What's in a name?

A couple of people have asked me "WTF is up with the name of your blog?" To which I have unhelpfully replied, "Um, it's kind of a geek thing."

In truth it's more of a "cyberpunk" thing, but by the time that term entered into mainstream parlance almost twenty years ago, it had lost most of its original meaning. It was so misused and maligned by both fans and critics that I'm kind of embarrassed to use it at all any more. So I say "geek" instead.

Back when I could use the term with a straight face, cyberpunk meant SF about the real world, and about a future existence that was almost close enough to see with the naked eye. It was dystopian and gritty and brimming with new ideas.

Back then, some people – not just SF authors but academics and engineers and other thinky-people – were using cyberpunk to frame their speculation about our future as a species and society. To them, the near future was awash with smart drugs, computer-enhanced brains, DNA manipulation and artificial intelligence, all of which would change the definition of being and cognition, and give birth to the truly post-human. And it was all really, really close!

When next time I say "it's a geek thing", that's what I'm talking about.

As for the title of this blog, that's something I read in Mondo 2000 many moons ago, and it still resonates with me today. I believe it originally came from Rudy Rucker, scientist, and SF author, kind of contextualizing the term "cyberpunk" in a Mississippi Review article:

What's really good about punk is that it's fast and dense. It has lot of information. If you value information the most, then you don't care about convention. It's not "Who do you know?"; it's "How fast are you? How dense?" It's not, "Do you talk like my old friends?"; it's "Is this interesting?" So what I'm talking about with cyberpunk is something like this: literate SF that's easy to read, has a lot of information, and talks about the new thoughtforms that are coming out of the computer revolution.

It is our hope that this blog can in some small way emulate that description. We don't want to weigh you down with drek, just maybe give you something interesting to think and talk about. Like a geek.