Too often in early cyberpunk stories, the protagonist was male, straight, and white, and people of color, women, and non-cis and non-het characters were set dressing or perhaps worse...tragic victims. Sci-fi and fantasy author Melissa Scott helped kick off cyberpunk's second wave with her novel Trouble and Her Friends, a techno-thriller set in a future besieged by corporate oligarchs and governmental overreach, with protagonists who are discriminated against for their embrace of new invasive hacking technologies, as well as for their gender and their choice of lovers. Trouble and Her Friends was published at a time when the imminent gains made by LGBTQ and other marginalized groups seemed impossible, and prefigured many of the struggles queer people still face today in virtual spaces.
In this episode, we talk with Melissa about the origins of TAHF, the novel's still relevant themes, the essential "criminality" of cyberpunk, the endpoint of our technological drives, looking at the future through the lens of the past, the "closed shop" of the early Movement, how digital literacy has changed cyberpunk fiction, the concessions you make to live in a society, the multifaceted metaphor at the book's core, and why optimism is required to write science fiction. We also talk about data tourism and body solidarity, making Voyager up as you go, who owns the Internet, making cyberspace sensual, hacking intersectionality, emotional support puppies, making things "political" in cyberpunk, building your own Internet, rural cyberpunk, social engineering an AI, and a definitive answer on how much space you can have in your cyberpunk story.
We're dangerously close to a The Postman situation!
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