Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150491
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REBECCA ORE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
An American science-fiction movement, invented by some guys in Austin and two guys from West Virginia and South Carolina, has gone international, but I still have to explain what cyberpunk is to my neighbors. But then, many of us live in planetary networks these days, not local communities.
Since the Soviet state last year gave up its monopoly on publishing, Boris and his friends are buying rights to translate American science fiction for an anthology with a 100,000-copy print run.
His science-fiction club, which only two years ago sought disaffiliation from the Pioneers, the Communist Party's youth organization, plans to host an international science-fiction convention. He sent me a photo of a young Soviet writer sticking out his tongue and wearing a "Things go better with cocaine" T-shirt.
Well, I thought, the genie is really out of the bottle now, his wearing that T-shirt.
Having personal contacts with real people in the Soviet Union makes the speculation about the meaning of perestroika more immediate.
Freedom of the press? Rupert Murdock is buying Polish newspapers and sending editors to remodel them on British tabloids with half-naked woman on page three, according to a friend of one of Murdock's editors.
Igor and Boris are making 1,000-ruble deals to get translation rights to material that was given sexual-content warning-labels by the Science-Fiction Book Club.
It's too easy to say that socialism failed, or communism failed. It's just as possible that central planning failed, or that having no checks and balances in the governmental and economic system failed.
What's critical now is: How fast does the new system have to work before Moscow matrons panic over all those cyberpunks on the Volga and want to bring back a strong dictator who can get things done? (Or were those Russians praising Stalin on CBS' "60 Minutes" only teasing?)
The year before Boris began writing me, the local authorities in his area tried to squelch a science-fiction convention. He and his friends cabled Gorbachev for help, and got it.
I thought it wonderfully weird that freedom looked like the side effect of long-haired and bearded Russkis wanting to get together and watch "The Terminator" on a VCR, and sell each other American science-fiction books and T-shirts that we American correspondents send them.
But if the cyberpunks on the Volga start their own publishing company, hold conventions, then will the United States and the Soviet Union stop being enemies?
History shows that most enemies aren't ideologically motivated, and certainly this country's allies and trading partners haven't been particularly democratic.
However, nation's aren't what they used to be. The poet Robert Bly complained that many of us are leaving communities to hook up with networks.
Boris and Igor, and I, are more part of an international science-fiction world than we are citizens of Volgograd or Patrick County. People thousands of miles away are more aware of what the local musicians are doing than I am.
When the Volgograd boys get their first private modem and personal computer (so far, they borrow the Young Pioneers' computer and dot-matrix printer), then they'll really be loose in that communication universe.
This freedom that the Volga cyberpunks are getting is a more ambiguous thing than an academic literary critic or a high-school civics teacher might prefer. But how rigid a society must be if people must fight for the freedom to wear Space Invaders T-shirts.
And how many Americans - say, those who think "Dungeons and Dragons" is satanic - would really like this country to be that rigid?
by CNB