he said, “morality is simply latent within me. You’re awfully combative for an analyst, you know.”

“I’m not here to analyze you. I’m here to give you a crash course in reality and then kick you out into the world,” Ashraf carefully flattened his hands on his desk. He looked up at Steward.

Mind like water, Steward told himself. Trying to stay calm.

It didn’t work.

There’s also the relationship with the Alpha’s ex-wife Natalie, who see’s through him. Whether it’s Alpha, Beta or even Gamma she knows what Steward is.

The reason that I focus on morality at all is that it’s one of the key issues in Cyberpunk. Science fiction is always much more a reflection of the time in which it’s written than the future. The 1980’s were a time of moral disinterest and one of the key concepts of Cyberpunk is the idea that if a thing can be done it will be done whether it’s humane or not. It’s one of the things that dates stereotypical Cyberpunk fiction because people in general are much more aware of, and resistant to, the potential horrors of new technology now. Not many people believe that the future is inevitable anymore. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in a morally ambiguous universe but the above passage humanises it.

Like Hardwired before it Voice of the Whirlwind is a piece of first class commercial writing in the Cyberpunk genre. Where it’s predecessor replaced the film noir stylings of William Gibson with a western theme this is a murder mystery espionage thriller in space. A damn good one in fact.

Hardwired was born in the aftermath of Neuromancer and shares that novels idea of a central relationship between a man and a woman in which the man is a techie and the woman the hardass. Fortunately it doesn’t share much else, it’s tone being less film noir and more dime store western. That’s not necessarily a criticism because Cowboy, the central male, clearly sees himself as a product of the dream of the American west. He used to be a pilot flying home-built deltas to make sure the mail got through but when that business got destroyed by the orbital Soviet he and others like him switched over to driving tricked out hovercraft called “Panzers” with which they try to smuggle cargo across “the line”, the border between the real west and the midwest.

You’ll notice the reference to an “Orbital Soviet”, the idea being that the communist Soviet block survives into the middle of the 21st century and prospers in space leaving the foolish and impoverished capitalist nations to wallow in the mud at the bottom of the gravity well. We forget just how unassailable the soviets looked up until the end of the ’80s and it’s not uncommon in CP literature of the time to find a depiction of a futuristic Communist state because everyone in the world of Cyberpunk literature just assumed they’d keep on being an important Superpower forever and that therefore they had to be depicted.

At one point Cowboy, flying in a delta (a kind of futuristic jet fighter built in a garage out of carbon fibre and epoxy resins) shoots down an unarmed private jet because one of the people on it has been trying to kill him. At no point does he try to find out who else is on the ‘plane. He has no moral qualms about it either, he just wishes it had been a more satisfying fight, yet elsewhere we find him worrying about the welfare of children who live (apparently as sex slaves) with his benefactor Rune.

While Cowboy sees himself as a man of principle (despite his unacknowledged lapses) “in it for the ride, not the cargo” Sarah is a prostitute and assassin (tricked out with a bizarre throat mounted cyberweapon) willing to do pretty much anything (undergo extensive plastic surgery to get close enough to an aging man who’s been cloned into a young Asian woman’s body to kill him/her) to get herself and her appalling brother Daud off of Earth and into orbit where everyone important seems to live. She strikes me as more of a cipher than Cowboy. I don’t believe that anyone in her position would be quite as resolute as she is.

The two protagonists come together in the context of a botched delivery, go on the run together and then separately until there appears to be a way to to fight against the particular block of the orbital Soviet that is trying to kill them. There is no commitment romance and economics and a perverted/happy ending. Like a lot of other ’80s Cyberpunk it’s an extrapolation of then current morals into the future. There’s almost moral vacuum where the novel’s soul would normally be.

While it’s hard to get excited about the tech on display in the novel at our point in the 21st century The handling of Cowboys enhanced sensorium (as when he plugs himself into the Panzer and Delta) are well handled and the idea of people prolonging their “lives” by downloading recordings of their brains into clones of themselves was newish at the time. Also the way economics is used as the most dangerous weapon in the endgame is clever.

Hardwired is several notches above journeyman cyberpunk. Walter Jon Williams may have written space opera and an earthquake novel since he wrote Hardwired but he seems to have grasped most of the essential elements of ’80s CP.

It may be coat-tail riding but it’s a really good ride.