Since we’re all talking about cyberpunk* (Thanks Cyberpunk 2077! I hear you sucked, but you gave me an opening and I’m taking it!) and since I’m reading a bit of it right now, I though I’d look at one of my favourite subgenres – rural cyberpunk.
What I’ve been reading is Erica L. Satifka’s Busted Synapses (great title) a novella about a couple of friends in Wheeling, West Virginia dealing with underemployment and lack of meaningful choices in a future where androids are taking jobs and cities are pretty much literally fenced off for the well-off. This isn’t going to be a review (I’m still mulling over the ending, which, HUGE SPOILERS FOR A CYBERPUNK STORY, doesn’t necessarily wrap everything up in a neat bow for the protagonists) but I can say it does something cyberpunk does very well – it looks at people out on the edges of the economy, struggling to get by. There are long traditions in every medium in the last several hundred years of this theme woven into stories urban and rural, so it’s no surprise that cyberpunk has mined both settings.
Including, well, something I wrote.
Back in 2015, I sold my first new story in 11 years, Patience Lake, about a broke and broken-down cyborg hitching through rural Saskatchewan, getting stuck in other people’s problems. Surveillance and privatized policing are key themes. And the whole thing pretty much takes place on farms and country roads and rest stops. A lot of it came from my memories of visiting the tiny, shrinking farming town where my dad was born, many years ago. The other key inspiration was one of my favourite stories, cyberpunk or otherwise – Dogfight, by William Gibson and Michael Swanwick.
I didn’t want to replicate the plot of Dogfight, or the particular cyberpunk tech. I wanted to capture something of the desperation of the characters, and the bitterness of the ending. The rural setting of Dogfight, where the protagonist can aspire to be a big fish in a little pond, is key to his miserable triumph. In a city, with millions of people, the gears wouldn’t mesh.
When I started thinking about rural cyberpunk, it occurred to me that there’s been a decent amount of it already, even just from the key early figures in cyberpunk’s development.
Gibson’s Sprawl novels take place largely in huge cities, but The Peripheral’s near-future thread is a small town, nebulously located somewhere in rural America. Even as far back as Virtual Light, Gibson was throwing in characters from outside big cities, with both Chevette Washington and Barry Rydel coming from smaller, rural/suburban working class or poor backgrounds.
Bruce Sterling, who grew up in Texas, has set a lot of his recent fiction in European centres, but 1994’s Heavy Weather takes place almost entirely in the U.S.’s tornado alley, where its storm chaser leads are pursuing a predicted F6 storm, and a big chunk of Distraction takes place in small town/rural East Texas and Louisiana, and features two entire societies of competing off-the-grid nomads.
I’m sure there’s plenty of other more recent cyberpunk-adjacent SF with dirt under its fingernails out there – and if you know of any good stories/novels, leave a comment, I’d love to track them down.
Gibson’s famous quote “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed” is often deployed when people in North America/Western Europe find out that some other country has already deployed a technology that seems futuristic – like how China already has 400,000 electric buses on the roads – but it doesn’t just mean that.
The future hits different places in different ways, and rural economies and ways of life can be disrupted** just as rapidly as those in big cities. And the ingredients for a messed-up, cyberpunkish rural future are all around us right now. Bioengineered crops. Cellular agriculture. Autonomous tractors and treeplanting drones. Corn producers who supply ethanol facing a battery-car future. Farmers jailbreaking the software on their tractors.
And yeah, 30 to 50 feral hogs.
Sounds to me like rural areas are going to be crawling with robots, drones, invasive species, water shortages, wild weather, genetically modified organisms, and the potential for crashing staple crop prices in the next, say, 10 to 20 years.
The real question – is there such a thing as suburban cyberpunk?
*I do not subscribe to sharp divisions, saying “this is cyberpunk!” and “this is not!” First of all, cyberpunk has always been much, much broader than “stuff that reminds me of Neuromancer” and second, it’s much more useful to say “this is pretty cyberpunk!” or “this has a bit of a cyberpunk thing going on.” Basically, any near-future science fiction that isn’t some kind of post-apocalypse or pure first contact/time travel/alternate history story is going to be influenced by cyberpunk in some way. We all live in a cyberpunk dystopia now, blah blah blah you’ve heard this before.
**And remember, when a tech guy in a polo shirt gleefully says “disruption” he’s talking about tanking whole industries.
Further Reading
The reason I picked up Busted Synapses (aside from my general love of cyberpunkish stuff) is that I really enjoyed Satifka’s story The Big So-So. Originally in Interzone, I caught it a couple years ago on Escape Pod and it stuck with me. Bizarro alien-invasion-via-drug-addiction story. Check it out!
Self promotion this week was already seamlessly – seamlessly, I say – woven into the main post. So nothing here!