Farewell Horizontal

Jeter, K. W. Farewell Horizontal. New York: St. Martin's, [1989]. [S. F.] Book Club Edition.

A cyberpunk novel set upon the wall of an immense high-tech city. The narrator discovers a plot by the ruling clans to manipulate the media nets in order to remain in power. Important images are to be found in the narrator's cybernetic linkup with the information nets and in the ways of life formed by living literally on the margin of a machine world. Rev. Terry Heller, SF&FBR Annual 1990: 321-22.

Discussed by Claire Sponsler in "Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play," q.v.

The milieu Jeter imagines here, the physical world represented in its entirety by Cylinder, would at first glance seem far removed from cyberpunk's deteriorated near-future urban environment. We learn that at some indefinite time in the past, some sort of nuclear holocaust took place that resulted in the sealing off of certain sectors of Cylinder and, we can imagine, in the isolation of those humans who now live in or on Cylinder. There is nothing beyond, beneath, or above Cylinder except air and clouds, and no speculation, until the very end of the novel, by any of the characters, about what lies beyond Cylinder. In the post-war world of Jeter's novel, what an architect would call the "built-environment'' swallows up the whole terrain. There is no natural world, no habitat, no living space beyond Cylinder except for the clouds, the air, freefall, the zone of the gas angels; there are no trees, no mountains, no oceans, not even any cities, only the building, which becomes in its solitude the quintessential representation of urban and rural life simultaneously, an entire city (or even nation) on and within one monumental structure. (pp. 257-58)

Cf. and definitely contrast such total environments as the Machine in "The Machine Stops" and, more so, the urbmons in The World Inside; note well different attitudes toward the human body.

Sponsler concludes, In Farewell Horizonal, as in [...] more explicitly cyberpunk stories [...] the people who live on the margins, independently, by their wits and in defiance of official forces, are seen as living up to their fullest potential. [...] In a scenario familiar to us from countless cyberpunk stories, the underdog ultimately triumphs, finds meaning for his own life, and undermines the power of repressive and malevolent authorities. For Jeter, there is nothing alienating or hostile about the environment except when humans unthinkingly surrender themselves to it, trading their freedom for security. Even though Cylinder, as the totality of the landscape in Farewell Horizontal, seems at first glance far removed from cyberpunk's decayed urban landscapes, in the end it amounts to much the same thing. Axxter's final plunge off of Cylinder into the clouds at the close of the novel can be read as penetration into cyberpunk's ultimate zone of possibility, the non-corporeal reality of cyberspace.

Expanded RDE, completing, 26May19