Kim Stanley Robinson is Wrong About Something

I’m a long-time fan of Kim Stanley Robinson. I believe his relentless focus on climate change, and the quality of the story-telling that goes along with it, has made his books not only worthy, but important. His work serves an ethical end insofar as it makes us understand the consequences and potential responses to climate change and unchained capitalism. Even the august (and usually genre-averse) New Yorker has called him: “one of the most important writers working in America today.”

So it pains me to say that Kim Stanley Robison is wrong about something. And not just slightly off, or askew, but wildly fucking incorrect.

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In a recent interview with Wired magazine to discuss his new novel, Red Moon, he decided – for no apparent reason – to denigrate cyberpunk and noir:

“Cyberpunk was an aberration,” he says. “They were somewhat antifeminist, with their hard noir gals. It was defeatist. Or nonpolitical. Or collaborationist—like noir. So I hated them, and they hated me.” The tropes of film noir, he says, weren’t up to the task of laying out a useful future.

I’ve recently spent a PhD defining noir and cyberpunk, and their representations outside of the US – in particular Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. I won’t regurgitate that work here (because we’re talking about Kim, not my interminable fucking doctorate), other to say that cyberpunk descends from noir, most obviously* through Neuromancer (1982) and Blade Runner (1984), whose creators – William Gibson and Ridley Scott – acknowledged the central influence of noir writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Despite common misconception, the origins of noir are not solely in the US, but were international from the very beginning. One of the key influences in the creation of the noir form was German expressionism, brought to America by refugees and exiles fleeing the rise of fascism in Germany. Jewish émigrés, in particular – such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Edward G Ulmer – were driven from Europe by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and early 1940s. This experience of dislocation fed into the cynical, dark vision of these directors, which in turn produced some of the classic films noir, such as Sunset Boulevard (1950), Double Indemnity (1944), and the Big Heat (1953).

Another key influence was Dashiell Hammett, who created the hardboiled literary genre, beginning with Red Harvest in 1929, and whose works – The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, The Thin Man – were adapted into some of the classic films noir. Before becoming a writer, Hammett worked as a private eye for the Pinkerton Agency, who at the time were known for their thuggish union-busting activities in service of capital.

Red Harvest was, for James Ellroy:

a coda to the Boom and a prophecy of the Depression. The Op witnesses and largely precipitates a hallucinogenic bloodbath in a Montana mining town. He pits labor against management and cops against crooks

Right from the start, then, we can see the origins of noir were not “defeatist. Or non-political. Or collaborationist.” Rather, the elegant and spare writing of Dashiell Hammett in the 1930s explored the moral vacuum of an era: the crony capitalism of inter-war America, the unchecked power of business and political elites and their collusion in perpetuating a corrupt system, the crushing underfoot of the dreams of regular people.

Later in life, Dashiell Hammett became a political activist and joined the communist party. He was imprisoned for his beliefs, and blacklisted for refusing to name names during the McCarthy period. The Jewish noir directors from Europe brought with them to America a lens through which to understand the modern world, darkly. They saw the grim underbelly of modernity: industrialised warfare, the rise of fascism, the depths of the Great Depression, and key Enlightenment ideals – learning, civilisation, and progress – shaken to their very core. None of these artists were apolitical. They just weren’t particularly optimistic.

The origins of noir – and therefore cyberpunk – are in the stories of the marginalised and dispossessed. This is why we see four archetypes, in particular, appearing time and again in transnational noir: the private eye (throughout noir, from the 1930s onward), the masterless samurai (in Japanese noirs), the gunslinger (also throughout noir, but in particular in Australian and Hong Kong noirs), and the android (in cyberpunk). Each the loner who works to their own, often opaque, code; who exists somewhere between the demimonde of the criminal underworld and ‘civilised’ society.

These archetypes are almost always in service of the elite, but almost always rebel against this service. Take Deckard, in Blade Runner, he is in essence a private eye (he’s not quite a cop, but he’s not a civilian, either), but he is also – unbeknownst even to himself – an android.

He is the product of a corporation, a slave, living in complete alienation from the self, alienated by the forces of capital, commodification, and the relentless expansionism of the market (Replicants, after all, are designed to help settle the Off-World Colonies). He hunts other slaves, who seem to be fully human (or even more human than human), yet who are denied this humanity. As Roy Batty says to Deckard, towards the end of the movie: “Quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

On the surface, cyberpunk and noir certainly may seem to be “defeatist” insofar as they are bleak tales with a fatalistic tone. Yet is a mistake to conflate the fatalism of noir with defeatism.

I suspect Robinson makes this mistake, in part, because his stories (usually) come from the perspective of the elite. If we take his recent most novel, Red Moon, we have as main characters a famous journalist, a talented scientist, and a dissident leader. In 2312, as another example, the main character is Swan Er Hong, a wealthy artist and former asteroid terrarium designer with an inbuilt A.I. Robinson’s Mars trilogy largely focusses on an elite of politicians and scientists, who struggle to assert their vision of a Martian society.

I admire his utopian impulse: stories of the visionaries and revolutionaries who want to change our world for the better. Here we see the world from the boardrooms and command centres, the high towers of finance and celebrity, the laboratories of cutting edge science; the good and the great terraforming, and making public policy, and undermining the grand conspiracies of the venal and corrupt. I must confess, however, that I find the stories of the elite far less interesting than I do of the people left behind.

Noir has no pretensions to imagining sweeping societal change; not because it is defeatist, but because it focusses on the underclass. The poor, the downtrodden, the exiled, by definition cannot change the world or a corrupt system. They have not the power. The story of noir’s anti-heroes is not one of triumph in effecting change, but rather a far more important one: individual integrity in the face of a corrupt and mercenary system. It is Deckard saving Rachel. Jack Gittes taking on the most powerful man in town in Chinatown. It is Major Motoko, in Ghost in the Shell, rebelling against her status as a slave, fully owned and operated by the government. It’s indigenous cop, Jay Swan in the Australian noir Goldstone, taking on a corrupt mining corporation, despite the danger to his career and his life.

Noir is the story of resistance where it is futile, of a commitment to truth where such courage is ruthlessly punished. The anti-heroes of noir are flawed, and broken, and doomed. They are, in short, human beings, and the despairing humanism of noir is epitomized by the fates of these characters.

It certainly may be true that the tropes of noir, according to KSR: “weren’t up to the task of laying out a useful future,” but it is only true as a statement of the obvious. Noir is not designed to map out a utopian future, but to reveal the nature of an unjust present. Noir is concerned with modernity’s casualties, those left behind in the creative destruction of capitalism, technological revolution, and the sweeping march of history.

Cyberpunk – and noir in general – is, I believe, a humanist literature insofar as it is a meditation on the human condition, and it treats humanity (or being treated humanely) as a normative good. The narrative sympathies are always with the marginalised in these texts, and the extent to which the structures of power erode human dignity. In this way, I believe the noir impulse is more humanist than the utopian fiction that Robinson prefers. Noir tends to focus on the smaller, more human stories of greed, and estrangement, and the pervasive violence of the dark city. Where utopian fiction has the space to tell the bigger stories, sometimes these smaller lives can be overlooked.

Cyberpunk most certainly is not an “aberration”. Given its roots in the 1930s, through to Neuromancer and Blade Runner in the 1980s, to shows like Altered Carbon today, it endures. So long as artists wish to explore the contradictions of rapid economic, cultural and technological change, and require a grittier, bleaker, and more human explanation of the consequences, there will continue to be a place for cyberpunk and noir. As the future crashes down us, carrying the world with it, noir reminds us of those left behind. It shows us the price that was paid, the damage done.

* Cyberpunk has many antecedents. Philip K Dick, being the most obvious example, insofar as his work depicted social decay, the use of artificial intelligence, surveillance paranoia, and the questioning of technological progress. Others have pointed to authors like Alfred Bester, or Zelazny, or Ballard. In my view, however, cyberpunk formed into a tangible entity at the twin foundational events of Blade Runner and Neuromancer.