Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The fact that Kovacs is trying to catch a misogynist killer, rather than personally murdering the sex workers himself, doesn’t make the story somehow feminist. No matter how heroically a white knight rides to the rescue, or how loudly a narrative declares that violence against women is wrong, only VILLAINS torture women, the audience still takes away the framing, the background assumptions of the narrative. In a novel, the events that are depicted and the language that gets used about them is not accidental. We subconsciously absorb these elements as we’re ripping through a plot, too often accepting them as reality rather than questioning them as authorial choices.
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What we choose to assume and accept tells us a lot about the culture we live in and our own individual psychologies. If I had read Altered Carbon five years ago when I was less attentive to underlying narrative assumptions, I probably would have liked it. I expect I would have been alarmed at the violence but treated it as a requirement of dystopian literature. I would have proclaimed that the ghastly prostitute murders were clearly derided as bad by the narrative, and excused it as the driver of the plot. But did you know there are entire books out there that do not murder whores even one single time? Did you know that there is a way to launch a plot without a long-legged dame being in trouble?
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pending misogyny in this form—and indeed, showing that an alternative to capitalist society is possible—is far more radical than just about anything offered up by cyberpunk.
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Eventually, you have to wonder whether some people just want to write stories about murdering women they pay for sex.
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pointing out the problems of capitalism is easy—even the New York Times manages to do it on occasion. What next, though?
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Silverhand actually seems more interested in being correct about corporate corruption, and getting revenge for his own death, rather than in trying to improve the lives of everyday people. This, too, might be punk, but it’s precisely the kind of cool that subsumes anything productive.
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In SF noir, humanism’s focus on heroic capacity is replaced by a central focus on psychic mutilation, used to set a stylized atmosphere. SF noir, as McGuirk defines it, presents problems and no solutions. These stories raise philosophical questions about power and class and identity they often do not develop, or resolve.
✏️ For cyberpunk and grimdark tales, it’s all about style. Always, style over substance. The aesthetic is king. The protagonists experience their sorrows as extrinsically caused and largely irreversible, so they can achieve neither the bitter enlightenment of the tragic hero nor the final triumph of the epic hero. It’s all downstream efforts and no exploration of what it could take to survive the whole system itself.
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Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.