Live Without a Net

INTRODUCTION: DISENGAGING FROM THE MATRIX By Lou Anders The future is here. Now. Every day, the stuff of science fiction is being made manifest around us. Faster and faster. Blink and you just might miss it. In March of 2002, an Oxford professor named Kevin Warwick underwent an implantation of a microelectrode array into the median nerve inside his arm. The purpose of the array was to record the emotional responses traveling down Professor Warwick's nerve, and to translate these to digital signals that could be stored for later playback and reinsertion. The goal? Digitally recordable emotion. Meanwhile, Steve Mann, inventor of the wearable computer (called WearComp), has been walking around wired for twenty years, recording everything he experiences as part of an ongoing documentation of his "cyborg" experience. Less sensational, but equally exciting, functioning neuromuscular stimulation systems are in experimental use today- implantation devices that promise to repair the severed connection between brain and peripheral nervous system caused by a stroke or spinal cord injury. And experiments in optic nerve stimulation have produced in blind volunteers the ability to see lights, distinguish letters and shapes, and in one dramatic case, even drive a car. Meanwhile, computers have become small enough and cheap enough to have become ubiquitous, appearing in everything from our ink pens to disposable greeting cards. In the field of computer graphics, breakthroughs in digital rendering make it harder and harder to distinguish our on-screen fantasies from our everyday realities. And everything, positively everything, is on-line. The real Machine Age is only just beginning, and we are rapidly melding with our devices. While it will be some time before we have to worry about zombie-faced automata proclaiming that "Resistance is futile," a technological singularity may very well have been crossed. Experiments and efforts like those above will, for good or ill, rapidly bring about many of the visionary concepts first proposed to us in the pages of William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's cyberpunk novels. In fact, one has only to read Wiredand Scientific Americanmagazines with any regularity to see that some form of that Gibsonian existence is barreling down upon us with ever-increasing speed. As advances in computerization, miniaturization, and neural interfacing are being made every day, it becomes progessively difficult for writers of speculative fiction to imagine near-future scenarios that do not contain at least some of the tropes of cyberfiction. With the fabulous and limitless playground that virtual reality offers the imagination, and the mounting certainty that something like VR is just around the corner from us here at the start of the twenty-first century, how can the conscientious and technologically savvy science fiction writer extrapolate relevant futures without the inclusion of cyberspace and its clichEs? Indeed, casting an eye backwards, many of the fictions of decades past seem much more plausible in light of projections in computer advancements. How many of the near-magical and seemingly godlike powers displayed by the advanced alien races encountered in golden age science fiction tales can be easily explained away as little more than virtual reality? The Matrix has us, all right, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for us to break free. Cyberpunk may prove to be the most prophetic subgenre to arise from SF, but it is also, at least in my mind, creating something of a bottleneck in our speculative futures. This is not to say that there is not tremendous work being done in this vein. In fact, some of the most exciting cyberfiction in years is being turned out by a few of the writers in this very anthology. But there is something to be said about "too much of a good thing," and it's never a bad idea to shAnders, Lou is the author of 'Live Without a Net' with ISBN 9780451459251 and ISBN 0451459253.