We are living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson
precastreinforced.co.uk85 points by speckx 4 hours ago
85 points by speckx 4 hours ago
I am a big fan of both, but I think what's missing in reality, but in their fiction (and cyberpunk fiction in general) is a sense of coolness and caring about aesthetics. For all the evil that the mega corporations do in a Gibson novel, they still have an aesthetic appeal.
Real-world corporations aren't that interesting. Amazon, Facebook, or Google have nothing "culturally" or aesthetically on Hosaka, Arasaka or Sense/Net.
Which is really the tragedy of it all: we are getting the cyberpunk dystopia with none of the aesthetics that have made it a household word.
These companies do have an aesthetic, it's just not cool. Mike Merrill calls it "Corporate Memphis"; see https://www.wired.com/story/corporate-memphis-design-tech/.
I would disagree with that, I've seen people anchor their own identity to that of brands like Apple or Disney.
They may not be aesthetics you find cool, but clearly they appeal to a large number of others.
Anchoring your identity to brands is tragically uncool no matter how you slice it.
Most corporations are boring, but there absolutely are some cool ones, they often aren’t as public as the big consumer ones.
Arasaka types are rare, it’s mostly big blobs like DatAmerica.
They had to make it cool to make it palatable and not a slog for entertainment purposes. Without that it's just a depressing read of reality.
Something recently occured to me. The plot of the 1967 movie Billion Dollar Brain (the less-successful followup to the more famous 1965 The Ipcress File and 1966 Funeral in Berlin, all starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer), while I though the movie plot kind of stupid when I first saw it years ago, the plot is today actually completely plausible, and it is odd that no modern James Bond or Impossible Mission-style movie has done it.
I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...
I disagree. Gibson's dystopias are too competent, too well organized, too serious. I feel like we're headed somewhere between the satire of Neal Stephenson and the lunatic delirium of Philip K. Dick.
100%
I know that "Idiocracy" gets thrown around all the time, but the reason I think it does is that they do have advanced tech but at the same time everyone is a blathering idiot. That's what gets me about our present reality - on one hand we supposedly have all the world's information at our fingertips, but the absolute dumbest, most bullshit theories get real traction and cause real damage.
When they had the UFC fight on the White House lawn I thought it couldn't be a better example of life imitating art.
There is a fine line between science fiction informing reality, and straight up delusion. We are living in delusional times—like a fever dream. Sooner or later, the patient either heals or dies.
The only reason I know who J.G. Ballard is is because of Jean Baudrillard.
I'm convinced it was the similarity of their names which convinced Jean to read J.G's work.
Where would you recommend I start with J.G.? I got into Baudrillard and have been meaning to go further down the train of thought.
Depends on what you're after. Ballard had several modes in which he wrote.
The early works were generally overtly sci-fi, but mostly earthbound, fitting into the British New Wave of the 1960s, alongside John Brunner. The Drowning World and The Crystal World are both fantastic and unusual for the genre. The short stories are often excellent, and in my opinion some of his most original work is in this period.
The major transition came with The Atrocity Exhibition, a "cut up" novel that was more Cronenberg/Borroughs/Lynch than what came before, and magnified themes that had been emerging in his short stories. Alienation, pop culture fetishism, clinical descriptions of injuries, war (the book was originally called Love and Napalm), the horror lurking under placid suburban utopia. Crash, High-Rise etc. followed in that vein. Crash is probably the best from this period.
He wrote two autobiographical mainstream novels: Empire of the Sun is the famous one.
The late 90s/2000s novels like Super-Cannes are all rethreads of earlier stuff; the Freudian pop-psych view that we are basically animals denied the outlet of violence got a bit tired at this point. They're really well written, but I felt Ballard had lost his edge and didn't have anything insightful to add. His last novel is quite average.
So: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, maybe The Crystal World or the collected short stories.
I highly recommend the “collected interviews” of Ballard that was released some years ago … very interesting exchanges and some almost shockingly present judgments about the future… Especially the future of media in the YouTube age.
Then I would read Empire of the Sun.
Super Cannes should be a perfect place to start for anyone reading this site.
My favorite is "The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard".
It has some of his best sci-fi, and they're all under 50 pages. His longer fiction (Cocaine Nights, Empire of the Sun, etc.) is okay, but IMO short stories are where he really shined.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/70239.The_Best_Short_Sto...
Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise
"Crash" I know of by reputation.
I can't see the dystopian music of John Foxx's Ultravox! (or Gary Numan for that matter) without seeing it through the Ballard/Crash Zeitgeist of the "New Romantics".
(Although I see now that "Crash" was published first in 1973—wow.)
It's more like a deliberate, manufactured future by the bigdiks that slowly takes place in certain countries.
The unevenly distributed future is a William Gibson thing.
A couple months back I had at a Chinese place in the western parts of Dublin (Ireland) and we could see the operating base of the Mana food delivery drones. Ireland was never known to get early issues of whatever the current dystopian future is being distributed, so it was an interesting sight - drones autonomously locating landing platforms and waiting to be loaded, and then launching to their next delivery.
Yes, the diversity of Gibson is amazing “in an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
Dystopian fiction was supposed to be a manual but a warning that was ignored.
Another thing they got right was the merger of governments, large corporations, finance, intelligence agencies, and globalized organized crime into one big sprawling mass of Machiavellian nihilists scheming for power. None of these people really believe in anything, though sometimes they pretend to as part of some power play.
Gibson in particular nails this, especially in his original Sprawl trilogy. This sprawling mass is what he calls "biz." It's "just biz."
I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable. Any kind of principle, rule of law, or sense of national or cultural identity requires that coherence. Without it the system dissolves into this random churning stew of scheming, money, and power.
On a personal level it means you have to find these things in your personal life and the family and community you build around you, and you should not look for or expect these things from larger scale social structures. They can't deliver them, and the reasons might not just be "corruption" or "people are assholes." They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate.
Gibson depicts this too. His world of the Sprawl was bleak but there were pockets of people who had created what amounted to intentional communities within it. I'm thinking of the Afro-American-futurist arcologies in Count Zero or the orbital subcultures like the Rastafarians. Some of the subculture around the "console cowboys" also counts.
EDIT:
Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data, Enterprise's AI, droids in Star Wars) or malevolent (Colossus, Skynet, Dune's prehistory).
> Another gigantic correct prediction of Gibson that nobody remembers is that he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this. The usual depiction of AI in pretty much all other sci-fi was as only logical, whether benevolent (Lt. Cdr Data
Data painted and performed music: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Data#The_arts
To be fair, his motivation was to become more human. But at least he did have intrinsic motivations that didn’t appear to come from some training.
That aside, there are many examples that long predate Gibson:
Kurt Vonnegut’s EPICAC (1950): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story). It also has the motive of a human passing off the AI’s artistic creation as his own.
C. M. Kornbluth’s “With These Hands” (1951): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51531
Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1953): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatiza...
Incidentally, J. G. Ballard’s “Studio 5, The Stars” (1961): https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/some-dance-to-forget
Once the concept of “electronic brains” was there, the idea that they might also produce art like a human brain can wasn’t far.
Yeah it's really amazing how prescient these books are given when they were written. I wish I enjoyed them more, I'm reading Mona Lisa Overdrive now and other than intellectual admiration of it all I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through. I don't enjoy the prose, and how dense it is I guess cause I am not a careful reader.
> I mostly find the Sprawl trilogy a chore to get through
I'm in the same boat - I wanted to re-read, but couldn't find my copy of Neuromancer (which was a chore to get through the first time I read it years ago), so I've started Mona Lisa Overdrive - same thing. Everything is desribed in some dense street subculture patois or as some Sony or Mitsubishi future-product. I guess if the point is "things are recognizable, but this is now a well-established 'different' culture" - mission accomplished. As mentioned though it is a chore. An unrelenting chore. Once you're done though, it's satisfying to reflect on it.
> he predicted that the AIs would make art. As far as I know he's the only one to predict this
Plenty of forebears here. Orwell's 1984 has mass-produced trash novels generated by a machine. Stanislaw Lem''s Cyberiad has a poetry generator.
> I sometimes wonder what's really happening here. Maybe with our large scale and large population we have exceeded Dunbar's number and the individual human cognitive "context window" so much that coherent social systems are no longer sustainable.
I think we might just not have run out of money yet. A lot of debt (social, structural, technical, financial, cultural, etc) is going to hit us like a freight train if AI turns out to not be the magic cure people desperately hope it is going to be.
The power of "the biz" rests on cash not running out. Certainly not on loyalty of the workers.
AI and creativity/art is actually explored through Data in Star Trek. He was a painter, played the violin, gave poetry readings...
"They might not be able to deliver them because we have exceeded the scale on which human social structures can coherently operate."
Sounds unlikely to me without the caveat "within this particular brand of politics and socioeconomics".
Sprawl is where he originally started exploring these ideas but Jackpot is where he really focused deep into them and it's even more prescient. It's also bleaker, he has clearly recalibrated his estimate of how much power and control these new entities will have. Unfortunately I think it's a better representation of the path we're on.
