Virtual Lightweight
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An entry in the Pocket Essentials Literature series, Butler's Cyberpunk guide is a flawed work tackling a difficult subject with a questionable focus. While the author is on much stronger ground with his Pocket Essentials guide to the works of Phillip K. Dick, released simultaneously with this volume, Butler's Cyberpunk feels half-hearted and poorly executed; his admission in an on-line interview that this volume was handed to him after a previous author was unable to complete it may go some way toward explaining the problems within, but yet it is Butler's choice of what to include and what not to include that is troubling and sometimes confusing. At first, past a rambling introduction and a dubious effort to explain cyberpunk via global economics, the author attempts to make 'a provisional definition' of the genre, but actually doesn't. His target audience seems unclear; is it those who know nothing about this sub-genre, who need to have basic concepts like the history of science fiction explained to them, or is it the informed reader with a working knowledge, as later chapters seem to indicate? A neophyte readership might do worse than to start here, but then should move beyond and not look back. While important writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and Pat Cadigan are included, authors who arguably deserve highlighting are either mentioned off-hand (K.W. Jeter) or ignored (Walter Jon Williams, W.T. Quick, Michael Swanwick, George Alec Effinger...). In addition, considering Gibson's place at the head of the movement, that the short stories in his collection Burning Chrome are not fully examined is poor indeed. Butler is also content to gloss over criticism of Sterling's attempts to manage the definitions of cyberpunk fiction in its' early years. The 'Cyberpunk Goes To The Movies' chapter has some questionable choices - of course, we find Blade Runner and The Matrix, but why include The Terminator films, or Run Lola Run? What of New Rose Hotel, Robocop, Brainstorm, Tron or Escape From New York (a film Gibson cited as a strong influence on the seminal Neuromancer)? Butler notes 'I've chosen other titles' but never tells us why, and he overlooks cyberpunk television - Wild Palms, VR.5, the excellent Max Headroom, even the X Files episodes written by William Gibson and Tom Maddox are at least worthy of a name-check if not their own entries. Given the slimness of the Pocket Essentials books - 35,000 words - one would hope for tighter editing, and yet Butler repeats himself and makes sizeable factual errors; referring to coverage of the Secret Service's seizure of a cyberpunk roleplaying game in The Hacker Crackdown, he mistakes Steve Jackson Games' offices in Austin, Texas for those of TSR Games in Lake Geneva (which are in Wisconsin and not Switzerland, as Butler says); he states that a cut of Blade Runner was shown on British TV with a lost scene restored when in fact it was not (the scene in question was shown on a documentary that followed the movie). This latter mistake also appears in his Phillip K. Dick guide, and it is inaccuracies like these that show up poor research, casting doubt on other facts and conclusions. Perhaps with a larger word-count, a bigger advance, a longer deadline and an informed editor, Butler could have turned in the kind of guide that this book hopes to be - instead, we have an incomplete, lukewarm work that skates over the surface of the subject matter. Perhaps this is less Butler's fault than it is that of the whole Pocket Essentials concept; to create a guidebook of this depth and yet still hope to cover 'almost everything you need to know' as the blurb claims, requires a clarity of intent and writing that is only semi-visible here.
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