Retro-futurism is usually associated with the likes of Hugo Gernsback’s stories and the streamlined cars and idealized cities of Norman Bel Geddes. But given the way nostalgia works, it seemed inevitable that the backward-looking retro-future lens would shift its focus from the Thirties and Fifties to more recent science fiction. Having apparently skipped the Seventies altogether (unless you count the attenuation of the Star Wars franchise), we’re now looking back to the Eighties and to cyberpunk, as in Rosa Montero’s Tears In Rain.

To say that it wears its Blade Runner influence on its sleeve is an understatement; almost anyone reading this review will recognize that the title is derived from Roy Batty’s famous dying words. That scene itself is quoted verbatim when the heroine recalls how a friend showed her the “old, mythical film from the twentieth century in which replicants first made an appearance”, and the “technohumans” of 2109 are referred to colloquially as “replicants” or “reps.”

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Last night’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon brought about the debut of a new, Hollywood-powered Halo 4 trailer. Produced by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and directed by Tim Miller (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), the new CGI/live-action hybrid trailer provides a few hints as to plot direction and also teases the series’ new big bad – after all, Master Chief can only kick Covenant butt for so long until he requires a change of pace.

[“An ancient evil awakens...”]

Stories have always been a source of inspiration for musicians, but this illustrated cyberpunk anthology turns the tables by using music as an idea catalyst for the authors of these stories. A group of twenty-eight authors, musicians and graphic artists have combined their talents under the name of “The Very Us Artists” to create Foreshadows. It’s a near-future world that is dark and gritty, but not without hope.

For this project, the musicians got first crack at describing the Foreshadows world. How will life change as society continues to deteriorate, mega-corporations vie for world dominance, and technology blurs reality with fantasy? Nineteen songs later, the music-makers had their answers and then invited various authors to select a song they liked and write a story to go along with it, reflecting that author’s perception of Foreshadows society. This unique approach gives those who purchase the book an intriguing bonus, as all of the songs are included on a CD in the back of the book. Those who prefer to download an e-book will receive the text and an MP3 file of the music.

[Every song has its story ...]

In order to understand Jack Womack’s first novel Ambient, I want to go back to the future that was the summer of the year 2000.

I’d become somewhat obsessed with an art exhibit; the Walker Art Center’s traveling exhibition of postmodern art entitled Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures. It ran at the Portland Art Museum from early July through mid-September, and I visited it often, bringing friends and family members back with me and introducing them to Jeff Koon’s penis, Takashi Murakami’s pornographic statue of an anime girl whose giant breasts gushed milk in a frozen action sequence, Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman spin video, and a video reenactment of Elvis Presley’s vomitous death on his toilet. For some reason, I wanted everyone to see these things.

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Do you remember a guy that’s been
In such an early song…

So asks David Bowie at the beginning of “Ashes to Ashes.” That guy, of course, is Major Tom, the lost astronaut hero of “Space Oddity,” and when Scary Monsters was released in 1980, much had changed in the 11 years since the major had originally gone floating ‘round his tin can. 

1980: the beginning of the Me Decade. Bowie might have been announcing its arrival in his song “Up the Hill Backwards”: “the vacuum created by the arrival of freedom.” Ronald Reagan was elected that year, and Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister of Great Britain for a year. Ridley Scott had just released Alien the year before, and he was two years away from Blade Runner. AIDS had not yet entered public consciousness; its emergence was a year away. Look back at 1980 with the clarity of hindsight and you’ll find dark currents under bright colors: a tangle of ideological warfare, Cold War anxiety, dystopian murmurings, hints of looming doom behind photogenic smiles.

Enter Scary Monsters.

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“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” —Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind.”

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —William Gibson, Neuromancer

The link between film noir (and its literary antecedent) and cyberpunk is not a revelation. The influence has been noted by countless critics, as well as cyberpunk authors themselves, most frequently that which Raymond Chandler had on William Gibson. Chandler, who came to writing late, not publishing his first short story until he was in his mid-40s, wrote boldly and flamboyantly. His protagonists were men embittered by the injustices of the American system, but resigned to working either within or parallel to it. As an older man, and one whose writing career began due to his previous one ending in the Great Depression, Chandler had earned his cynical world-weariness, something very few of his imitators could say, and quite simply no one could ever write prose like Raymond Chandler.

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Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK novels are some of the most insanely inventive books I’ve ever read. They’re a spicy brew of urban fantasy and cyberpunk, nanotech hacker adventures fused with end of the world prophecy, books where artificial intelligences rub virtual elbows with the Archangel Michael and where cyborg priests from the Inquisition have taken over international policing duties from Interpol.

It is no wonder to me that these books have built an intensely loyal fan following over the years. Appetite for stories set in this universe did not diminish when the series finale, Apocalypse Array, was released in 2004. Over the years Morehouse has fed readers morsels of short fiction that expand and embellish her storylines and her characters’ history. Now, with the release of the so-called AngeLINK prequel, Resurrection Code, we get our first full meal in almost a decade.

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Zenith is a movie that plays tricks with its audience. Nothing is what it seems to be with this movie, including its promotional tactics. I’m not just talking about the extensive J.J. Abrams-esque cult of enigmatic blogs, websites, and YouTube videos that floated around for six months leading up to the film’s premiere. Describing itself as a “retrofuturistic steampunk thriller,” Zenith has flagged attention from curious art-house critics and the steampunk community alike, jumping on film festivals for both. Watching, Zenith, however, was a bit of a deceptive experience. No airships, no sepia-tones, no gears or tactile technology or mad scientists (though these were plenty of off-kilter people, and one strange British accent).

So, did Zenith live up to its hype? Retrofuturistic—okay. Steampunk—not at all. Thriller—sure, at least I was entertained.

[Cue in the drugs, sex, and debauchery]

More than once, I’ve heard that steampunk is a reaction against the world that cyberpunk gave us. The argument is fairly straightforward. Modern life is smooth and plastic and seamless. We’ve created a life out of near constant connectivity, powered by endlessly upgradable and ultimately disposable tools that are themselves mass produced in some distant territory. Our friends are online profiles that we refresh, our communities are by subscription service. For many of us, the work of our days and our lives comes down to little more than lights on a screen. Disposable.

Steampunk means to put that on its head. The hope is to build an enduring community of Makers and musicians and writers who dream of yesterday’s future that never happened. The intention is to create some kind of permanence in our increasingly fractured lives, to ground ourselves in things that we’ve made with our own hands, to find solace in the act of creation.

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Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a speculative-fiction theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.

When you think of cyberpunk, who’s the first musician that springs to mind? Billy Idol? Please. Naturally, it ought to be Neil Young.

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