To Dream of Electric Sheep

Greetings, Kittens!

I grew up on science fiction and fantasy and have loved them both since before I could read. My mother would come home with bags of books from the library and I would get to go through them and pick out the covers I liked. She’d read me the blurbs and explain the story and we’d decide which one to start first. Throughout her reading, I would come back and get chapter updates, or what at four years old I thought was chapter by chapter, and I got to experience the twist and turns of faraway worlds and duplicitous human nature.

I learned to read later that same year, but I got those updates until I was eight and could read the same books on my own. By then, I knew the kinds of worlds that waited for me and I couldn’t wait. Much to my delight it would only get better, as sub-genres grew and spawned sub-genres of their own. Cross-genre works would further open the field, and by the time I would start publishing some twenty plus years later, the doors of what could be done would be thrown wide open.

Despite my absolute love of Cyberpunk and its subgenres Biopunk and Nanopunk, I don’t embrace the dystopian mindset of technology as our downfall. Blame or credit Star Trek as you will, but I have the fundamental belief that technological advancement, is human advancement. And as it has for my lifetime so far, technology will continue to make things easier, make the world smaller and make democracy a truer force.

The terms I’ve come across to embody that belief are NeoCyberpunk and Cyberprep, but I use Futurist Paranormal to describe my genre. My stories brim with shifters, psychics, ghost and vampires, all set in near-future worlds. The open acknowledgement of the supernatural and acceptance of possibilities, directly results in more advanced day to day technology. It has touches of cyberpunk and biopunk, with the pervasiveness of the technology and biological implants/manipulation, but the technology has merely moved us forward, often for the better. The worlds still have their issues, but the society has clearly embraced scientific advancement on all fronts.

That’s not to say I don’t have a story or three in the back of my head that's dark and harsh. I love the post-apocalyptic genre as well, and I have my fair share of catastrophic plotlines to come. There’s just something darkly beautiful about watching humanity persevere against the odds. But when it comes to the prediction of technology and its applications, I feel that as long as communication tech keeps us informed, and science is tempered by ethics, we’re more than on track to live better, rather than suffer at the hands of our own genius.

I’m happy to admit that I didn’t set out to write futurist fiction. I didn’t even originally recognize that I’d done so. It came to me as a logical extension of preternatural minds in the tech field, able to advance unchecked. I realized the habit only after seeing it written about me by a reviewer. I sat back and realized that every single story done, and all of those in queue at the time, had the same futurist bent. It just goes to show, we write what we’re drawn to and can’t escape the things we love and the journeys that define our worldview.

What about all of you? What subgenres do you draw from again and again within your work? What are your thoughts on future tech and where it will take us?

~X

*The title of this post is from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick . The book is the basis for movie Blade Runner. The image is from Tokyocypberpunk.com

Cyberpunk Anthology Submissions

Call for Submissions: Samhain Publishing Cyberpunk romance anthology

Welcome to the future, a cyberpunk future—-post-industrial dystopias where society has broken down; a world of advanced science, cybernetic and tech. The cyberpunk world is a dark and gritty place, blurring the border between actual and virtual reality.

I'm very happy to announce an open call for submissions for a new, yet-to-be-titled summer 2011 cyberpunk romance anthology. Don't know what cyberpunk is? Think The Matrix and Bladerunner, or the popular role-playing/computer game/book series Shadowrun. For more information on cyberpunk, you can check out the entry on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk .

I'm open to M/F, M/M, F/F, or multiples thereof, any sexual heat level, and the romance must end happily ever after or happy for now.

The novellas must range between 25,000 to 30,000 words in length, no more, no less—please note, only manuscripts that fall in this word count will be considered for this anthology—and will be released individually as ebooks in August 2011.

Submissions are open to all authors, published with Samhain or aspiring to be published with Samhain. All submissions must be new material—previously published submissions will not be considered. Additionally, manuscripts previously submitted, whether individually or for past anthologies, will not be considered either. Be aware that manuscripts submitted to this anthology cannot be resubmitted at a later date unless by invitation from an editor.

To submit a manuscript for consideration, please include:

The full manuscript (of 25,000 to 30,000 words) with a comprehensive 2-5 page synopsis. Also include a letter of introduction/query letter. Full manuscripts are required for this as it is a special project.

As well, when you send your manuscript, be sure to use the naming convention Cyberpunk_Title_MS and Cyberpunk_Title_Synopsis. This will ensure that your submission doesn't get missed in the many submissions we receive, and makes it easy for me to find in my ebook reader.

Submissions are open until February 1, 2011. No submissions will be accepted after this date—no exceptions. A final decision will be made by February 28, 2011. Send your submission to editor@samhainpublishing.com and include Cyberpunk Anthology in the subject line.

Questions and queries can be addressed to Sasha Knight (sasha@samhainpublishing.com) though do your due diligence and read this anthology call completely and check the Samhain Submission FAQ page before emailing. http://www.samhainpublishing.com/faq

Permission to forward or repost granted

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Anybody got any good cyberpunk novella ideas they don't feel like writing??? I also posted 13 things about the cyberpunk subgenre at The Otherworld Diner today because I'm in cyberpunky research mode: http://otherworlddiner.blogspot.com/2010/08/13-things-about-cyberpunk-subgenre.html

Jody W.
http://www.jodywallace.com/ * http://www.meankitty.com/

Where Have All the Punks Gone?

The closing of CBCG signaled the end of an era for the modern punk. In a bitter irony, the old club space has been taken over by men’s fashion designer John Varvatos. Ouch.

But the spirit of the punk lives on, and not just in music. Punk was always about people making their own way, not depending on anyone to do it for them, and a rejection of the commercial. Sometimes that freedom expressed itself in violent, self-destructively anarchic ways, but some of the art and attitudes that sprang from the movement were also mind-blowingly inventive, displaying the DIY ethic that ran deep in Punk's veins.

Two current trends in genre fiction use the ‘punk’ suffix, but they couldn’t be further away from each other in many ways.

Cyberpunk hit the books long before Steampunk, so we’ll start there.

Cyberpunk is dark. There’s no getting around it. It’s the way the Punks of the 20th century – marginalized, alienated, dismissed and rejected – viewed the future. A future often run by corporations, rather than democratically elected governments. A future where we were in the final stages of killing off the Earth, where technology was power.

There’s no beautiful utopian vision of peace and prosperity in cyberpunk, where everyone is equal and no one needs money to get what they need.

No. Cyberpunk is deeply and insidiously dystopian. A future that is grim and gray and violent, ruled by rapacious greed. The protagonists of cyberpunk stories written by Philip K. Dick or William Gibson aren’t what we usually call “heroic” in romance terms, and the endings are rarely happy.

The unfortunately short-lived Shomi line from Kensington (Edit: Jeannie Lin says it was from Dorchester) featured futuristic, cyberpunk plots and settings, but it was difficult to pull off the HEA when each story started in such a dark place. Not that it couldn’t be done, but they weren’t often traditionally feel-good romances. In fact, the HEA element wasn’t even a requirement of the line, which displayed, in my opinion, a real understanding of how cyberpunk worked.

Steampunk, on the other hand, got its name from a play on words by author K.W. Jeter, who thought the Victorian fantasies that he and a few others were writing should have a name that focused on the use of technology, much as cyberpunk focused on it. Hence, the term “Steampunk” was born.

Right off the bat, it’s easy to see that many of the Punk attitudes and philosophies that inspired Cyberpunk weren’t truly evident in its historical counterpart.

And yet… and yet… The Victorian-inspired fantasies and science fiction often make commentary on history’s politics and policies. Slavery, imperialism, the power of the haves over the have-nots, religious, cultural and sexual attitudes are all touched on in Steampunk.

Putting a heroine in a bustle doesn’t make a story Steampunk any more than dressing a hero in a long leather duster makes him a Cyberpunk Neo.

The punk in both movements is deeply embedded in the world that writers build. The Punk ethos of tinkering and DIY is inherent in the way that Victorian technology progressed.

I think where the two sets diverge is primarily in their view of what comes next. The Victorians in general looked forward to a future of great technological advancement and upward mobility of all socio-economic classes, so their “futuristic” fiction was largely optimistic, much in the way that many of our current non-Punk futuristic writers envision the time to come. Not all fluffy bunnies and cotton candy clouds, of course, but a future in which we’re making our world better. Steampunk, then, is more readily optimistic, despite some of the grim literary offerings from William Gibson and others.

Steampunk literature also often tends to branch into the fantastic more easily than Cyberpunk. Victorian science wasn’t strictly opposed to the idea of alchemy or occultism, so adding magical elements to the technology of the day is less far-fetched than might otherwise be thought. After all, Clarke’s 3rd law states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It’s my personal view that Steampunk is most moving, though, when it’s set in a fully realized world that has the same problems that the protagonists in Cyberpunk face. Political and commercial greed, abuse of power, marginalization of segments of society – problems that are sadly eternal, part of the human condition. When we face those issues, even in our feel-good literature, we can move people to forward progress.

The Ramones are dead, CBCG is gone, but the things that made Punk so powerful live on.