William Gibson’s The Winter Market

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Published post Neuromancer, The Winter Market has a quasi-cyberpunk aesthetic with its run down market where people sell their wares and its futuristic technology where people’s dreams are commercialized by technology that turns their dreams into films.

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The story is about a film editor who takes people’s dreams and turns them into films and then sells them. The main character meets a woman who has a debilitating disease that requires her to wear an exo-skeleton to walk around. The main character then decides to turn this woman’s dreams into a commercial film project. The main character plugs his brain into hers to see her dreams.

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This is where the story loses me.

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This plugging in is supposed to be some transformational experience that creates a connection between the main character and the woman dreamer. Without this the rest of the story doesn’t make any sense because otherwise why would the main character (and the reader) care about her? The story ends with the woman uploading her consciousness to a computer server and the main character is afraid the woman’s consciousness will contact him (which unnerves him because he doesn’t want to talk to someone who got cremated).

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So, the whole story hinges on the relationship between the woman and the main character. And I’m not buying it. What’s the basis for the main character’s feelings toward the woman? It’s supposed to be the plugging in, but here’s how Gibson describes it: “Words. Words cannot. Or maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came out of her, what she did…” The main character then goes on to explain what the dream looked like: “like your on a motorcycle at night, no lights but somehow you don’t need them … Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge forever.”

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And that’s basically it. That’s the four second dream that is so pivotal to the story. The main character describes the rush but do you feel it? Do you buy it?

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I don’t. Any sort of “Words can’t describe what I’m trying to describe” is just awful writing. It is the writer’s job to describe things. Even if the main character himself couldn’t describe it, the reader should still be able to feel what the character goes through and just saying “words can’t describe it” is a miserable failure.

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The writing tells me that the incident is “Amazing” without actually showing me that it’s amazing. That’s the problem and the problem is fatal to the story. With any futuristic technology like plugging in, the technology and its effects on people needs to be believable. Obviously, it’s hard to show a futuristic technology and its effects on people. It is much easier just to mail it in and tell the reader instead of showing them. But that’s not good writing. Good sci-fi writing will give the reader no choice but to feel the future.

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The Winter Market is a miss. The voters that nominated this for the Hugo had low standards of proof.

An AI actress has been created and born. Mass outrage among the Hollywood creative community with actors condemning it. Hollywood talent agencies have said they will not work with her. Their argument is that creativity must be human centered. I think that misses the point. AI can still be human centered because there’s a human somewhere that is directing the AI. Furthermore, I think the criticism misses some of limitations in fully human creativity.

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Everyone who watched Games of Thrones noticed the massive quality difference in the first 3-5 seasons and the final couple of seasons, with the final season notably weak. What started as an ultra-realistic critic of cheesy High Fantasy devolved into the type of show it was ostensibly critiquing. One of the most notable differences was how the show changed its approach to on-camera nudity.

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“Fuck You, I’m Naked” was the overriding philosophy of the first 3 seasons. The show was very in your face about it and this nudity created a sense of ultra-realism that was unlike anything on TV. But the last 3 seasons had a very different attitude toward nudity. There was none. Or at least the nudity was minimal and safe. The most obvious example was when Arya finally gets a sex scene in the last season and there is really nothing shown. This matters. By refusing to show what was really happening, and only showing the safe and bowdlerized version, the show ends its critique of Tolkien and company. Gone was the punk rock principle of “I’m going to show you reality whether you’re ready for it or not.” And the show greatly suffered.

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What does this have to do with an AI actress? Everything. Because the reason the show went safe is that the human actresses had gotten more famous and more powerful politically and refused to do more extensive nude scenes. Also, the general political environment had changed and with it changing attitudes of women’s nudity in film/tv. So, there was no way to keep the no holds barred nudity and with it the whole “Fuck You, I’m Naked” vibe. AI solves this problem. An AI actress’s feelings can’t get ruffled by requiring more nudity than she wants. So, if an AI actress had been available then GOT could have kept up its ultra-realistic critique of cheesy heroic fantasy and given us the ending that the show deserved.

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Creatives should not default to the idea that humanity is always better than AI. Humanity has its downsides and in certain circumstances AI can circumvent those downsides to create something better than humans alone could create.

Gibson’s Hinterlands is a short story from 1980-something. The story revolves around astronauts who pilot a small vessel to a point in space between Earth and Mars. Once they reach that point the astronaut hope to be taken by an advanced alien race. If they are taken, they disappear as if through a worm hole. The people then come back, maybe years later, often brining back some object (the first object was a sea shell).

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It’s a good story with an interesting final twist. Something worth pointing out, however.

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Gibson’s whole career is undisputably a reaction to 1950s optimistic Sci-Fi. He thinks that the gee whiz sci-fi is bullshit and that comes through in his famous cyberpunk stories, but also in his non-cyberpunk stories like Hinterlands. The Hinterlands of the title is our solar system and the effect of that is anti-human. “We’re not special! There is a civilization more advanced than us!” Gibson is saying. Very different from Captain Kirk whizzing from star system to star system.

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Nothing inherently wrong with that but it is worth pointing out the internal inconsistencies of the “1950s were bad” people.

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One inconsistency that strikes me is when he writes about the first astronaut that came back and how medical science took various samples of her skin/body so that the astronaut was “spread thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine.” You can only write that in a culture where religion actually means something. You would have to know that a Saint’s relics include the Saint’s body parts and not just personal belongings. You would have to know that these relics are actually venerated. You would have to actually believe a reasonable person would find some sort of meaning in these relics. You would have to not be grossed out by someone praying to an old Saint’s dead body parts. These beliefs are all incompatible with the current culture, a culture that Gibson helped build.

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Of course, this was really just a throw-away line and not really relevant to the story. So you could read this and say that I am making too much a few lines in a single short story. But I think it is instructive not only of how writers work generally (we are all products of a culture – even when we’re writing to change that culture) but also how current sci-fi devolved into its current state. I can respect the current generation of sci-fi, despite how nihilistic it is, more than Gibson’s sci-fi because it is more honest and doesn’t attack the very thing that sustains it. It doesn’t saw off the tree branch that it’s standing on.

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Of course, Gibson’s sci-fi was a lot better than the current sci-fi, but Gibson’s works were not without its flaws and reading his early stories some things really stick out.

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Lots of talk about free speech lately but what people are missing is that both the Kirk shooting and the Kimmel firing/suspension are downstream of liberal capture. Once liberals captured every single cultural institution it became commonplace to say things like “Punch A Nazi” and there were no conservatives around these institutions to say “Maybe it’s wrong to commit violence against people you disagree with.”

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So, someone was going to get killed.

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Furthermore, once all actual conservatives had been purged from every cultural institution, the only conservative pushback could come in the form of government action. Enter the FCC. The argument that conservatives shouldn’t want the government to intervene on their behalf because one day the roles would be reversed falls on deaf ears because conservatives don’t have any power other than political power. They have no power in cultural/academic institutions because liberals completely took over those institutions and so conservatives have nothing to lose.

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Having one ideology run everything is a recipe for an unstable and precarious society.

Just announcing it to the world.