Fuck Your Rocket Car

Just like it says on the tin, chuckles - fuck your rocket car.  You know how everyone says "We're living in the future now - where's my rocket car?"  And I say again, fuck your rocket car.  Your reflexes aren't sharp enough to drive one, your 3-D spatial reasoning isn't acute enough, and  you don't even know what yaw is. Without an understanding of yaw, a rocket car in your hands is nothing but a screaming turbine of death.

Neeeorrrrrooowwww  *BOOOM*

There's a diminishing return on science fiction the closer you get to the date of speculation.  If I write a story about the high-tech advances that are coming out tomorrow (literally tomorrow, June 24 2010) you're going to be all like "Oh, yeah, that's pretty boring and also anyone could have thought of that hurr durrr" but if I write about June 24 2100, then all of a sudden I'm some sort of visionary, neverminding the fact that I'll be mostly wrong at best, and laughably so at worst. 

In the early half of the last century, the realm of science fiction was one big question mark - everything was a "maybe" as in "Maybe we'll live on the moon, do you think?  Would you buy a ticket to see a silent movie about that?"  In the 1950's we had unbridled rocket-ship optimism - science fiction with an exclamation point.  By the year 1985 we would be flying to work in astro-cruisers and smoking Winstons on the moon.  Then drugs happened, and the 1960's gave us a sort of acid-addled angst-scape where your average Joe was given a number and pacified with chemicals so that he could be a more productive work-sex-flesh unit before breaking through the chemical haze and screaming "What has HAPPENED TO MANKIND!?!"

Okay, so it wasn't ALL "Flowers for Algernon"

The Seventies benefited from the auteur movement of the 1960's and so you had all kinds of interesting conceptual stuff like A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, and Soylent Green, and of course in print you had Ray Bradbury still pumping out the same Baroque plodders he'd been writing for decades, Heinlein was wrapping up his first cycle of Hippie Libertarian Love-Fest books, and the general tone seemed to be that of smudges and grease smears on the neat skin-tight tunics of decades past - the notion that the neat and clean order of 1950's science fiction had broken down, and that the psycho-social questions posed by 1960's sci-fi was just so much big-headed ivory-tower babble.  

But by the 1980's we were all like "Duh dude, no shit" concerning most of that line of inquiry, and that's why we had Cyberpunk. 

Before anyone jumps up to ask, no, I'm not a cyberpunk junkie.  I've read some Phillip K. Dick and some Neal Stephenson, and I saw Bladerunner about 8 bajillion times, but no, I've not read Neuromancer and it's not even at the top of my list, so stop asking.  90% of what I know about Cyberpunk comes from two sources:  Billy Idol's Shock to the System video, and the role playing game Cyberpunk 2020. 

His GUN has LIGHTS on it - FUCK YEAH!

So as far as I'm concerned, the future was supposed to be all about awesome chrome cybernetics and changing the color of my mechanical eyes with an impulse.  It was about tattoos that shifted and changed under my skin, and also lit up.  It was about air-brushed handguns in exciting colors "for the teen interested in self-defense" (to quote the second edition of the RPG rulebook). 

Taking the broader view, it was about cities that sprawled into giant steaming conurbations and racing down the streets of those cities in something that looked like a stretch Ferrari.  It's about racing a motorcycle through back alleys to do battle with the neon samurai security forces of the Japanese mega-corps and enlisting the help of retired mercenaries who remember hearing, vaguely, that once upon a time Americans had freedom and that it was something worth fighting for. 

But here's the one that really disappoints me - where the hell is the little plug in the back of my head?  Do you know how onerous it is for me to have to type this crap out?  If this were the 2010 I was promised, you would put a wire in the back of your head, I would put a wire in the back of my head, and you would "hear" everything that I have to say from my 3D avatar  just as fast as I could think it. 

This is what I look like on the 'net, but with a katana

But here we are in the so-called future.  There are no data terminals where I go to read a digital newspaper from a street kiosk, no hardwired Internet-surfing hardware in my head, and guns remain generally the province of gangsters and rednecks.  Indeed, the more things have changed the more they have stayed the same. Instead of jacked-in neuro-running cyber-couriers crossing a broken-down neon streetscape, we get KFC eating Wal-Mart shoppers downloading shitty crippleware copies of Leap Year to their iPhones.

Furthermore, cybernetics remain the domain of those who actually need them, and they are prohibitively expensive even then.  We are evidently a long way from designer chrome hands or light-up orange eyes.  Worse still, and maybe I'm just jaded, there's less and less that's actually subversive about getting out of "meatspace" and jacking into the digiverse (that's what I like to think we cyberpunks call going on the internet - I'm hoping it catches on).  This open conduit of suppressed information is now the place where soccer moms go to buy tickets to Elmo on Ice. 

It's got digi-art on a 3.5" floppy

I'm left with an intense disgust for the world in which I live, and an intense longing for the way things were supposed to be - a nostalgia for futures past.  The mundane march of American mediocrity continues without breaking step, and a final econopocalypse, the kind that would actually force people to riot in the streets over the breakdown of society (or at least the loss of basic cable TV service), seems a long way away.  People keep moving farther and farther away from cities, thus leading us to endless exurbs as opposed to sprawling concrete mega-cities, and sadly, it looks like the Japanese are not poised to take over the world economy despite the most dire predictions of late 1980's economists.

And so now we must invent new futures for ourselves.  Sadly, it looks like those futures will not include keyboard-laden New Wave or LA Glam Metal music.  High-tech at street level will be limited, at least for now, to cell phones and GPS devices while electronic music trends away from futuristic beep-boop sounds and ever more closely resembles its organic counterpart.  I guess maybe I will go read Neuromancer after all, and dream of a world in which I can fulfill my dreams of replacing half of my brain with circuitry, and both of my arms with machine guns.

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