The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig's disease, MS, or paralysis.

The lead scientist on the project, Dr. Jerry Shih, says the program is able to perform near or at 100% accuracy for the patients. While this isn't far from the results from studies using non-invasive EEG, Shih believes that ECoG has advantages, as the scalp and skull distort the information coming from the brain, which means that ECoG has potential to be faster and more accurate. Shih also said that with EEG, "the accuracy isn't terribly great, and it takes a long time for the computer system to learn an individual's brain signals and to correctly interpret."

It is early days yet, and there are still numerous hurdles for the research. The initial study was only with two patients, but they're now on to the sixth, with plans for a wider study, to ensure that this technique is universally applicable. Shih's system does require a craniotomy, which is not a surgery to be taken on a whim; and an interpreter device is required, which must be tuned to an individual user. There is also the fact that EEG based interfaces don't require the invasive surgery, and are similarly accurate, even if they are slower and not quite as precise. So in terms of market adoption, the implant is at a disadvantage. Most people would be willing to deal with the speed loss to avoid dangerous procedures.

Shih is currently working on ensuring the method's effectiveness. He believes it could be used for controlling prosthetics as well as typing. It could also possibly be trained with images instead of letters. Imagine an item, and an image or word for it would appear on your screen.

The device could be available in as little as 5-10 years.

It's just a matter of time before this technology filters down from medical to elective, and we can all live out our cyberpunk dreams of plugging our brains directly into a computer.

Via American Epilepsy Society and Mayo Clinic

Fashion blogs have been pushing the meme that thigh-high boots are going "cyberpunk" lately, and this seems to originate with Fashionising.com, who included this paragraph in a roundup of recent boot styles:

Futurism/Cyberpunk: building upon the cyberpunk influences of recent years, some designers have thrown an element of dark futurism into the thigh-high boot mix. Particularly evident in the wound-and-bound effects of boots by Rodarte and Topshop Unique, this is a trend I expect we'll see more of in coming seasons.

Already, these "cyberpunk" boots have been seen on Twilight's Kristen Stewart (see picture) and Lindsay Lohan, among others. Here's a gallery of the boots most likely to plug your brain into cyberspace.

Hussein Chalayan adds garters to thigh-high boots. (Photo by Imaxtree, from New York Magazine.)

Jean-Paul Gaulthier, photo from Fashionising.com.

Rodarte.

Topshop Unique, from Fashionising.com.

Photoshoot from Numero Korea Magazine, via Fashionising.com.

Twilight star Kristen Stewart does a photoshoot for Allure Magazine wearing Rodarte boots. from Fashionising.com

Rodarte, from Fashionising.com.

Louis Vuitton, from Fashionising.com.

How exactly does Case manage to last six hours? The program says it goes from noon to six on Sunday Nov. 22 at the New Museum — and Grey mentioned those times as well. I'm guessing there's some repetition in there, but will Grey and the other performers be there the whole time? Possibly the "faux virtual reality" sequences involving sculptures and Gamelan music will occupy five of the six hours?

Update: creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, "The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece. A mention of that might clear up any confusion. Viewers can come and go as they wish throughout the day.

Update #2: Gibson tweeted about this event:

Gol' dang! It's news to me!

Sasha Grey feels more like a character from Virtual Light, to me, but then she feels so *exactly* like that. Heh.

In any case, here's the official description:

An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson's1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux "virtual reality" scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.

The event at the New Museum is the premiere of Case, which will also be performed at a small outdoor community theater in rural Missouri in summer 2010. The New York production of Case will feature many of the ten cast members from the upcoming Midwest event, such as political activist (and notorious local hell-raiser) Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, who stars as the main character Henry Dorsett Case, a drug addict and computer hacker hired to execute an impossible cyber crime. Case will also feature Brooklyn-based performance artist Sto as Lupus Yonderboy, leader of the techno-anarchist gang the Panther Moderns, and the actress Sasha Grey as the street samurai Molly. The script has been prepared by the writer Brandon Stosuy, with sound design by Peter Segerstrom, and graphic props by Breanne Trammell.

In Morgan's novel, set in the 25th Century, human memories are backed up and stored in cortical stacks, data storage systems implanted in the human body. If the body dies, the stack can be "resleeved" in another body, enabling human beings to become essentially immortal. But only the very rich can afford to be resleeved frequently, and when one such very wealthy, very long-lived individual, Laurens Bancroft, dies, his stack is shockingly destroyed as well. Thanks to a remote backup, Bancroft is able to be resleeved again, but finds he's missing the memories from the 48 hours prior to his death. While the police rule Bancroft's death a suicide, Bancroft himself believes he was murdered. To solve the mystery of his death, Bancroft has soldier Takeshi Kovacs resleeved into a cop's body. Kovacs is thrust into a world of violence and intrigue, dealing with the dark realm of world politics, enemies from his past, and the fact that the body he now inhabits belongs to someone else.

McTeigue was working on a big-screen adaptation Altered Carbon when he was approached to direct his upcoming action film Ninja Assassin. He is currently at work on The Raven, a film that speculates on the final days of Edgar Allan Poe, but in an interview with /Film, McTeigue said Altered Carbon is still very much on the table:

I still hope to make [Altered Carbon] with Joel [Silver]. There is a really good script that I've developed for a while, and I'd love to do that when the time is right, and hopefully that time will be shortly. We've started actively talking about that again.

Hopefully this is more than just idle talk. Altered Carbon made our list earlier this year of books that deserve to be made into movies, and it would be great to see McTeigue bring the same cyberpunk sensibilities that he helped the Wachowskis bring to the Matrix trilogy, as well as see a futuristic mystery story on the big screen.

[/Film]

When MTV News talked to Cameron about the possibility of adapting Yukito Kishiro's cyberpunk manga series, the director first responded with a less than resounding, "Maybe, maybe." But as the interview went on, he began to talk more animatedly about the technology needed for an Alita film:

If Cameron can work out the technology in a timely fashion, Alita might be just the project to follow Avatar. From what I've seen of the footage, Avatar is an enormous technological leap in animation, but if viewers ultimately find the storyline too Dances with Wolves/Ferngully, it might make more sense to turn to an already established property. And Kishiro's dystopian 26th century would be lush in an entirely different way from Pandora,Avatar's botanical wonderland. And even if Avatar is every bit as incredible as the early footage suggests, I'd much rather see Cameron push his technology in new creative directions before we take a second visit to Pandora.

James Cameron Says 'Battle Angel Alita' Adaptation Could Be Next, But Evolving Tech Is 'Critical' [MTV Splash Page]

The genre: Military science fiction
The book: Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein.
Actually, Wikipedia and Fandomania credit the earliest beginnings of military SF to George T. Chesney's 1871 Germany-invades-England tale "The Battle Of Dorking" and George T. Griffith's serialized "The Angel Of Revolution," plus the works of H.G. Wells. But the book that everybody refers to as the touchstone of military SF, the book which really launched the themes of futuristic interplanetary warfare and examining the military as a social entity, was Heinlein's Starship Troopers. As Fandomania's survey puts it, this 1959 book "put Military Science Fiction on the radar."

The genre: Cyberpunk
The book: Neuromancer by William Gibson.
There's some debate about who really "invented" Cyberpunk as a genre. As this cranky essay (PDF) notes, Asimov was the first writer to consider the ramifications of artificial intelligence seriously. Bruce Sterling helped shape the genre with his 1986 anthology Mirrorshades. Bruce Bethke invented the term "cyberpunk" with his 1980 short story called "Cyberpunk." But even Bethke admits:

I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Mike Swanwick argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.)

Gibson's Neuromancer gives us the fusion of noir with brain-computer interfaces and dystopian paranoia, which spawned so many imitators.

The genre: Gothic science fiction
The book: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Commonly acclaimed as the first science fiction novel in general, Frankenstein was the first novel to meld the burgeoning gothic lit genre with the themes of abuse of science. Brian Aldiss, in his seminal work of SF criticism The Billion-Year Spree, claims that SF was "born out of the gothic mode" with Frankenstein. As CUNY professor Lilia Melani puts it:

In 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus introduced the theme of the dangers of science and created the obsessed scientist, who was to develop into the mad scientist, and the archetypal Monster. Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel; she of course thought she was writing a novel of terror.

Gothic science fiction has come to mean any science-fictional story with terrifying elements, a horrendous monster or some kind of science-fictional explanation for a horror trope, like vampires created by a bio-engineered plague.

The genre: First contact with an alien race
The book: Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. This was a tough one - even if you only define "first contact" as being a scenario where human society, as a whole, comes into contact with an alien species (and not just one solitary human explorer) you still have tons of early stories about aliens showing up. Some would say the earliest notable "first contact" novel is H.G. Wells' The War Of The Worlds. But let's say that a crucial component of the "first contact" story is that the aliens are friendly - or at least reasonably well-intentioned. Otherwise, you just have an invasion or war story. In that case, Childhood's End, with its super-advanced Overlords showing up and guiding humanity to a higher plane of existence and merger with the Overmind, although somewhat disturbing, is still a more benign story than Wells'. And thus a more proper precursor to books like Carl Sagan's Contact and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis saga.

The genre: Utopian science fiction
The book: Stories of utopian futures are enjoying a bit of a resurgence, with the upcoming Shine Anthology pushing for a more optimistic futurism. But the first future utopian novel (as distinguished from, say, More's Utopia, which is the account of a fictional realm) is The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century by Jane C. Loudon. In this happy future, everyone wears neon hats:

The ladies were all arrayed in loose trowsers, over which hung drapery in graceful folds; and most of them caried on their heads, streams of lighted gas forced by capillary tubes, into plumes, fleurs-de-lis, or in short any form the wearer pleased; which jets de feu had an uncommonly chaste and elegant effect.

Other wonders include "the steam-powered automaton surgeons and lawyers (who speak briefs fed into tubes in their bodies) and the delivery of letters by cannon-balls, which are shot into large nets erected in each village." She even predicts a sort of Internet. Everyone travels around in giant blimps, and it's a happy, egalitarian society. There's also Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, in which a young man goes to sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the Socialist utopia of the year 2000 - Bellamy's book may have been more influential, along with H.G. Wells' A Modern Utopia. (Thanks to Liz Henry for the suggestions.)

The genre: Apocalyptic fiction
The book: The earliest apocalyptic novel is probably Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man. But the first really popular novel of global devastation, and the one which helped to spawn a ton of imitators, is Nevil Schute's 1957 novel On The Beach. As you'd expect from that date, it's all about nuclear holocaust, which devastates the Northern Hemisphere and leaves the last survivors in Australia and New Zealand, drinking way too much wine while awaiting the end of everything. It became a film and also helped shape our atomic anxiety into a rich seam of fiction that endures today in novels like The Road.

The genre: Steampunk
The book: Infernal Devices: A Mad Victorian Fantasy by K.W. Jeter. Jeter not only invented the term steampunk, in an interview around the time this 1987 novel came out. A weird comic twist on the Victorian adventure novel, Infernal Devices stars George, a young watchmaker who discovers that his father was the greatest inventor of all time - even creating a clockwork automaton version of George. The clockwork duplicate of George plays the violin better than Paganini and has greater sexual prowess than George himself, leading to all sorts of wacky adventures as people mistake George for his automaton twin. Other books that could claim to be steampunk pioneers include Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (1983) and Homunculus (1986) by James Blaylock. But to be fair, the book that really popularized the steampunk genre was 1990's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

The genre: Time travel
The book: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This is sort of a gimme, I guess. The best-known early time-travel saga, and still one of the best, Wells' story launched a whole flotilla of time vessels into the distant future as well as the past. Like War Of The Worlds, it has been adapted into movies and various other formats, and the Eloi/Morlock dichotomy has become a sort of shorthand for a type of future dystopia rife with exaggerated social division.

The genre: Alternate history
The book: Histoire de la Monarchie universelle: Napoléon et la conquête du monde (History of the Universal Monarchy: Napoleon And The Conquest Of The World.) Screw those "Hitler wins World War II" books. How about this popular "Napoleon won the Napoleonic wars" book, published back when Napoleon was still a living memory? Louis Geoffroy imagines Napoleon's First French Empire defeating Russia and then going on to invade England in 1814. Result: Game over. Napoleon rules the world.

The genre: Posthuman space opera
The book: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I have no idea what book launched the "space opera" genre originally - that might be a question for another day. And there's some debate over which book inspired the resurgence of space-opera books loosely called "the new space opera." But to me, it's probably more accurate to call this genre "posthuman space-opera," since it so frequently deals with artificial intelligences, augmented humans, beings who live for millions of years, and generally a set of characters who far exceed the capabilities of a regular human. And for my money, the first really influential star-spanning novel about a civilization of A.I.s (the Minds) and superhumans whose concerns are much farther reaching than our pathetic horizons was 1987's Consider Phlebas. I freely admit this may be a bit of personal bias showing through, since Phlebas was the first novel I read which really knocked my head off and made me see the awesome potential for this type of story.

So what are you waiting for? Go out there and create some more new genres!

Top image from Consider Phelbas cover.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Ballard was never fully comfortable with being considered a science fiction author, and he actually had a somewhat decent case to make. After all, neither of his two most famous works were science fiction; certainly not Empire of the Sun, which dealt with his childhood in a Japanese-run internment camp in China, and not really Crash, which followed a group of people who derive sexual pleasure from car crashes. (Both of these were later adapted into films, the former by Steven Spielberg and the latter by David Cronenberg.)

Even his more genre-specific novels seemed more interested in reimagining and repurposing hoary old science fiction conventions to new, experimental ends than merely telling a science fiction story. His interest in exploring more avant-garde modes of expression did not fit well with the science fiction landscape he discovered when he began writing in the late 1950s. Ballard's disillusionment with the hard science fiction of the time led him to become a founding figure in science fiction's New Wave movement during the sixties, joining with the likes of Philip José Farmer, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin to foment a distinctly artistic, experimental take on the genre.

His works tended to focus on dystopian themes of societal decay and dehumanization, making him an obvious forerunner for the cyberpunk movement of the eighties. In his preface to the seminal 1986 cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, editor Bruce Sterling describes Ballard's place as the spiritual founder of the sub-genre:

Cyberpunk work is marked by its visionary intensity. Its writers prize the bizarre, the surreal, the formerly unthinkable. They are willing - eager, even - to take an idea and unflinchingly push it past the limits. Like J. G. Ballard - an idolized role model to many cyberpunks - they often use an unblinking, almost clinical objectivity. It is a coldly objective analysis, a technique borrowed from science, then put to literary use for classically punk shock value.

All of this certainly applied to Ballard, including the bit about shock value. His works were often deliberately provocative, perhaps none more so than Crash (although special mention really should be given to his 1968 parody of political pamphlets, the wonderfully titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan). One publisher considered Crash so disturbing that he declared Ballard "beyond psychiatric help." But there was little in his works that was offensive merely for the sake of being offensive; everything was towards a larger purpose of forcing readers to reevaluate their thoughts and preconceptions.

In his review of Ballard's 1987 novel The Day of Creation, author and critic Martin Amis discusses the book's river setting and antagonist, a newly created river that drives the book's protagonist to the brink of insanity. His description also captures the power of Ballard's writing in general, a force somehow simultaneously off-putting and mesmerizing:

As is the way with the obsessional, everything stops mattering except the obsession. And here Ballard will always win out, because of the remorselessness of his imagination, which itself is strange, vast, unique - and impossible. In all senses the river is an original creation, beautiful and leprous, putrid and austere, and as feral as the mind from which it flows. Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.

But above all, there are the stories themselves that stand as a lasting testament to his place in science fiction. His body of work spanned over five decades, and time and again pondered how the technology of the very near future would impact the psychology of humanity; the list that follows is only a most meager sampling of his output. "The Voices of Time" wrestles with the coming of absolute entropy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. High Rise charts the breakdown of civil society in an ultra-modern apartment building, as the tenants' isolation from the world outside forces them to go to war over elevators and swimming pools.

Ballard looks at an Earth stripped of its resources in the name of interplanetary colonization in "Deep End", as a man called Holliday struggles to save a dying dogfish in the remnants of the Atlantic Ocean. "Billennium" considers Ward and Rossiter, tenants in an impossibly overcrowded megacity, and their discovery of a huge, unoccupied room next to their cramped living cubicle. Hello America, perhaps his most accessible work, ruminates on the cultural importance of America as explorers from Europe return to the western continent, abandoned after early 21st century environmental collapse. None of these synopses really do justice to Ballard's iconic voice, which infused his ideas with a literary style few of his science fiction contemporaries could truly match.

Returning to Bruce Sterling's preface to Mirrorworlds, one can find a tribute to Ballard that is powerful in its subtlety. Listing the various New Wave authors who influenced cyberpunk, Sterling points to:

The streetwise edginess of Harlan Ellison. The visionary shimmer of Samuel Delany. The free-wheeling zaniness of Norman Spinrad and the rock aesthetic of Michael Moorcock; the intellectual daring of Brian Aldiss; and, always, J. G. Ballard.

There was no need to single out what in particular was special about Ballard; he simply was. Ultimately, J.G. Ballard was the very best a certain strand of science fiction - equal parts literary, dystopian, edgy, and endlessly experimental - could ever hope to be.

W.W. Norton is publishing a posthumous new edition of Ballard's collected short stories, including two previously unavailable in the United States, "The Dying the Fall" and "The Secret Autobiography" Book cover images from Terminal Collection.

"Not that there's anything wrong with that. Writers like Ted Chiang and Gene Wolfe write brilliant books by breathing new literary life into these old tropes. But their concerns are ultimately moral. They're not interested in New Ideas About Everything as much as in the problems and choices those ideas pose.

"In the last thirty or so years, the only sub-genres of Science Fiction willing to take on new science and technology have been cyberpunk and its cousin ribofunk (addressing respectively info- and bio-tech.) But recently, both these sub-genres have been petering out because, I would argue, real-world progress in both those areas has been both too fast and too gradual: fast enough to make most writing obsolete shortly after, or even before, publication; too gradual to produce anything truly transformative for the long view (we're still waiting for AI, immersive VR, and genetically modified humans.)" - Dmitry Portnoy's Amazon.Com review of Neal Stephenson's Anathem [via Wading Through Treacle]

Tanaka was one of the key animators on Akira and was responsible for, among other things, the animation of Testuo’s rapidly mutating arm. His still illustrations draw from similar imagery, telling stories of young people set in a crumbling future, and filled with grotesque experiments and bizarre creatures. The images below come from Tanaka’s art book Cannabis Works.

[Digik Gallery via FFFFOUND!]

"Cyberpunk literature toyed with this - but, I feel, never very successfully. It's like in Gibson's work. In some sort of grand theoretical sense the protagonists were "from the street", but their interaction with the system was essential one of equals. That is, I believe, an attitude that is quite natural for white men to take - that the system, even if stupid and corrupt, nevertheless recognizes them as human and acknowledges their ability to challenge or destroy that system. It is my experience, so far, that in afro-futurist works that assumption is not there. The system often does not recognize the legitimacy of the humanity of the protagonists. I feel that even in science fiction where humans are regarded as backwards, and I am reminded of David Brin's Uplift novels, the author tries very hard to assure the readers of the inherent specialness of humans (generally, we are either stronger of will or more adaptable than the aliens - it's pretty predictable), and afro-futurism doesn't seem to deal much with aliens, but the evils that people do to each other. There is no confidence that the specialness of the protagonists will win out (and, indeed, in several of the stories that is not the case)." [Christopher Bradley]

At the heart of Wall’s argument is that public fears about Internet-based crime are overblown, with individuals and the media mythologizing the idea of all-powerful hackers who possess almost mystical abilities to screw up our lives. He claims that the very notion of cybercrime originated in cyberpunk, with the genre creating a universe in which the proliferation of technology is inextricably linked to criminal activity:

The actual point of origin of the term ‘cybercrime’ is unclear, but it seems to have emerged in the late 1980s or even early 1990s in the later cyberpunk print and audiovisual media. However, the linkage between cyberspace and crime was implicit in the early cyberpunk short stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Bruce Bethke and so many others. The concept was subsequently taken to a wider audience in popular contemporary novels such as Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy of Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) and Stephenson’s Snowcrash (1992). Cyberpunk effectively defined cybercrime as a harmful activity that takes place in virtual environments and made the ‘hi-tech low-life’ hacker narrative a norm in the entertainment industry. It is interesting to note at this point, that whilst social theorists were adopting the Barlovian model of cyberspace, it was the Gibsonian model that shaped the public imagination through the visual media.

Wall doesn’t believe that a computer-fearing populace is picking up William Gibson and immediately threatening to go luddite. Rather, he claims that the problem lies in the sort of films these stories inspire: so-called latter-day “haxploitation” flicks in which the Internet enables disaffected genius outsiders to engage in novel and devastating forms of crime:

The ‘factional’ images described above, skilfully combine fact with fiction, and have crystallized the ‘super-hacker’ offender stereotype as the archetypal ‘cybercriminal’ (Wall 2007, p. 16). Moreover, the combination of independent ‘outsider’ and the potential power they can yield also sets up the hacker as a potential folk devil, which is precisely what the hacker became (Nissenbaum 2004).

According to Wall, cyberpunk has led to the portrayal of technologically-engendered criminal actions as “dramatic, futuristic and dystopic” and cyberspace as “pathologically unsafe and criminogenic.” And he claims that this image of online crime, as well as the notion of the “omnipotent hacker” has bled into even government perceptions of the problem. He cites a 2007 House of Lords report in which cybercriminals are described as highly organized, highly skilled bogeymen who have wreak untold havoc on the less technologically apt.

But Wall never draws a clear line between fictional portrayals of cybercrime and public misconceptions as to its nature. And eventually his paper turns to several more likely sources of trouble, including misreporting of incidents and media exaggeration of cybercrime:

News reporting tends to simultaneously feed the public’s lust for ‘shocking’ information, but also feeds off it - the relationship is dynamic rather than causal. This endless demand for sensationalism sustains the confusion of rhetoric with reality to create, what Baudrillard described as “le vertige de la realité” or “dizzying whirl of reality” (1998, p. 34). By blurring predictions about ‘what could happen’ with ‘what is actually happening’ the message is given by various media that novel events are far more prevalent than they really are. Once a ‘signal event’, such as a novel form of cybercrime, captures media attention and heightens existing public anxiety then other news sources will feed off the original news story and it will spread virally across cyberspace. In such manner, relatively minor events can have significant impacts upon public beliefs compared with their actual consequences, especially when they result in panics and moral panics (Cohen, 2002; Garland, 2008).

And the lack of public understanding regarding actual instances of hacking:

For many years the face of the super-hacker was Kevin Mitnick until he was eventually caught and jailed. His own account (Mitnick and Simon 2002) usefully deconstructs his own myth. His account reminds us that at the height of hacker mystique in the 1980s and 1990s overall levels of security were much lower than today. It was not uncommon at the time, for example, to find systems with a default user identity of ‘Admin’ being accompanied by the password ‘Admin’. Where security was tighter, the majority of deep level penetration was and still is the result of ‘social engineering’ - persuading those in low level occupations within an organisation to reveal their access codes (Mitnick and Simon 2002).

It seems that cyberpunk’s greatest crime is that it may have inspired a handful of thrillers that are technically science fiction but fail to identify as such. And while those thrillers may make the cybercrime bulletins passed around via email or reports of cybercriminals targeting foreign governments more plausible, so too does a media intent on sexing up its crime reporting. It seems the real culprit behind disproportionate public fears about cybercrime is not the invention of a few technologically advanced dystopias, but a lack of technological understanding. And hunger for that sort of technological understanding is exactly what cyberpunk inspires.

Cybercrime and the Culture of Fear [Social Science Research Network] (Via SF Signal)

1. People should dress like grown-ups. That means no pajamas. No shiny gold or silver fabrics. No GWAR gear. No matter what era you're writing about, professional people will wear clothes that allow everyone else to take them seriously. And space travelers will probably wear outfits that are functional and help keep them alive.

2. No jolly lectures. This is more of a book thing. When a character stands around for three pages explaining the author's philosophies in a cheery tone, it's the prose version of a giant glittery tiara. I'm looking at you, Robert Anson Heinlein.

3. Take off that shiny apron, robot! The robots of the future will be stronger, smarter and more durable than anything we have today — they'll basically be able to sever your spine with a flick of one of their little microfilaments. So it's understandable and desirable for robots to be cute or sexy to distract us from their genocidal potential. But "cute" doesn't have to include a silly cartoon voice, a catch-phrase like "beady beady" or a funny walk.

4. Rock music cannot possibly get sillier. There are limits to what even the brain-damaged tweens of the 22nd century will bop around to — and there's no way it could be dumber than Debbie Gibson or Aaron Carter. Barring radical brain mutations, future pop music will at least be sorta catchy and have a few okay lyrics. The worst is when a novel or comic book reproduces song lyrics of the future — and they're the author's bad poetry. Somehow, these things are always worse on the page.

5. Neologisms should be plausible. In other words, if you have a future technology, and you're coming up with a name or slang term for it, it should be something you could imagine grown-ups saying. Comedy shows us what not to do in serious SF, with the zany slang in Woody Allen's Sleeper: "It's not only cool, it's Koogat!"

6. Yay sex, but boo zany ironic dominatrixes. That's pretty much all I had to say about that.

7. Cut down on the eyeliner, Mr. Spock! Yes, it matches your blue top. But just listen to Yahoo Answers: light-blue eyeshadow looks "tacky and outdated."

8. In general, aliens should be alien, not human ethnic groups or stereotypes. This pertains to campiness because the number one cause of campy aliens is a failure to imagine a truly non-human lifeform. Instead of the shock of an organism whose life cycle and culture are totally at odds with ours, we get the wacky Jamaicans in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

9. And no more cultures with just one wise saying. If an alien race has managed to make it into interstellar space and develop artificial gravity, it might also be advanced enough to afford two great philosophers or schools of thought. Worst of all are the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, who quote the Rules of Acquisition as if they're the only book Ferenginar has ever produced.

10. If you must have villains, make them awesome. Mike Meyers did us a favor creating Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies — by giving us a template for what villains should not be like outside of comedies. Villains can be scary, or understated, or believable people whose agendas are at odds with the hero's... but they shouldn't kill us with cuteness.

11. If you must tackle religion, avoid being woo-woo. That means no priests with funny outfits. Yes, priests dress funny in real life, but they're still campy on screen. That also means no prophecies, especially ones with funny names. Visions are okay, if they're more David Lynch and less Derek Jarman.

12. Musicals are inherently campy. Do you ever find yourself watching the Buffy musical episode, or Rocky Horror, and thinking, "Gee, I wish there was more stuff like this in my science fiction?" If so, then maybe you should spend some time in fantasy-land instead. People bursting into song and doing that thing with their hands is directly opposed to the willing suspension of disbelief thing.

13. Punk is campy. Maybe it wasn't in the 1960s, or whenever you guys invented it, but it is now. Sorry. That goes for regular punk (just watch Doomsday) as well as cyberpunk (watch the Matrix sequels) and definitely steampunk. Steampunk is camp-tastic.

14. Time-travel leads to culture shock, not Culture Club. Journeying to another era shouldn't be an excuse for Renfaire/Society for Creative Anachronism goofiness. I've seen enough pithy Victorians (especially on Doctor Who) and doughty Medievals to last me a thousand time warps. And our ancestors may have been less technologically advanced, but they weren't freaking morons. (Well, okay, some of them were.)

15. Robots shouldn't pee. They shouldn't pee on people. They shouldn't pee in space. They shouldn't "vent coolant" in the middle of a hot robo-fisting scene. Robotic urine just should not be part of our lexicon at all.

16. A certain amount of cheesiness may be inevitable in science fiction. Just accept it. The difference between cheesiness and camp is that camp is self-aware and deliberate, and cheesiness is a result of someone fervently saying, "We're going to have giant robots fighting for ten minutes and it's going to be stupendous! Yeah!!"

17. Don't go retro. Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow winks so hard at classic scifi it's got a permanent squint. The 1930s fin-headed scifi was the original reference point for much of the seminal works of camp, and earns a starring role in Susan Sontag's foundational 1964 essay on camp. So looking backwards will only make you look ironic and funnily subversive.

18. Absolutely no go-go boots or sparkles. And no epaulets. Or shoulderpads. Or giant buckles, or insignias that are bigger than someone's hand.

19. No more Angelina Jolie. She's cute, but she camps up every role she's in. Just look at Tomb Raider. And the aforementioned Sky Captain. She's the main reason why this summer's Wanted will be a huge camp-fest.

20. War is hell, but shouty-jumpy soldiers belong in Monty Python. Yes, we get it — you're subverting the deadly conformity of military protocol by having your soldiers act like loons. But a little bit of armed-forces wackiness and slogan-shouting goes a long way. And that goes double for Starship Troopers' fake war propaganda.

21. Don't confuse "campiness" with "fun." You can create a fun, exciting storyline without going the campiness route. Space battles can be adrenaline-blasting, without any need for funny computer voices or zany puppet aliens. We like to watch people kickbox on the the deck of a satellite that's breaking up as much as anybody. Just, you know, without the shiny pajamas. Movie screencaps taken from Wetcircuit.

The "anti-hero" comes to science fiction from a variety of sources, including noir and Westerns... but she also has her own uniquely science fictional avatars, that spring out of science fiction's tradition of skepticism and social criticism. The anti-hero is where science fiction's pulpy roots meet its most intellectual aspirations. Plus, he/she totally rocks on ice.

Noir:

My favorite noir hero is Dashiell Hammett's nameless Continental Op, who spends more time orchestrating convenient murders than he does investigating crimes. In the novel Red Harvest, the Op arrives in a town called Poisonville which is run by organized crime, and he systematically tricks the town's ruling gangsters into killing each other, first a few at a time and eventually in a full-on massacre. By the end, he's one of the few people left standing. In noir, nobody's morally pure.

The classic science fiction noir movie is Blade Runner, featuring Harrison Ford's hardboiled and conflicted cop, who's hunting the Replicants without being sure if he's doing the right thing. And of course Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, and a lot of Dick's best work has a particularly noir flavor of pulpiness. Dick's protagonists are never sure if they're doing the right thing, and often are just out for themselves. That could be one reason why Dick is the author of choice for movie adaptations — his work is very close to a genre that movie people understand.

Another great science fiction noir author is Richard K. Morgan (no clue if the middle initial "K" is a requirement), whose first novel Altered Carbon is like a fusion of Chandler with Doctorow's Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom: hard-as-nails gumshoe Takeshi Lev Kovacs dies in a shootout, and then is restored from a backup and "resleeved" in a new body so he can investigate the murder of a rich guy (who's also been restored and "resleeved.") And then Kovacs promptly sleeps with the rich guy's wife.

And then of course, there's always Jim diGriz, hero of the Stainless Steel Rat novels, who starts out as an amoral trickster — before eventually devolving into a bit of a pussycat. And there's Gully Foyle, dubious hero of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. (And Alfred Bester becomes the name of a morally gray psy-corps agent on Babylon 5, who becomes more of a sympathetic anti-hero in Gregory Keyes' novels.)

Westerns:

The archetypal Western anti-hero is out for himself, and only incidentally ends up helping others. Often, he (and it's usually a "he," except for Sharon Stone in Sam Raimi's underrated The Quick And The Dead) is only a "good guy" in comparison to the really really shitty bad guys. Think Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name from the spaghetti westerns. Cowboy-influenced anti-heroes in science fiction are usually pretty easy to spot: Han Solo in Star Wars and Mal in Firefly have everything except the Ennio Morricone whistle/trumpet score playing in the background.

I'm also going to peg Vin Diesel's Riddick from Pitch Black as a Western-style anti-hero — he's basically a convicted murderer being transported across the prairie in a wagon train, and then the wagons break down. Will he help save his captors, or let the elements and the hostile natives take care of them?

The Mad Scientist:

Unlike the noir and Western anti-heroes, the mad scientist has always belonged to science fiction, as far back as Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. As the name implies, the mad scientist doesn't always have the greatest grip on reality, unleashing forces he cannot blah blah blah. The mad scientist is often just a foil for the hero in space opera and action-adventure stories — but he's also a protagonist a surprising amount of the time.

On TV, Doctor Who features a mad-scientist archetype as the hero, and the early episodes of the series in the 1960s made a conscious effort to portray the Doctor as an anti-hero rather than a more uncomplicated good guy. Over time, the Doctor became purer and more motivated by compassion for other sentients, but he still gravitates back to the anti-hero side of the fence occasionally, most notably in the late 1980s.

Cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk obviously borrowed a lot of themes and styles from noir, but also brought in its own flavor of anti-authoritarianism. The e-zine Computer Underground Digest debated, in 1991, just how anti-heroic the cyberpunk hero actually is. Brad Hicks wrote:

A cyberpunk is to hackers/phreaks/crackers/crashers what a terrorist is to a serial killer; someone who insists that their crimes are in the public interest and for the common good, a computerized "freedom fighter" if you will.

In the works of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and others, cyberpunks are not terrorists in the conventional sense of the term, and the analogy to serial killers strikes me as a bit extreme. Cyberpunks are characterized by their resistance to oppressive authority (which makes them a form of freedom fighter), but the resistance tends to be highly individualistic. I wonder if cyberpunks might be based on the anti-hero model of westerns (Shane) or earlier science fiction in which the marginal but basically decent outsider steps in to use marginal skills to save the town, country, or civilization?

The rationalist skeptic, who critiques everyone else's ideals and delusions, is an outgrowth of the mad scientist, and usually has some scientific knowledge. But he's also a nihilistic superhero, who questions human-made belief structures. Avon from Blake's 7 is a bit of a mad scientist and a noir gun for hire, but he's also something else — a foil for rebel leader Blake's idealism who grows into a self-hating amoral hero in his own right. Avon serves as a role model for Horza, the bitter mercenary in Iain M. Banks' Consider Phlebas, the first Culture novel. The shape-shifting Horza tricks a shipfull of pirates into helping him track down a lost Culture Mind in the middle of a warzone. He's willing to make deals with his worst enemies and double-cross his friends, if the job requires it.

I feel like most yaoi art is fantasy-oriented. Is your work more oriented towards fantasy or science fiction?

A lot of my art is ambiguous as to whether it's fantasy or sci-fi, but I think I gravitate more towards fantasy. Lately I've been doing more steampunk themed art, which I guess falls more into the sci-fi category... So the scifi vs. fantasy might even be around 50-50 at this point. I've often tried to break out of the scifi/fantasy niche and just draw something completely mundane, but I can't seem to manage it.

How big is the yaoi audience in the U.S. now? Is it as big as it is in Japan?

I won't claim to be an expert on the yaoi market. I'm pretty sure the Japanese yaoi market still far surpasses the American created/produced yaoi scene. They've just been doing it longer, and most of our popular yaoi media is imported from Japan. I think many of the bigger publishing houses are not so quick to pick up yaoi as they have been to dive into general audience manga, so that keeps the market small. It's difficult for the small presses to to make it in the business, and that's where most of our American yaoi is coming from - small presses, independant publishers, and self-publishing.

When did you get involved in yaoi art?

I discovered rather early in my teenage years that having two guys together is just hot, so when I first found yaoi on the internet (it is for porn, after all) it was like coming home. I didn't join the yaoi art scene until much later, circa 2004, but it really only coincided with graduating from college and suddenly having more time on my hands. Moving to San Francisco helped also, because that gave me my first chance to attend Yaoi-Con and meet the community in person. Having a group to share the artwork with just gave me more reasons to draw yaoi-themed art.

Methods: We compiled a complete list of cyberpunk novels and movies, by date, from a variety of sources including Wikipedia, the Cyberpunk Review, Amazon.com's cyberpunk lists and various other sites. Then we tallied the number of novels (red line) and movies (blue line) per year. We were hoping for a nice smooth curve, but it didn't happen. We're sorry the chart turned out so zig-zag, we were as surprised as anybody.

Results: Cyberpunk has gone in waves, judging from our data. Novels in the genre have had a few high points. The biggest peaks for novels were the late 80s (eight novels in 1988), and then the mid-90s (an average of 6 novels per year from 1993-1996). Cyberpunk films had a peak in the late 80s-early 90s, followed by a brief lull. There were ten cyberpunk movies each in 1993 and 1995, and then another lull. The genre had a resurgence at the movies from 2002-2004, and then quieted down again.

How do we define cyberpunk? We tried not to. We pulled our list from as many reliable-looking sources as possible, and only left out things that seemed like obvious outliers. (On the Cyberpunk Review site, some of the movies on the cyberpunk list were listed as having a "low" level of cyberpunk themes, and seemed to be obviously reaching. So we left those movies out.)

So what does this tell us? Maybe cyberpunk is less of a fad than it used to be. Or maybe because we're now living in a cyberpunk era with virtual worlds, nonstop cybersex and evil corporations, we no longer view those things as elements of science fiction. What do you think?

A bizarrely erotic ad for Phillips razors features a robot straight out of I, Robot and a futuristic house that reminds me of something from Greg Bear's classic novel Eon. Definitely cyber, definitely all about buying a razor.

An Israeli ad for a dairy is snatched right from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. We see an old-fashioned factory, but then when the factory owner opens his doors we discover it's a tiny island of old-schooliness in the middle of an ultra-futuristic cyberworld.

A bizarro ad from Mountain Dew creates an early cyberpunk vision ripped straight from William Gibson's Neuromancer, with corporations ruling the world and high tech innovation the only hope for freedom. Except, of course, the rebels in this world are trying to create "the ultimate soft drink."

A Levis ad plays with imagery from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to create this futuristic wasteland where a guy lassos a car (think of the skateboarding pizza delivery punk in Snow Crash), which turns out to be self-driving (Transformers or KITT anyone?).

An ad for Playstation 2 depicts a Max Headroomish future of multinational media conspiracies:

Sure these ads are creative, and there's nothing wrong with getting inspiration from cool punked-out scifi subcultures. But once the subculture is smooshed all over SUVs and razors? Then it's just a hollowed-out shell of itself being used to sell stuff. Old-school cyberpunk novels are still great, but today's cyber is VH-1 material at best.

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The idea is those with the money or connections can access this secret highly illegal facility where they can basically fulfill their greatest fantasies. Most people assume that means sex—and on an occasion it does, because that is a lot of people's fantasies—but it's basically scenarios. They can basically reenact scenarios of romance, adventure or anything perfectly, because they become the person that you want them to be—they become that person.

Fox has already committed to seven episodes of this show, and Angel/Firefly producer Tim Minear will be involved too. Joss has already pitched all seven storylines, in advance of the looming writers' strike. It's a vehicle for Dushku, who already had the deal at Fox. Here's hoping the network gives it the same chance that Tru Calling got. Image by Andrew H. Walker, Getty Images.

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