Red Spider White Web by Misha

[james_davis_nicoll]

Inaugurating The End of History reviews, Misha’s sunnily ebullient exploration of the North America of tomorrow.

Red Spider White Web by Misha

Comments

[estrevan]

I sometimes wonder if the constant dunking on razorgirls in cyberpunk isn’t just another kind of misogyny, like the complaints I remember about the more general trend of tough-girl action heroines in the 90s. That’s possibly because I always wanted to be Molly from Neuromancer, though.

Which is not to deny cyberpunk was and is very blokey… but it’s interesting to see which bits get criticism and which don’t.

[james_davis_nicoll]

The druggy petty criminal protag is just as annoying but usually those guys get more to do.

[estrevan]

For Neuromancer specifically I could argue for Molly as Case’s manic pixie dreamgirl - depending on what we think the author’s opinion of Case is, anyway - but that’s a bit of a tangent.

I don’t know. On the one hand, there’s the ultra-cool lady assassin stereotype as male fantasy but on the other there’s Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg, which has an acknowledged debt to cyberpunk. I’m just wary of criticism that tries to pin a bunch of rather complicated complaints - the figure of the lone rebel, the way the genre erased the feminist SF of the 70s, fetishisation of technology if you think that’s a patriarchal thing - on the figure of the “razorgirl”

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

As to cyberpunk's roll in the diminishment of feminist SF ... Well, this was the 80's. Everybody experienced blowback from the usual suspects' outrage at anything humanizing females. Why, if we don't act now pretty soon my wife/girlfriend/etc. will think they're as good as me! Ronnie as much to answer for, though admittedly he was more symptom than cause.

[roseembolism]

I could argue for Molly being her own realized character-for one thing, she appeared outside of Neuromancer. Of course she also fits other tropes like "The Tough Chick Who Falls For The Nebbishy Hero"™.

But I really feel like the concept decay hit with Hardwired, where it feels like WJW went "Let's take Molly and turn up the danger! And the sexyness! And we'll make her a former prostitute!"

[james_davis_nicoll]

I have this vague memory that Hardwired was written before Neuromancer but published after...

[patrick_morris_miller]

'Right story, not yet time' would be a very WJW thing to do.

[dsrtao]

_Hardwired_ was June 1986 according to ISFDB; _Neuromancer_ was 2 years earlier. It does appear as though they were completely independent, though.

The rest of this comment is a quote from http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2011/04/1983-the-writers-life/

---

This occurred on yet another visit to Austin, when I was freeloading (yet again) with Howard Waldrop and Leigh Kennedy. We’d attended the Aggiecon convention, which places the date as April 1983. On the night before my return to New Mexico, I crashed in a sleeping bag in the dining room, I think because Ed Bryant was crashing in another sleeping bag in the living room.

Howard and Leigh lived in a second-floor apartment, and the dining room was directly above the apartment’s laundry room. The dryers ran all day and night, and generated vast amounts of heat. I lay there in this heat cloud sweltering, and had a troubled night, unable to rest.

At some point I finally fell asleep. At some point I dreamed a horrific scene that was the kernel for Hardwired. I woke up immediately, and thought about the scene as I lay sweating and unable to sleep. (I can still see the scene in my mind’s eye.) I thought about the scene for the rest of the night, and then on the twelve- or fourteen-hour drive home. I kept trying to think of a world in which a scene that horrific could occur. By the end off the trip home, I had Hardwired plotted.

But the problem was I’d just sold another book entirely, and I was obliged to write that one. So, with my head on fire from this other book, I set myself to compose Knight Moves.

[estrevan]

I have long and probably unfairly blamed Walter Jon Williams and Hardwired for taking everything actually interesting about cyberpunk - technology as environment, the elimination of the distinction between natural and artificial, body as artefact - and replacing it with a set of easy tropes and some unthreatening blather about “freedom”. But again, in terms of what gets criticism, I don’t think Sarah is any less of a cliché than Cowboy.

[estrevan]

And of course Molly did sex work too, to pay for her surgeries. Lots of trans vibes off of Molly even though I’m sure Gibson didn’t intend it.