Damn you, Polter, that made *me* cringe just reading it.

::snerk:: Come on -- a book with an unsullied spine is a book that has been horribly neglected!

ION, a few months ago, Jilli mentioned The Anubis Gates, and it sounded intriguing, so I put it on hold at the library. I finally started it last night -- OMG SO GOOD!

Although I'm apparently as fuzzy on what "steampunk" is as I am about what "cyberpunk" is. (I know, several of you have explained cyberpunk to me, but I still don't exactly understand it, based on the examples I've been given. Like, Hec said that the 9/11 hijackers using box-cutters was very cyberpunk, and I don't get it. Shouldn't technology have been involved? Isn't that where the "cyber" comes from?)

I even read the Wikipedia pages on steampunk and cyberpunk last night, and I have concluded that I am completely ignorant and will never be able to understand what, exactly, they are.

It's like those "Magic Eye" pictures, where it looks like a patterned jumble, and ALLEGEDLY a 3-D picture emerges from the jumble. I have never been able to see the 3-D picture. Not even once. I suspect they're a big scam that the entire world is in on, to make me feel deficient.

Well, my inability to understand what cyberpunk (and now steampunk) is like that, too. Everyone *else* seems to understand it, but my brain won't comprehend it.

Still The Anubis Gates is really damn good so far.

Like, Hec said that the 9/11 hijackers using box-cutters was very cyberpunk, and I don't get it.

What? Neither do I, and I thought I mostly understood cyberpunk. Well, probably not, as I think it mostly involves computers and robots and a general punkish attitude. Whereas steampunk is more the same sensibility as cyberpunk, except the computers are made of string and toast.

Whereas steampunk is more the same sensibility as cyberpunk, except the computers are made of string and toast.

I actually *do* understand steampunk better than I do cyberpunk. Chatty!co-worker is trying to explain cyberpunk to me, and he told me that maybe I'm incapable of understanding it because I'm ludditepunk.

ludditepunk.

Able to have a badass attitude no matter what the ambient level of technology is?

Like, Hec said that the 9/11 hijackers using box-cutters was very cyberpunk, and I don't get it. Shouldn't technology have been involved? Isn't that where the "cyber" comes from?

9/11 in its planning, execution and politics seemed like it came straight out of a Bruce Sterling novel to me.

Sterling's fiction and non-fiction is interested in how people use technology, not high technology. In fact, much of his fiction is interested in finding new uses for old technology to hack contemporary systems.

And hacking wasn't about breaking into a computer, but about figuring out and exploiting the weakness in a system.

So the weakness in airline security was an outmoded policy about how to deal with hijackers. What the terrorists understood better than anybody was that an airplane is a gigantic bomb. They exploited the weakness in the system (hacked it) with low tech (box cutters).

That's a scenario that recurs in Sterling's work. The early cyberpuynks were interested in the "elegance" of outthinking a system with the most efficient means. They were interested in how marginal groups use technology against the people who presumably own that technology.

He was also very prescient about the conflicts between the West and the Muslim countries, though most cyberpunk writers saw that coming.

I'm not trying to be deliberately obtuse, I swear.

I just don't think of box cutters as "technology," so that's part of where my disconnect comes from.

Although I don't quite buy the larger point, Steph, just think of any tool as technology.

There's been a jargon misuse that might not be recovered from--hackers doesn't have an automatic negative connotation, or didn't. It's like being a digital McGyver. It's about the insights, not so much the raw power. Although being shiny is still often a status symbol.

I just don't think of box cutters as "technology," so that's part of where my disconnect comes from.

Well, as ita notes, they are. Technology isn't just circuit boards. Sterling used to spin a scenario about creating machetes out of new light weight ceramics that were super strong and very sharp and imagining how quickly deforestation would happen if they were cheap too. Cyberpunk was very into the implications of cheap technology. Also into how things could be repurposed.

The main point about 9/11, though, is really about the mindset of hacking. The way the cyberpunks liked to write about it this involved understanding systems and the implications of them better than the people who made those systems. That's what the terrorists did with airport security.

I just don't think of box cutters as "technology," so that's part of where my disconnect comes from.

Well, as ita notes, they are.

What makes that "cyber," though? See, steampunk makes sense to me because the technology (if you can call it that, and I guess you can and I should) isn't electronic. "Steam" makes sense.

Box-cutters = "cyber" doesn't compute for me, though. (Pardon the pun.)

t edit If I'm frustrating the holy hell out of you, and you're just staring at your computer screen wondering how I manage to survive with only a brain stem, just ignore my retarded line of questioning. It's just a disconnect I've got in my head. I can see how the Matrix movies are cyberpunk (um....if, in fact, they are), but box-cutters? "Cyber" just seems like the wrong prefix.