Real life acts like rubbish cyberpunk nov. JH-R firmly and chappistly unimpressed.

[hirez]

Do I mean cyberpunk? Is there perhaps another sub-genre that I've happily missed that has rubbish and badly extrapolated SFnal near-future tropes scattered about the place. For (previous) example 'Kosovan one-shot railgun'.

Anyway. Another in the sequence of plainly odd telemarketry experiences. As opposed to telemarquetry, which is decorative veneer work performed at a distance. Perhaps due to radioactive trees or corrosive halitosis. Or indeed tellymarquetry, which is where you take one of those dreadful old television cabinets with the doors on the front (so the owner could pretend not to have one or that it was a drinks cabinet: "We only keep it for the children. They do love a gin & tonic after they've done their homework.") and disguise it further so it's easily mistaken for a model village.

The voice on the far end of the phone is... Nearly beyond description. As if some woman had learned her script phonetically from a chap with one of those buzzy-throat-things who's first language was Polish rather than English. I t w a s c o m p l e t e l y w i t h o u t i n t o n a t i o n o r e m p h a s i s, thus impossible to render as text. I sat and listened, extranced with the strangeness, while she (Well, I say 'she'. I wondered if it wasn't a speech-synth, but even those things have more expression. Or some Burroughsian tape cut-up experiment. Or Cyberwomen bent on enslaving us with zero-percent credit transfer and cash advance deals.) droned on and on. It was hypnotic. So much so that I'd stopped listening to the words and was just marvelling at the noise.


Oh. In the post this AM was a card from mater. On the front a trio of (well-presented) cross-dressed blokes, on the inside a message beginning 'I saw this and thought of you... '

Cheers, mum. :D

Comments

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I mean, there's the stuff that glories in the cyberiness and punkness of it all. I refer you, for example, to the business of smuggling contraband cross-country in jet-propelled armoured hovercraft. Or the esoterically-armed-totty tendency.

Then there's the stuff which extrapolates a bit less far futurewards, and which glories in something a lot more like the good bits of Wired than the good bits of Thunderbirds. For that, see the early bits of Accelerando or some Doctorow. That genre surely has a name, but I have no idea what it might be.

I got cold-called by an actual robot yesterday. 'Good Afternoon. This is an automated call from [click]'. I hung up at that point. Can't have robots demeaned by cheap marketing jobs. Robots are for Science. Or beer.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Written like that, the concepts of 'Smuggling' and 'jet-propelled hovercraft' become entirely ludicrous.

"I know. Let's write 'contraband' on the side in luminous paint. They'll never spot that..."

Tom Clancy with spaceships?

There are Future Things which are obviously good and useful devices. Demon-detecting Palms with cones of silence, for instance. Want one now. Then there are things from the Rubbish Future (perhaps the Grim Meathook Future that WozEllis et al bang on about) like eyeball implants with adverts, that no sane person would touch with a bargepole. Unless you posit some scheme where aftermarket eyeballs are expensive, so the good ones come at a price and there are ad-supported options for the hoi-palloi. Marketroid futurism or chappist hacker futurism?

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Yes. Um - I think the idea was that it made it possible to travel at high speed cross-country so nobody was likely to catch you even if they saw you. But I wouldn't defend it as unludicrous.

Actually, I think the eyeballs-with-adverts thing is more-or-less inevitable:
1 - Data in your eyeballs seems too useful to not happen
2 - People like to pay for data by looking at adverts. Look at most any web page for confirmation.
3 - So much of the data in your eyeballs will be free, but advert-encumbered.

The trouble (or perhaps the great charm) of chappist hacker futurism is that it always has the Best Hacker In The World in it. It's an unhealthy echo of the Heinlein Competent Man paradigm.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite. We steer well clear of Mary-Sueisms round here.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I've (managed to) read a book where the central character is useless and remains useless until the end. (At least one Amis springs to mind.)

I suspect that's got a lot to do with the relative world-views of the fiction-reading/writing public.

Howver, I don't think that Chappist Hacker Futurism requires a Mary-Sue character, in fact I think it would fit better into one's head without one. I think if it requires anything, it's an absence of Americana. In that it does without neon, egregious assumptions of libertarianism, egregious assumptions of free energy, enviromnental disasters happening only to poor people, synthetic food, arcologies, bizzarely stratified societies, suburbs... I mean, nice toys and all, but you wouldn't want to live there.

[reddragdiva]

I had one recently from a survey taker from London Underground, who I took pity on (having done that job). She was very nice and tried very hard but had clearly learnt English from written sources and not very good ones. She was pathetically grateful when I went all the way through and finished the survey.

I'm surprised we don't have surveys being done by a Tom Baker cut-up prerecording. I wonder how many machine calls one Albanian telemarketing slave could monitor at once.

Nice one on the card!

[spride.livejournal.com]

> "We only keep it for the children. They do love a gin & tonic after they've done their homework."

see that? that was my childhood, that. Except it was before, not after.

Richard Jobson, twenty years? LIGHTWEIGHT.

[operon.livejournal.com]

Did you ever finish your story? I forgot about LJ for a bit sometime after about the fifth installment.

Andrew.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Not yet. I fired the thing off to a writer's workshop (I'm surprised I've not seen anyone draw the obvious parallels between demo tapes and early/first books), got busy with that short thing about the automata that SFX clearly hate and then, um, stared into space for a bit. Proper work, real life. That sort of thing.

However, a great lump of Plot fell into my head again the other night, so I'm sorted for the next bit after the bit I haven't written yet.

As they say about code, "Build the first one to throw away."

[operon.livejournal.com]

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[hirez.livejournal.com]

Cor cripes they've tumbled my little game. Scarper, lads. It's the coppers!

[operon.livejournal.com]

Weapons of mirth distraction...

Andrew.

[outerego.livejournal.com]

Marquetry?
- Reminds me of my Dad and the pictures of fish he used to make, before he decided to spend more time building a fishing boat.

He now spends his retirement (he's pushing 75 now) fishing and tying flies in his own Domain (http://flickr.com/photos/optativus/143040294/), or writing about local history on his latest computer, complete with homemade document holder (http://flickr.com/photos/optativus/143031933/) - spot the fly tying connection there. The last time I was home he puffed on his pipe and asked me "So, tell me, exactly what is this Ipod thing?" while I was showing him how to get to grips with (his) latest version of Microsft Word.
I wonder what would happen if I told him about Linux?

Another sub-genre that has rubbish and badly extrapolated SFnal near-future tropes scattered about the place?
- That reminds me of the discussion of anything slightly techy that "Grumpy Old Men/Women" talk about on the television*. I am sure there must be a neoligism for "wrong-headed" and "hyperbole" combined. Probably in German. I doubt it would be a term my dad would use, though.

*television or tv, please. I will be a grumpy middle-aged chap here and insist that "telly" just sounds rubbish.

ObLit: I have just finished reading "Is I Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?" by Lowe and McArthur, and wholeheartedly agree with their trenchant analysis of this modern world.

[outerego.livejournal.com]

That should have been "Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?"

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0316729531/026-6395643-8122864?v=glance&n=266239

As gifted to me by a young man who enjoys vinyl records and XTC, and who was no doubt born in the wong age.

[diffrentcolours]

I recently had occasion to converse with an American Netgear support monkey over a heavily-compressed VoIP line. I had serious difficulty telling where the speech-synthed menu system stopped and the support call began.

Perhaps VoIP is one of the enabling technologies which will allow the Machine Consciousness to bypass our Turing-filters and achieve domination through the service industry.