Cyberpunk Review: Rewired

Last week I looked at the classic cyberpunk anthology "Mirrorshades" and found it contained much quality fiction -- even if some stories might not strictly speaking qualify as CP, most were entertaining and mind-expanding nevertheless. This week I turn to "Rewired: the Post-Cyberpunk Anthology" (ed. James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, 2007). This much more recent anthology serves not so much as an update on the CP field as a survey of some different directions CP's ideas, stylings and conventions have been taken in recent years. Some stories are classic CP and could have been written in 1986, others are fresh and new and surprising. Here are some that stood out for me:
"The Wedding Album" by David Marusek. A definite highlight of the anthology, this story explores the "lives" of uploads after their original human beings (who created them for commemorative purposes) have long passed on. This story manages to pack upload morality, a singularity or two, biopunk constructs, ruminations on the Turing test and a dozen other themes and ideas into some 50 pages, all the while making you care for digital personalities who may not even, at root, be truly sentient. Dense with ideas and wonderfully executed.

"Daddy's World" by Walter Jon Williams is also an upload story, dealing with a boy who is forced to "grow up" uploaded. Delightful whimsical imagery mix with some of the more disturbing implications of uploading (& AIs in general) for an entertaining and thought-provoking ride.

"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe is by far the most bizarre story in this anthology, and perhaps the most interesting. It concerns a hive-mind state of Tennessee in a world where math lives and roams the landscape, and where indoctrination can be passed along via a song such as this:

Tonight we'll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee. . .

Wonderfully weird and mind-expanding. Of all the stories in the anthology, this one might be honestly called cutting-edge cyberpunk.

"Search Engine" by Mary Rosenblum details an all-too-plausible world where intensive data mining of everything everywhere makes everything searchable, and there exist "search engine" companies that will find anything you want for you. We might end up living in this world.

"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi is the story that started his "agri-punk" series (his novel "The Windup Girl" is out from Night Shade Books now). It posits a post-oil world where energy comes primarily from foodstuffs, consumed by genetically modified beasts that do physical labor (or wind up springs as a form of energy storage), and where the production of said foodstuffs is controlled by giant corporations via GM techniques. Wonderful ideas here -- I don't necessarily find all of them plausible, but they provoke thought about the directions we may find ourselves going in the not too distant future.

And one can hardly fail to mention "Lobsters" by Charles Stross, one of the iconic tales of 21st century CP: go here and read it if you haven't. Stross is one of the new wave of CP-ish authors (along with Cory Doctorow and a few others) whose work is extensively informed by Web 2.0 concepts and all the digital IP firestorms of the past decade, and this story is a fine example. Amazingly dense with ideas and. . . must I mention the kittens?

A few other stories in the anthology were truly delightful without necessarily having the incredible density of novii (novums?) that I usually associate with the best cyberpunk. Two of these:

"Yeyuka" by Greg Egan. A powerful character study of a character in a society where the rich can afford portable health care that's miraculous to those who can't afford it. A bit of corporate conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure, unfortunately all to plausible.

"When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Cory Doctorow. Sysadmins cope with the apocalypse. Delightful, fun, enjoyable, even if not mindblowing on the level of idea.

The above are by no means the only good stories in the anthology, but they're the ones that stuck with me the most (and seemed the most fresh). For the most part, "Rewired" is a delightful read full of lovely ideas, images and characters. Is it as groundbreaking as "Mirrorshades" once was? I don't think so. It's hard to hold it against the book, though -- CP has had more than two decades to develop and mature. What the anthology does illustrate very well is the shift in the genre from gritty tales of urban gloom to a more balanced spectrum that has more room for that classic science fiction staple -- the sense of gee-whiz wonder. Pick it up.

---

Something that I looked for but didn't find in "Rewired" - "brain-punk" stories. Stories about group minds, mind-jacking, mind-sharing, brains that run ships, brains that run cities, brains that do things nature never intended them to. Do you know any stories or anthologies that seem to fit that bill?