A Song Called Youth

• Biographical Note on John Shirley • Bruce Sterling

I knew this guy John Shirley when he was the first and only punk science fiction writer in the world.

Back in those days, William Gibson was a hobbyist teaching-assistant who was whiling away his youth, in his ivied meditative fashion, in Canadian junk shops. I was an engineer’s kid from a smoggy refinery town who had had my head utterly twisted by three years in India and was hanging out with cowboy-hatted interstellar longhairs deep in the heart of Texas. Rudy Rucker was futilely trying to pass as a normal math professor somewhere in upstate New York. Lewis Shiner was enamored of hardboiled detective fiction and living in Dallas.

But John Shirley loomed on the horizon like some prescient comet. The rest of us paid a lot of attention to him. We were right to do this.

Most of the science fiction writers who later got called “cyberpunks” are and were, at heart, really nice middle-class white guys. They have some pretty strange ideas, but in their private lives they dress and act like industrial design professors. John Shirley was a total bottle-of-dirt screaming dogcollar yahoo.

There were still a few New Wave people around at the time earnestly writing stories with hippie protagonists. The people in John Shirley’s stories weren’t hippies. They weren’t progressive. They didn’t mean well. People in John Shirley stories were canaille. They had no brakes. They didn’t know what brakes were.

Other people wrote experimental stories with numbered paragraphs, but John Shirley wrote “stories” that were so profoundly fucked-up narratively that you could feel the guy’s fingertips trembling spastically on the keyboard. Some of the more daring SF writers of the period were testing the limits of genre. For John Shirley the limits of genre were vague apparitions somewhere in his rearview mirror.

Science fiction is a genre by and for bright people who feel a tad ill at ease in a bourgeois society, a tad under-socialized, but also a tad inventive…. Nice people, really. You get used to them. They have a lot to offer, these insect-eating Mensa-freak people who like making puns about neutrinos while sipping ginger ale in the con suite. John Shirley was never like that. John Shirley in his early days was visibly orthogonal to the human species.

I share certain deep and lasting commonalities with John Shirley. We’re very near the same age and we’ve shared some crucial generational experiences. Harlan Ellison was a guru of mine and was kind enough to commission and publish my first novel. Harlan Ellison was utterly enraged with John Shirley and once publicly challenged him to a duel. I once angrily walked out on a bad panel at a science fiction convention. John Shirley liked to topple over tables at science fiction conventions and wallow howling in the crushed ice where the fans had hidden the beer. I listened to a lot of punk music. John Shirley wrote, recorded, and performed punk music.

I think that drugs are an intriguing social and technomedical phenomenon. John Shirley had serious drug habits. I got married and had a kid. John Shirley has been married four or five times and has three kids by two different women. I’ve written over a dozen books. John Shirley has written more books than I can count, a lot of them under pseudonyms. I once wrote a book with William Gibson. John Shirley is the guy who convinced William Gibson that writing science fiction was a good idea.

I’m kind of interested in military stuff. John Shirley joined the Coast Guard. I took some martial arts classes. John Shirley had a beer bottle broken over his head in a bar brawl. I’ve moved house a few times in the last thirty years. John Shirley’s moved a couple of dozen times during the same period, including a sojourn in France.

The typical Bruce Sterling fan is a computer-science major in some Midwestern technical university. “Stelarc” is a John Shirey fan. Stelarc is an Austalian performance artist who has an artificial third hand, sometimes bounces lasers off his eyeballs, and used to suspend his naked body in midair by piercing his flesh with meathooks.

It may be that it all boils down to this; I am a professional science fiction writer who happened to get called a “cyberpunk.” John Shirley is a uniquely authentic avatar of the weltanschauung.