第 56 页

And just because we saw it coming doesn’t make it our fault.

Once ink gets all informational, that’s not the half of it. It’s not the tenth. People often ask us, “What happened after cyberpunk in science fiction?” The answer is that cyberculture happened.

For me, The Difference Engine happened, then. It changed something, for me. Changed how I thought, and wrote. It’s the only novel with my name on it that I return to for reading pleasure.

Cyberculture happened all over the place. It scarcely left a brick standing on a brick. “Cyberpunk” was the classic boho harbinger of mainstreamed cyberculture. That desktop-based computer world is becoming quite archaic now. It’s being rapidly replaced by wireless, cloudy network culture, a world where even family intimates commonly communicate through handheld devices. A world where electronic expression is the everyday vernacular, and an eighty-thousand-word coherent text comes across like a Victorian epic poem.

It everted. Turned itself out, into the world. The world became it.

Social networks are bigger than nations now. The Xeroxed bits of cyberpunk lore we used to swap are spread worldwide in blogs and tweets. The Difference Engine turned out to be a kind of Gothic sarcophagus for our print culture. If we’re at relative ease in the current antic media environment, it’s because we’ve spent our entire working careers disentombing and reburying media. We’ve killed ’em with more reckless hilarity than Dickens killed Little Nell.

The Difference Engine had its conceptual roots, I think, in Bruce’s Dead Media Project, or in the thinking that led up to it. Discussing dead media. How the media we then had was going to look, dead.

We probably shouldn’t end this without saying something warm and kindly about steampunks. We didn’t make up that word “steampunk,” any more than we ever made up the word “cyberpunk.” Granted, we both make up a lot of words.

Or find them, often as not, and handily recontextualize them.

The Difference Engine in particular boasts entire creole vocabularies of period technocriminal argot, fits of creative archaeoneologism that still make us both crack up laughing twenty years later. They’re the kind of words we could have made up, we just didn’t.

The magic of sampling. Sampling forgotten quotidian period text.

The book does prominently feature three of the foundational touchstones of all things steampunk: giant airships, brass computers, and kinky feminine underwear. We, however, are not responsible for that. We didn’t lift a finger to make a steampunk scene happen; we never wrote a sequel, nor will we. We have our own problems, such as designing Japanese athletic shoes and keynoting augmented-reality conferences. Certainly we never wrote this book to create subcultures of people who build brass hobby instruments, play dress up, and send us ardent email from Brazil and Poland.

And I for one can never countenance the repurposing of new old stock mechanical watch parts for purely decorative purposes. Please, stop doing that.

Words of experience, kids. When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed it.

It’s still our book, no matter what time it is.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

WILLIAM GIBSON was born in the United States in 1948. In 1972 he moved to Vancouver, Canada, after four years spent in Toronto. He is married with two adult children.

BRUCE STERLING is an Austin-born science fiction writer and Net critic, internationally recognized as a cyberspace theorist who is also considered one of the forefathers of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. He has won a John W. Campbell Award, two Hugo Awards, and an Arthur C. Clarke Award.