Bit Rot

[digitaldiscipline]

I don't know the tendencies and predilections of the rest of y'all, but I've noticed that, especially in the work of the "founders" of cyberpunk literature (especially Gibson), there's been something of a revolt against the austerity of the defining literature - his later works, as well as those by followup authors (Stephenson specifically springs to mind) are more aggressively organic, practically eschewing the armature that the genre was built upon.

Is it worthwhile to backtrack and bridge the gap, or revisit the original flavor?

Just to liven up anyone's day who might be inclined, and excerpt from one of my efforts at doing so:

=============
If you got any of them alone and asked what they called the undersized, dark kid who sometimes sat in the old wheelchair, every one of them would say "Cock-Knocker." They believed themselves on this implicitly. To them, he was "Cock-Knocker" ("Knock" for short) because that made them better than him, and he was some kind of shrimpy cripple, so they had to be better than him. But watch them from behind a door or around a corner as they swaggered or skulked, jibed or (more rarely) thought, and if the little kid with the long arms, big hands, and strangely wasted legs went by in his chair or in the back seat of a car with the windows open, you'd hear a different truth.

"Rock, you got any gum?"
"No wheels today, Rock?"

His parents, when he remembered having them, had called him Norbert. His older brother (so much older it was almost like having another father, but one you could be friends with, kind of) had called him The Red Baron for some reason he could never figure out. But, like just about everyone else, they were dead - his brother, Duane, had disappeared when he was really little (like, five), Miaki from the Trips, and Gregor Rickenbacher from the Squads who came after. Nobody called him Norbie or Bert anymore, but liked being Rock better anyways. Sometimes he thought about how being The Red Baron would have been. Maybe like being German, but with style.

* * * * * * * * *

Cambridge came awake feeling like he'd been given a molten basalt ipecac cum inner-ear trepanning, and retched the ubiquitous krill/rice/Budweiser mash his diet had become into a pink plastic bag with a smiling cartoon dog's head and the words Moo Moo Market- All Hours emblazoned on it in a black so cheap it was dark green. Jetlag was still a bitch, no matter how fast the planes went, and New York didn't smell any different than any of the last half-dozen cities he'd found himself vomiting in.

Even the street hordes sounded the same. Didn't anyone speak English anymore, anywhere? Even Heathrow had been a sonic chaos, and Cambridge figured that would be the most English place he was going to be for quite a while. If anything, being someplace where he expected not to know what the hell was being said was comforting. He might be a foreign element, but it was okay in Marraketch or Prague or even Tejales. But when that ubiquitous babble remained in alien tongues juxtaposed against drivingly banal Starbucks and Do Not Enter signs, he ended up with aural motion-sickness on top of everything else.

Thankfully, the bag didn't leak as he tied it off and dropped it carefully into the basket outside that night's sleeping cubicle.

Now his air smelled like puke on top of the background notes of dry rot and electrical fire. He wished he hadn't trashed the filter brick as he sagged back into sleep, troubled by glaring headlines in surreal, gamboling typefaces about declining allergy tolerances, scrawled in the dark green of cheap ink and bile.

============================
[this has been crossposted]

Comments

[izzy23.livejournal.com]

Nice. I'd love to see the rest.