The Sprawl: Cyberpunk Ground Zero

You can argue about who counts as the first cyberpunk author – some would advocate for Philip K. Dick, others might make a case for John Brunner, Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty is often cited as a potential influence on the genre – but it would hard to say that William Gibson wasn’t the definitive cyberpunk author. Quite simply, if Gibson’s seminal work in the genre does not count as cyberpunk, then the term is pretty goddamn meaningless.

That said, as the world has caught up with the requirements of his fiction, Gibson’s writing has become less stylised, less science fictional, and more like modern-day techno-thriller material: computers are now at a point where Gibson can tell many of the stories he wants to tell without resorting to science fictional departures from current tech. When it comes to Gibson’s cyberpunk writing, the truly definitive stuff is his work from the 1980s, and specifically the stories of the Sprawl setting, “the Sprawl” being in-setting slang for the continuous urban development extending from Boston down to Atlanta along the East Coast of the US.

Though the Sprawl itself is not as central to most of these stories as you’d think – they tend to be more globe-trotting affairs – the tales keep looping in and out of it, so it’s a fairly apt term for the series. It’s now some 40 years after these stories first started being published, and we are now very much living in the sort of future Gibson was envisioning, so let’s see how well these have aged.

Burning Chrome

Before we get into the Sprawl series itself, it’s worth looking at this short story anthology. Collecting more or less all of Gibson’s short fiction up to 1986, the majority of the material here predates Neuromancer and finds him developing ideas he’d later use there, and three of the stories actually take place in the Sprawl setting and provide little prequel snippets to the Sprawl trilogy itself. Some of the other stories have sufficient thematic overlap that they feel like they could be Sprawl stories, but only three – Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel, and Burning Chrome – are the subject of significant callbacks in the Sprawl novels.

Après Newt, le Déluge

A warning in advance: this article is going to do absolutely nothing new. Griping about diminishing returns in the Alien sequels is a well-ploughed furrow. Still, with Disney threatening to make more sequels in the franchise, I might as well bite the bullet and go ahead and offer some thoughts on the series, especially since I already did the same for the Alien vs. Predator movies.

Alien

I’ll try to keep this one short, since it’d insult your intelligence to give a plot recap; Alien‘s plot is pretty damn archetypal, all told, and if you haven’t already seen it and have any interest in SF-horror hybrids, you need to go fix that.

You can see the original 1979 Alien as a riposte to Star Wars – a gruesomely visceral SF-horror nightmare which takes place in a similarly grimy, “used” version of the future without the glamour or mysticism of the Jedi or the bombastic space battles and Death Stars to steal the spotlight from the blue-collar characters in their functional blue-collar ship, and which is more than willing to take a slow, gentle pace when it calls for it rather than keeping the action fast and furious all the way along.

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley became the franchise protagonist well past the point when that stopped making sense. In some respects that’s kind of a shame. Only the very first audiences to see Alien, before Weaver’s central role became widely known, will have been able to fully enjoy the question mark over who (if anyone) would survive the slasher movie-esque depredations of the xenomorph.

Still, at the same time Ripley is arguably an important figure not just for science fiction (still precious few female leads in that), but also for horror. On the one hand, she’s an example of the Final Girl concept as widely used in slasher movies, but only in the extremely surface-level, literalist sense that she’s a woman and she’s the only cast member to survive the xenomorph’s assault.

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 7: Hey, Did You Know David Duchovny’s (Sort of) Leaving?

Season 6 of The X-Files was, as I recounted in the previous part of this article series, was a season of two halves – starting out as a big goofy mess, but somewhat pulling itself together by the end. Season 7 would find the production team having adapted fully to the relocation to Los Angeles, but also dealing with the fact that David Duchovny was feeling increasingly restless and clearly wasn’t going to be sticking around forever.

This was particularly the case because Duchovny had decided to seriously upset the applecart by suing Fox – the television network, not his own character. See, Duchovny’s contract with Fox included a cut of various royalties, including the proceeds from book deals, reruns and the like. Duchovny felt that, rather than seeking the best and most competitive deal for those rights, Fox had instead just sold them to their affiliates at an unfairly low price. (Note, for instance, how the show switched to Sky – a Fox-owned company – rather than the BBC after season 5, putting an end to my watching of the show because my family didn’t have or want satellite TV in our house and I no longer cared enough about the show to seek out other means of watching it.) By doing that, Duchovny and anyone else whose compensation included royalties on those would end up underpaid.

The lawsuit would also undermine Duchovny’s working relationship with other individuals on the show; most notably, though Chris Carter was not a full-blown co-defendant on the case, Duchovny’s suit did allege that Carter had been paid hush money to keep the arrangement quiet (presumably so as to not damage any contract negotiations which might have been impacted by the knowledge that the rights were going to be handed off for cheap). Fox settled with Duchovny, but it was clear that some bridges were burned there.

This was not the only situation the creative team had to face. Chris Carter’s own contract was up by the end of the season, raising the possibility that the show might get renewed but he might not be onboard. Perhaps as insurance against that policy, the circle of writers was somewhat widened for this season; it has the least Chris Carter script credits of any of the pre-revival seasons, and less Frank Spotnitz scripts than any season since season 3 (Spotnitz would be conspicuously absent from the revival seasons); as we’ll see, this is a trend that’s very much reversed in season 8.

Revisiting the X-Files, Part 5: Hey, Did You Know We Have a Movie Coming Out?

So far on my X-Files rewatch we’ve seen the show’s muddled beginnings, cheered it on as it got good, savoured its prime, and tried to enjoy what we could as it gradually began its decline. (We’ve also glanced over at Millennium and gone “nah, can’t be bothered”.)

Now it’s time to look at season 5, produced in parallel with The X-Files: Fight the Future, the first movie. As we’ll see, that’s a circumstance which ended up overshadowing this season somewhat.

I noted how in the previous season the writing team had become somewhat contracted, and that’s exacerbated further this time. The inner circle has now contracted to just Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban, and Vince Gilligan – four writers as opposed to seven last season – and once again, there’s much less outside contributions than in earlier seasons, with only three episodes having scripts which weren’t written outright or contributed to by those four people.

The season opens with another Chris Carter two-parter focusing on the mytharc, Redux and Redux II, resolving both the “did Mulder kill himself?” cliffhanger from last season (of course he fucking didn’t) and the “will Scully’s cancer be cured?” (of course it fucking will). The only really exciting aspect of the cliffhanger, really, is “Whose dead body is that in Mulder’s apartment that Scully misidentified as Mulder to cover for him?”, and the answer turns out to be “a generic agent of the Conspiracy we don’t care about”.