“Johnny Mnemonic” by William Gibson

For Cyberpunk I read “Johnny Mnemonic” by William Gibson. When stories are set in another version of Earth, which Johnny seems to be on since he mentions Paris, I expect their to be a good amount of time spent on what happened. We really only learn that a lot of the way things look in this world are based on a long ago war fought primarily by the Navy. Short stories are good however for not wasting time on anything. I like how focused they are. This class has been my first experience with really reading short stories.

I also expect the first person narrators to set up who they are and how they feel about their present state, but Johnny jumps right in. You spend more time having to read and reread because you didn’t understand what that thing back there meant, but then you find something that makes sense and go back to what confused you before. You have to train yourself not to take time to figure out what something is but instead to just roll with the fact that is something and maybe later you’ll find out what it does even if you never understand what it is.

I think it gave me a good taste of cyberpunk allowing me notice the conventions of the genre and be able to recognize them in the future. It had a cyborg dolphin, body modifications, and an alpha female all set in an alternate reality.

Some of the body modifications of note were: The Magnetic Dog Sisters who were “as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them,” the bodybuilders that almost didn’t look human for all of the super structures of muscle graft, characters can wear the faces of famous people, and the LowTeks who like to exchange some of their teeth for a dog’s.

Then there were the cyborgs: the assassin with the bullet-like thumb attached to a monofilament, Jones the dolphin-cyborg-addict with twin deformities on either side of his skull which had been engineered to house sensor units (squids) and articulated body armor. The cyborg stars are the alpha female with ten blades that extend straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a narrow, double edged scalpel in pale blue steel and Johnny whose brain carries stored data that is fed though a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.

The design of the Killing floor was pretty cool. I especially liked the incorporation of a musical aspect. The whole story seems like bits from a lifetime of dreams artistically melded together.