Headcrash

Bethke, Bruce. Headcrash. New York: Aspect-Warner, [1995]. "A Time Warner Book."

A satire on cyberpunk by the inventor of the term, including within its satiric "anatomy" (in Northrop Frye's sense) a send-up of a cyberpunk novel. See for the motifs of surveillance, computer-takeover, the Laws of Robotics/Humanics, nasty high-tech multinational corporations, VR, cyberspace, battlemechs™, the cyberspace caper (in the manner of W. Gibson's Neuromancer), transformers and techno-morphing, virtual sex, and the superimposition of the cybernetic upon the human (including the variation of the "ProctoProd": the insertion of the cybernetic into the human in a manner grotesquely decorous in a rather Swiftian satire). Also includes some serviceable Bad Hemingway and a highly useful attack on the plausibility of the trope of "Lethal Feedback" literally burning out the brains of someone who runs into serious electronic countermeasures in cyberspace: If I have tapped into a system that used high voltages (which won't happen) and I hadn't the foresight to install a surge protector or fuse on my system, still, "... the molecule-sized gates on the IC chips and the hair-fine wiring on the PC boards instantly act like thousands of tiny fuses, melting down into harmless slag and breaking the circuit long before my first neuron gets even a little warm" (258). CAUTIONS: (1) Someone may come up with electronic countermeasures in cyberspace that send back data that harm one's brain (possibly rapid bursts of political rhetoric). (2) Accusing satirists of either bad taste or loose plotting is like accusing a Marine platoon of violence, but Headcrash is not for children or the fastidious. (RDE, 18/02/96)