CYBERPUNK 2021

Let’s go binary for Cyberpunk

ONE:

“Cyberpunk fuses and reuses and intrudes. It’s the messy, difficult, ill-tempered child subgenre of its often more formalist sci-fi parents, the picky eater at the buffet collecting the most idyllic of its aspirations and reconfiguring them into a beautiful disaster. Seated before it at the table, the meal is bizarre, the flavors meant to contrast, but it eats heartily; as do we, hypnotized by its crudeness and gleam, its majestic opportunity for danger. Part of why it’s such special subgenre is that it’s generally both rare and hard to define…”

TWO:

“Cyberpunk. You’re seeing William Gibson’s name, right? Mod guys with bad hairdos and gritty tech? Images of Bladerunner? A lot of vaguely Japanese cultural influences? But what about the rest of the big, wide, technologically-adept world? You seeing the Black experience? Palestinian, Greek, African, Laosian, any cyber not rooted in visions of Robin Hood via Tony Stark? Not very likely. Till now….”

Engage maximum overdrive. We’ve seen the future and it’s indie.

Team Narazu

All Indie. All Awesome.

Why haven’t you watched The Last Angel of History yet? This 1996 metafictional documentary felt like an Afrofuturist thought-virus, in the very best way, intended to infect perspective into a higher-def resolution. Merging talking heads with a poetic narrative, time-traveling tech guide (and the film’s researcher) Edward George plays the “Data Thief,” investigating the past and present to solve the future. And we don’t mean just any talking heads, either, but cultural juggernauts like Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Nichelle Nichols, Ishmael Reed, the list goes on and on. Even Goldie, DJ Spooky, and A Guy Called Gerald make appearances, informing a 45-minute miniature masterpiece that remains one of the most coherent and creative expressions of Afrofuturism in visual media. It’s honestly perfect and still inspires 25 years later, but where would you find it? Icarus Films began hosting The Last Angel of History in an on-demand fashion, where you can rent or buy high-quality digital versions. A DVD copy is also available, though I don’t have any experience with this version (note that it also contains John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X on the disc). And…you may also possibly find it floating in the internet flotsam, depending on your own interpretation of the narrator’s name.

Common to cyberpunk fiction is an East Asian cultural presence. At times, maybe even most of the time, this appears as mere window dressing or visual fetishization, which isn’t the case with the evergreen underseen classic mini-series Wild Palms. I consider myself a long-standing evangelist for the six episodes of this deeply unusual and subversive show, a joint project between novelist Bruce Wagner and Oliver Stone that low-key blew everyone’s minds back in the day; ABC (yes, this aired on ABC) even published a primer on the show because they were convinced nobody in the audience would “get” it. Even summarizing Wild Palms is beyond the reaches of this paragraph, but it’s a subtly psychedelic and literary sci-fi tale with an array of references and critiques, everything from Scientology, American Japanese Internment Camps, Buddhism, ‘60s pop music, virtual reality, and mass media. Performances impressively click together by an invested cast, including James Belushi (the story goes that he had no idea what was going on in the script throughout filming), Ernie Hudson (with arguably my single favorite career performance), Kim Cattrall, Eugene Lee, and many others. Wild Palms continues to thrill me, and it’s amassed a cult following ever since its 1993 release, though I venture to say that those ranks have never truly expanded as much as the series deserves. Luckily for everyone, a proper Wild Palms Blu-ray packed with features quietly released last year and is presently on sale at Amazon. As for the original comic strip the show is based on, it’s honestly fantastic but possibly beyond most wallets; prices have ballooned up to $500+ dollars in recent years for the collected 64-page graphic novel.

Johnny Mnemonic. 12% on Rotten Tomatoes with a 31% audience score. Heralded as the first big-budget cyberpunk film (with a William Gibson screenplay, no less), lambasted by critics of its era into this day as generally poor and clumsy, a mess. A final chapter film – director Robert Longo abruptly ended his film career here, in 1995, though he continued onward as a successful artist, and William Gibson would never write another feature-length script. Even what was possibly Dolph Lundgren’s best performance here paused his acting career for 15 years. Johnny Mnemonic a multicultural film telling a multicultural story with a multicultural cast; name another Asian-American-led cyberpunk film in the 25 years since. Maybe you can, but it’s work. Someone might say the live-action Ghost in the Shell, which is a decent joke, we’ll take it, you can stay. Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Mnemonic would, a foul-mouthed corpo merc who runs around with a head full of other people’s secrets, perpetually broke and under the gun. When he downloads more than he can chew and needs to get rid of it ASAP, a film-long chase emerges with filament laserwires slicing the air, Henry Rollins as a chatty ripperdoc, and Ice-T practicing for a genuinely prolific film career of much of the same. Even Takeshi “Beat” Kitano is in this, years before he became something of an American film-nerd household name. My point is, go watch Johnny Mnemonic already and stop living by the word of Rotten Tomatoes. And, YES, there’s a hacker dolphin in it. I never understood why this is often used as a condemnation of the film rather than the selling point.

Milton Davis brings you CyberFunk!, its focus on the Black experience, its soul worldwide. Full disclosure: I have a story in this anthology, but that’s not why it’s featured. This lineup of authors is why it’s featured: Eugen Bacon, Gerald L. Coleman, Ashleigh Davenport, Milton J. Davis, Minister Faust, Donovan Hall, John Jennings, Ronald Jones, Nicole Givens Kurtz, Kyoko M, Carole McDonnell, Violette Meier, T.C. Morgan, Balogun Ojetade, Hannibal Tabu, Jarla Tangh, Napoleon Wells, and K. Ceres Wright. Speculative writers at the top of their games exercising not only their imaginations but yours as well, showing that tech has as multi-faceted a life as a rhododendron, humpback whale, or your next door neighbor. There are dystopian visions, joyful visions, playful visions, even sensual visions. If funk, as George Clinton teaches, not only moves but removes, this collection of stories should remove a few preconceptions about this particular subgenre of sci fi. It’s not all cool trench coats and sunglasses.