Just noticed this among the various Clarion West photos that've been posted.

Unlike most of the pictures, I actually knew this one was being taken. It's from the final party. I remember that Shawn accused me of looking like I was posing for GQ.



I forget who the rest of those people in the picture are.

(-:

#

I've been reading through Bruce Sterling's classic cyberpunk anthology, "Mirrorshades." The second story in there is Snake Eyes by Tom Maddox, available for free here. An enormously finely crafted story delivering some gorgeous "eyeball kicks":

"...no, this won't do: there are wires in my head and they make me eat cat food..."

"...last night we were strange, but we were human--Adam and Eve under the flaming sword. thrown out of Eden, fucking under the eyes of God and his angel, more beautiful than they can ever be..."

...and I enjoyed it enormously on that level, as a typical cyberpunk plot, milking all the usual themes of the movement, gorgeously written and executed to a tee.

Then (mild spoiler alert) I was thinking about about two days after I read it and I realized belatedly that there's a fairly thinly disguised other level the story's working on. The Artificial Intelligence controlling everything behind the scenes is called Aleph, which is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and a big deal is made of it in Jewish mysticism and numerology. In fact, Aleph is described in the story in a way that pretty much mirrors that:

"So strictly speaking there is no Aleph, thus no subject or verb in the sentences with which it expressed itself to itself."

Now, that obvious hint (really, where Maddox is tipping his hand) aside, let's move on to Exhibit B:

The premise of the story has to do with the protag (George) having had computer interface technology put into his head, which after he leaves the military continues to impact his behavior in strange and disturbing ways. Even less subtley than the aleph thing, he calls this "the snake."

Yeah. Nuff said.

Exhibit C gets more complicated, since it has to do with a read of the general feel and subtext of the story. Through his interactions with Aleph, George learns to see, e.g. instead of color, he sees a certain position of the spectrum, instead of smell, he perceives a certain configuration of molecules. So he's getting at the underlying hidden structure of reality. Do we have a theme here?

In the Tanya, a kabbalistic classic by the founder of the Lubavitch Chassidim (those are the guys in long black coats and beards who set up Chabad Houses on college campuses), there's this whole analysis of people having animal souls and higher souls that come into conflict....which sounds an awful lot like the way "the snake" makes George engage in more animal-like behavior (rough sex, eating cat food, etc). Now, the connection's loose enough and the thematic material general enough that there wouldn't be any reason to suspect this specifically was going through Maddox's mind...if not for the hat-tipping explicitness of "the Aleph" and for that matter the Adam-and-Eve line (read the Zohar...it's a generally available biblical story outside of a Jewish context much less a mystical Jewish one, but there's a very kabbalistic feel to that imagery).

Finally, and again this gets down to mood and feel, if you've read some of this stuff its hard not to think when you get towards the end of the story about typical kabbalistic imagery of light encased in shells of darkness, that can in turn be subverted back into light, etc. The whole story can be read as kind of a submerging through this weird animal stuff into a drive towards transcendence and joyful acceptance of the true nature of ultimate reality.

Am I stretching here? Maybe. Some of this stuff, certainly, can be taken easily from lots of different sources and traditions. But again, given the semi-explicit references, its hard not to run with. I severely doubt the story's intended as any sort of religious parable--it's more likely the other way around, that the kabbalistic imagery, for those who catch it, is being used in service of and to give depth and resonance to the typical cyberpunk themes.

Still, sort of interesting, nu?