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I S S U E - & J A N U A R Y 9 , 1 9 9 4
: File !
: Intro to Issue 7
: Billy Biggs <ae687@freenet.carleton.ca>
: File @
: Virtual Light review
: <bcclark@igc.apc.org>
: File #
: REALITY?
: The Electric Phantom <phantom@cyberspace.com>
: File $
: Third Floor Garden Of Eden.02
: "Paige" -2038
: Andrew Mays <masya@knuth.mtsu.edu>
: File %
: Bandwidth 01/01/94
: Steven Baker <steven.baker@atomiccafe.com>
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File - !
I would like to apologize for the lateness of this issue. I've been really
busy lately. This issue could have been out alot sooner, the only thing
holding it back was an article I was writing. So I have decided to hold off
the article till issue 8 and send this out now.
Submissions are pretty slow. I would like to recieve a few more things from
people. Issue 8 or 9 will have a large thing on CyberPunk music, so I'd
like to hear anybody's defenition, opinion or article related to the subject.
Till next issue,
-Billy Biggs, da nerd.
-*- Subscription Info -*-
Subscriptions can be obtained by sending mail to:
dodger@fubar.bk.psu.edu
With the words:
Subscription LineNoiz <your address>
In the body of the letter.
Back Issues can be recieved by sending mail to the same address with the
words BACK ISSUES in the subject.
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File - @
>From: bcclark@igc.apc.org
The following review of VIRTUAL LIGHT is by
Brian Clark, and is reprinted from PUCK:
The Unofficial Journal of the Irrepressible #10
(Jan 1994).
An Engine of Sum Difference
William Gibson, Virtual Light. Bantam, cloth, 325 pages, $21.95, 1993.
Gibson's new novel is an outgrowth, more or less, of his short story
"Skinner's Room." That story (which can be found in the collection Burning
Chrome) really sparked my imagination, as it rests on the presumption that
after an earthquake called the Little Grande, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay
Bridge is unusable. Fenced off and just sitting there, the street people
bust through the barriers and make it their new home. Soon it is festooned
with every (and some un-) imaginable building material. Bits of it frequently
fall off in the damned ever-present wind that stalks the head of this
peninsula. And you don't want to wander off onto Treasure Island, for the same
reason you wouldn't want to now: it's full of toxins and radioactive gloop and
crazies. Gibson came back from two weak novels (his second and third, Count
Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, completing the "Sprawl" trilogy) to collaborate
with Bruce Sterling on the meticulous and exciting The Difference Engine.
Engine has a focus that was lacking in the previous two books, for reasons
both obvious and subtle but beyond the scope of this mini- (though see also
Lance Olsen's monograph on Gibson's literary output, recently out from
Starmont, and you can write or e-mail me for access info). I'm just leading
to the point that VL is the best Gibson yet. Fuck it: this is a mass market
book by a best selling author, and shouldn't even be reviewed in these
tattered pages, but Gibson, here, is painting on an edge of the envelope that
we're only beginning to adumbrate. How do. Virtual Light is a tech, a software,
that makes you think info without pinging photons at your brain receptors. VL
is something else, less mediated, more direct, and the means of a
nanotechnology that will transform the earth, in other words, a plot! See,
there's these glasses, and this grrl gets'em, and hey, that's all, OK? Buy the
book yer own self, borrow it, steal it, we're talking education as enterprise
here, free market, right? What I like best is what Gibson does best: social
speculation. The guy's a natch-born philosopher of knowledge, folks like him
can see traces or patterns going through histories of peoples, know how to
speak of the moment. Plus I was a skip tracer for a few shifts, which is no
damn good. I still believe that me and my moll disabled that biz's paper
database. C ya on the Bridge. Wait a minute, has anybody seen the BridgeI?
Dark side: the type of the body text of the novel is set in a lovely semi-sans
face, with commas that look like periods, and periods that look like flea
shit. A hold over from the seventies, when nobody cool wanted to use
punctuation. Designers in 12 Step programs beware!
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File - #
>From: phantom@cyberspace.com (The Electric Phantom)
In this short story I depict the future in a unique way
never before thought of. It is a new and original idea. Living
in cyberspace; a strange thing to think about. I hope you enjoy-
REALITY?
by The Electric Phantom
Exactly nine months and two seconds after fertilization
and the child is ready. It slowly works it's way through the
artificial birth canal. He makes it throug the process painlessly
and is ready for surgery when he comes out. While unconscious
his nervous system is prepared for the permanent jack in; the
P-Jack. A quick 2 hour sugery installs the trode plugs.
Exactly four hours after birth. The baby is in the ninth
and newest of the great domes on Antarctica. The housing place
for Cyberspace's citizens. He is brought in by a self moving cart
and laid down on a P-Jack bed. He is fitted with a tube for feeding
and a mini-computer is hooked up to his brain. The computer auto-
matically signals bodily functions at the right time. His muscles
are stimulataed frequently so they won't deterirate. The same with
his bones. The mini-computer sends the message, not to wake, con-
stantly. Finally the dermatrodes were locked onto the plugs the
surgery had inserted on his head. He jacked.
Just a 3-D computer image. It was a creationon but it was
in the form of a crib. Suddenly a baby appears within that image.
A mother looks down at the baby. She has a huge pyramid for a nose,
golde circles for eyes, and many other interesting features.
"I simply adore this form we chose for him, don't you?"
"It is handsome," the father returned."
"I'm also happy with the name we chose."
"Chibo does have a nice ring to it"
Three years later, after Chibo's first month or so of kinder-
garten, he asks a very unusual question.
"Mom, what's Reality?" Chibo asked.
"Where'd you hear about that, sweetheart?"
"Oh, just at school."
"Well I'm not sure if it really exists but some historians say
thousands of years ago humans lived back in this place even more real
than our universe, Cyberspace. It was called Reality. You couldn't
evan get to Cyberspace back then. It's like another dimension. It was
horrible. You'd have constant pains called irritations and itches, plus
whenever you had an accident you'd have extreme pain. All matter had
already been formed. There were no creationons; you could not make your
own matter. Those historians even say that Cyberspace is imaginary, and
we still live in Reality. Our brains are just being transmitted to
Cyberspace. They say that all our needs in the Universe are being attended
to by robots! Hah hah, what a joke! Whenever we make a decision here or
change things it get changed back in Reality too. For example if you take
this banana and eat it you are being fed a banane mush in Reality. When
you go to the farm console and plant something a little while later it
appears in the creationon, meanwhile it supposedly was grown in Reality.
Personally I think it's all a myth."
Chibo was 13 now. His previously programed features are beginning
to form more clearly. He has a pyramid for a nose like his mother. He
has black diamonds for eyes and four arms. He lives in a large house set
for 0-G. The house is in a town of pure luxery. Nothing has to be done.
Almost no work at all, although a few adult have to do some important
decision making. Other than that it was all fun. Chibo often programed
quick toys with his own creatinon he got for his birthday. Once he even
made a small animal. He uses the toys with his friends.
Chibo has never touched an object that, when touched, stimulated
pain nerves. It was illegal to make pain objects in his town. Even his
home was pain free. He could punch a wall as hard as he wants and he'd
feel nothing.
The cart is rushing by, taking the newest born to an open P-Jack
bed. Just a half inch off course. It rams into Chibo's P-Jack bed and
the mini-computer malfunctions. The locks on the trodes open and he's
disconnected. The mini-computer shuts off. He slowly opens his eyes.
No, not the pain of the tubes sticking out of his stomach. Not
even the painful one in his lungs hurts him. Before any of this can reach
his brain the shock of feeling his own weight; the feeling of flesh and
guts inside him kills him.
Author's Note
Many "Cyberpunk" authors gave me these ideas. The idea of being
able to 'jack in' in the future is now a common idea among us CP fans but
nobody has ever though about living in Cyberspace. It's so short and not
very well writen I wouldn't really call it a story. More of a new thought
I'm presenting to you all.
Phantom
November 1993 Distibute this file freely. Please don't tamper mutilate
or otherwise change this file when distributing.
Written by The Electric Phantom phantom@cyberspace.com
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File - $
Third Floor Garden Of Eden.02
"Paige" -2038
"Blake tells me about the time he sees Alexia spending in the
Botanical Gardens; he watches her sleeping in the cool grass from within
the matrix.
"'Day dreamer,' I used to call her. 'Daydreamer with the golden
hair.' I never imagined that she would graduate The University with a
bachelor of science in bioengenineering; and now she tells me of her
approbation as a senior level worker in the research and development
branch of botany.
"Her father works within the matrix and I myself as an
administrative assistant in the systems-operations division here at the
University of Haiku Medjiama Where Alexia gets her love for biochemistry
I may never know. Although, in retrospect it seems that she always has
loved that garden. It fascinated her as a child, and so I suppose that
it is only natural that she would choose to work in the gardens where she
has already spent the majority of her lifetime.
"Alexia is so determined. She gets that from Blake. He is
stubborn as a self aware program that you are trying to eliminate.
Alexia is like a rock. I can remember when she was 17 and determined to
get a nueral web installed. She ran off one night and traveled to see a
doctor on the black market. She was all set to have the operation until
the doctor contacted Alexia's father on the net. As it turns out they
were old friends, and so Doc wouldn't install the hardware. He said it
was to risky to preform said operation on a child of said age, and so
Alexia sulked home....and was promptly grounded for a week from the network.
"I can still remember watching her make her first run into
cyberspace though. I ran an audio/visual cord out from her new cyber
deck (we bought it for her on her 18th birthday) and then I watched
through the VR viewer. She was so excited to finally have the freedom to
move around in netspace, she swirled and swam through the bright neon
light in our local grid. After interfacing with her father she traveled
to the VR replica of the BioGardens; and was obviously displeased. But
it thrilled her to know that she was in a virtual reconstruction of
something very real and dear to hear. 'It's like going shopping on line'
She explained later, 'Nothing beats the reality of traveling to the
store, having to walk in, walk around, and all that. But knowing the
virtual shop is there is. Well. Comforting I guess.'
"She seemed very uncomfortable in the reconstruction and quickly
left for the Electronic Library Databases. That was about the time I
disabled the Virtual Reality Feature on the viewer screen, and began to
prepare dinner. 'Something special for a special day,' I recall saying
to her after she logged out and told me that she'd read about four
volumes of study journals and graduate papers.
"'And another thing mother.' She'd said. ' I've decided to go into
bioengineering. I want to be in that garden.' Yes. That was the day she
decided that her major would be declared in the sciences. And that was
the night she had the first dream.
"She's had them ever since too. Long, strange dreams that she
awakes from with a start, her body drenched in sweat. Exhausted she
stumbles into the kitchen and scribbles down a few figures or an idea and
then, half asleep, returns to bed. Come morning time she reads the notes
and finds that she has found the solution to the morning's botanical
creation. Or that she has come up with an idea for a whole new creation
of an animal or plant life. Why my apartment is full of Alexia's
creations, the result of her odd dreams. Some are sitting, some are
hanging, all are beautiful; more the work of her mind then of her hands,
she is truly an artist.
"Alexia calls the dreams inspiration. I think it's very strange
myself. But the dreams don't seem to bother her and often times I have
heard of creative people having dreams like this. Perhaps President
Medjiama himself was tormented by dreams. Or do the ghosts of the
network dream? I'll have to ask Blake about that."