John Shirley - Pan or Praise?
anon
C. Adam Kuhn,
I would definitely praise him, I'm one of his biggest fans. He's
extremely prolific being published since 1973, and has written Sci-Fi,
Fantasy, Surrealism, Horror and a lot of stuff that mixes genres. He's
probably most famous for discovering the comic and writing earlier drafts of
the movie, The Crow. I'm a Sci-Fi reader so I'll focus mostly on that, but
right now probably his best horror collection Black Butterflies and his best
horror novel Wetbones are being published. Most of his sci-fi you will have
to find in libraries, used stores or mail order. I think his novel City
Come a-Walkin' (1980) is his masterpiece. It's truly a seminal cyberpunk
work about a city that manifests and tries to save itself from those that
would disperse it. I've posted a montage from it below to give you a feel
for the book. Many people think his novel Eclipse (1985) is his best. For
me the section "Freezone" which you can read in Sterling's Mirrorshades
collection is brilliant. Eclipse and the other two books in the trilogy are
coming out soon. His most consistent collection is called Heatseeker
(1988). Very hard to find, but well worth it. It's in my local library.
Shirley really shines at the short length. The Exploded Heart (1996) and
RRRReally Weird Stories, which is out now, also contain some quite memorable
works. His first novel Transmaniacon (1979) is uneven, but contains some
amazingly descriptive sections which I've pasted below as well. Although
he's not proud of it, Shirley write #2,3,4,5,6 and 8 of the men's
action/adventure series Traveler as D.B. Drumm. This is Road Warrior
rip-off pulp, but the early ones are fun if you've bought into any of that
post-holocaust punk imagery.
Like you I like PKD, but I prefer books you didn't mention such as Time Out
of Joint, Dr. Bloodmoney and Martian Time-Slip. I know Shirley is big on A
Scanner Darkly and Valis. I haven't read Lethem. One piece of advise I'd
have for anyone reading Shirley is not to expect word-perfect pieces such as
Gibson's short stories. Shirley has moments of soaring surrealism, of
guitar solos. Like a good rock song.
Gene
Cole’s visions of the city as a vast electromagnetic organism are Shirley at
his crazed best. --William Gibson
Urban Montage from John Shirley’s City Come a-Walkin’
In the distance the severe lineaments of the street converged in a patina of
glamorous scales, refractions of neon lights, headlights, streetlights, and
metal; glints diffused through a cloud of cigarette smoke, steam from
manholes, and carbon monoxide. The glaring signs in the long row of
nude-live-sex-bestiality-bondage-on-stage clubs seemed to flash at him in a
familiar subverbal code; the signs were arranged in compositional
juxtaposition with the gloomy network of trolley wires crisscrossing
overhead; electric buses flared sparks from their runners when they
traversed the nexus of wires at an intersection. The lights defining the
skyline resembled light shining through holes in a yellow computer
punch-card; the angular graph of citylights reflecting in his mirror shades.
Spaced about his apartment were highly detailed overview shots he’d taken
from the tourist ‘copter, arranged to suggest the demarcations of city
blocks. The city like solid-state circuitry. Maybe he was rooted, a plant
that would die unless rooted in the peculiar chemical compounds
characteristic of its native soil: the concrete and its San Francisco
configurations; the asphalt with the sweat blood vomit tears semen of the
people who trod it as its mystic fundament; the copper wire, the asphalt,
the aluminum scalings; the particular array of towers of glass and steel;
the great grey wooden ladies the tourists saw as Victorian houses; the soil
of San Francisco. He was an urban mutation, a metropolitan aborigine who
instinctively understood the Greater Urban Reality, the secret geometries of
the city; and it came to him that the city was like a great mind, a matrix
of ideas, concepts pressed into concrete and asphalt; and he was at the
center of consciousness traveling that mind touching on first one idea—one
location in the city—and then another, the street addresses laid out in
orderly array, one leading to the next, like the pathways of free
associations. And he could feel the subways passing under his feet, the
pipes gushing and burbling around the subway tunnels; the crackling
electrical strength in the thousands of miles of wire interlacing; he could
smell torrents of sewage pumping and the sickly exhaust of thousands of
combustion engines commingling gases with hundreds of thousands of
foodcooking wafts: it was all perfume to Cole. Then the subway moved out
and the train's urban continuum began to function. Feeling a distant
pleasure at the procedural perfection of the machine around him, Cole began
to count the lights flashing by in the tunnel and listen to the rhythmic
click of the wheels, the sigh of air pressuring at corners.... "All the
machinery in the world is connected," he murmured, looking around him in
growing realization, "in electrical line, phone connections, in a big
electronic webbing, like…the pipes." Then Cole stood outside the black
imitation-granite building, control rooms for the Data Distribution Center,
picturing the great computer underground as a gigantic mechanical black
widow spider squatting amidst terminal linkage lines that were its webbing.
He could see it there, in the infinite darkness behind his closed eyes,
superimposed luminosity, blue-white against the speckled blackness: the
great endless blueprint of the city’s electrical neural channels, the
interlinking buildings and the loci, the nexus of the powerplant, the— And
Cole began to feel it, a slow oscillation of Presence increasing the
frequencing of its wavelengths; shimmering up his backbone, lighting up his
head with the blueprint imagery: the city’s neurology superimposing on his
own. He slipped away, seeming to sink through the mattress to deliquesce
into a liquid that raced merrily through pipes beneath City’s streets; while
overhead, luminous blue prints, the buildings and utilities denuded and made
neon-visible, blinked on and off in a machine choreography…
Transmaniacon descriptive sections
Ben was not at all surprised to see the nulgrav car molded in the scaled-up
macrocosmic model of a common house-fly. Mentally, he dubbed it the
fly-car. The forty-foot fly was complete in almost every detail, its
decorative thirty-foot wingspread constructed from transparent plastic and
veined with gold and platinum wires, shimmering like real insect wings in
the sullen lights surrendered by the tense city night above them. The fly
was so complete, so well proportioned, the bikers seemed reluctant to
approach it. It crouched on barbed, hairy legs, sense-wires fanning from
its thorax, overlapping spiracle scales forming its abdomen, antennae
sprouting from its enormous gargoyle head; its compound eyes—translucent
enough so Ben could make out the car’s control panel behind them—glittered
in the half-light. Ben ducked under its mandibles and climbed after Fuller
up a rung ladder and into its belly.
The fly-car set down (in a vast parking lot) between a huge metallic
grasshopper in chrome-flake green and silver trim, and a bat, with
outstretched wings of simulated leather over aluminum bone-struts and
genuine brown fur on its bulbous torso. Ahead, a huge bee, complete in
every detail; wasps, four-passenger moths, an open-air touring butterfly,
and a sporty swallow, all with their rotors and fusilage so artfully
concealed they seemed ready to perk up their various outsize heads and leap
into willful flight.
Ben swallowed and looked up. His gaze met by three pairs of mirror
sunglasses and his own miniature image in sextuple. [Note: This may be the
first mention of mirrorshades in the fiction of any of the original
Cyberpunk or Mirrorshades writers.]
Nulgrav was new to Astor and the local artists. In the Dirty Jewel,
artists were some eighty-five percent of the population. The sculptors were
exploiting nulgrav to the fullest.
Ben and Gloria had seen conventional kinetic sculptures in Astor before
coming to the Geodesic Stage at the center of the city. They’d seen
gleaming, multifaceted monoliths of shiny steel whose parts moved in
repeating purposeful patterns as if they were bent on manufacturing some
undisclosed product. Yet, they manufactured nothing but motion, the
inflexible writhing of machine ecstasy. Sculptures of genetically
manipulated flesh-octopal monstrosities of babyskin, human hands reaching
from spiked mounds of flesh to grip one another in endless arm wrestling;
beams of light interwoven with concealed mirrors to seem to curve impossibly
into spirals, rainbow arches, lattices of light. Rattling sculptures of
animal bone, sinew, furs, like living aboriginal fetishes…luminous ball
bearings rolling on tracks that shunted through intricate inversions,
twists, hyperbolas, and hairpin turns, triggering flywheels, strut-arms,
spoked mills, motivating glass rods into unfolding interlinears while lights
played through conterminous prisms.
And then there were the nulgrav sculptures, bobbing, unsupported in midair,
stationary with breeze-resistant gyros. Among these was a floating model of
an atom, scaled up gigantically, its electrons represented by vivid blue
neon balls hurrying in orbit around a nucleus of sparking white and black
cubes; the protons and neutrons whirling and constantly interchanging
positions. Opposite this and on a plane adjacent so that the sculptures
were like two wagonwheels, was a model of the solar system, a blindingly
bright sphere in its heart showing a shifting gold corona and occasional
flares; the planets and asteroids and moons circling in their respective
orbits. The planets were scrupulously detailed and exquisitely colored.
Below these sculptures, a free-floating gyroscope was fashioned from flowing
crystal-blue waters, plashing at the middle to curve precisely and
gracefully out and up in defiance of gravity-but in conformity to
nulgrav-into concentric circles. It refracted the sun, dashing it into
polychromatic scales. Not a drop of the sculptures’ water fell to earth.
C. Adam Kuhn
spot him) recently saw me reading "The Consumer" by M. Gira, and suggested a
plethora of books I would enjoy if I liked "sick stuff" like that. Amongst the
names he gave me were PKD, Johnathan Lethem, and "his personal favorite," John
Shirley.
Now, having read most of PKD's books and all of Lethem's, I'm kind of wondering
about Shirley. What type of fiction does he write? Horror? Fantasy? Plain
vanilla sci-fi? I'm intrigued by some of the titles of his books ("Really
Really Really Really Weird Stories," "The Exploded Heart") but I'm always wary
of picking up something by an author I've never heard of (I was burned twice:
once, by going on blind faith in a friend that "Terry Brooks is the best fantasy
author ever!" and once, by going against my better judgement and buying "A Fire
On The Deep," by Vernor Vinge - boring).
Any opinions would be appreciated, as well as other suggestions for
reality-warping literature in the vein of PKD and Lethem.
C. adam kuhn
np: Aphex Twin - Windowlicker [debbie does dallas in the year 6000]
Lawrence Person
> I'm kind of wondering
> about Shirley. What type of fiction does he write? Horror? Fantasy? Plain
> vanilla sci-fi?
Hard-edged horror and cyberpunk. (Of all the writer's in Mirrorshades, I
believe Shirley was the only one who was actually ever in a punk band.)
Much of Shirley's short fiction is excellent, but his novels can be
uneven. If you can find and afford it, his Scream Press book HEATSEEKER is
excellent, with "Wolves of the Plateau" being perhaps the best pure-quill
cyberpunk story to come out after MIRRORSHADES. Also, "Just Like Suzy" may
be the most gory, disgusting, over the edge, "top this!" splatterpunk
story every written.
FWIW, Shirley co-wrote the screenplay for THE CROW with David J. Schow.
--
Lawrence Person
lawr...@bga.com
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Joel Benford
>[...]
>Now, having read most of PKD's books and all of Lethem's, I'm kind of wondering
>about Shirley. What type of fiction does he write? Horror? Fantasy? Plain
>vanilla sci-fi? [...]
All of those, though I'm not sure about the plain vanilla. It's often quite
hard to say quite which category a particular work falls into. You could
probably split his work into cyberpunk stuff and vaguely surreal "ecstasy
and dread" horror. Well, sometimes.
Finding Shirley's stuff is ludicrously hard, but have a go at:
Heatseeker, Scream/Press 1989, ISBN 0-910489-26-2. I think it's hardcover
only. This is the most consistent collection, with most of his best-loved
stories.
The Exploded Heart, Eyeball books 1986, ISBN 0-9642505-0-0, trade PB. A
recent collection of stories which are predominantly pre or post Heatseeker.
I love the early stuff. Although he was obviously feeling his way as a
writer it just burns with energy. If anybody put the "punk" into "cyberpunk"
it was Shirley.
City Come A-Walkin', reprinted Eyeball books 1996 (a sort of 20 bit digital
remaster with bonus tracks), ISBN 0-9642505-1-9. The great Ur-cyberpunk
novel. "John Shirley was cyberpunk's patient zero, first locus of the virus,
certifiably virulent" says Gibson in the foreword. This one would fit your
PKD/Lethem "sick stuff" bill quite well.
The Eclipse Trilogy (Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona). Forget
finding the originals, but it's supposed to be coming out again soon from a
new small press. Relatively mainstream cyberpunk, with the writing pretty
much down to earth. Quite politicised.
There's about a dozen more, but those are good and you stand some chance of
finding them.
-- Joel