Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

236Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsMirrored sunglasses have been a Movement totem since the early days of’82. The reasons for this are not hard to grasp. By hiding the eyes, mirrorshadesprevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazedand possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary,the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. Mirrorshades –preferably in chrome and matte black, the Movement’s totem colors – appearedin story after story, as a kind of literary badge. 146The logical contradiction does not prevent Sterling from listing the policemanamong other “similar outlaws”; Samuel Delany has pointed out thatmirrorshades “both mask the gaze and distort the gaze,” and Darko Suvinwrites that they “conjoin a minor degree of effective withdrawal with a largedegree of psychological illusion of withdrawal in the wearer.” 147 Such illusions,paradoxes and apparent lapses of rational reasoning are interestingfrom the specific viewpoint of this study; cyberpunk is situated in the traditionof “hard” (technologically plausible) SF, but its characters seem to havea relationship with technology that reaches beyond rational extrapolationand invention. They are also inheritors of Victor Frankenstein, Roger Torraway,and Rick Deckard, and of the demonic conflicts negotiated at thelimits of the self and the other.Brian McHale has dubbed as “interface fictions” those contemporarynarratives which register the “first, often traumatic encounters between ‘literary’culture (high culture generally) and the transformative possibilities ofcomputer technology.” 148 The term could be developed to cover the “interfaces”of other cultures, not only the high one, with the cybernetic condition.These fictions often address the anxiety of dealing with non-humansystems in demonic terms. Félix Guattari, for example, comes up with thesame idea while trying to rethink the relation of subjectivity and machine:The fact that machines are capable of articulating statements and registeringstates of fact in as little as a nanosecond, and soon in a picosecond,does not in itself make them diabolical powers that threaten to dominatehuman beings. People have little reason to turn away from machines;which are nothing other than hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentratedforms of certain aspects of human subjectivity, and emphatically not thoseaspects that polarize people in relations of domination and power. It willbe possible to build a two-way bridge between human beings and machinesand, once we have established that, to herald new and confident alliancesbetween them. 149When Guattari proceeds from theoretical speculation into prophecy, heis actually producing “interface fiction” in the sense above. The reference tomachines (here specifically computers) as threatening “diabolical powers”146 Sterling 1986/1988, xi.147Suvin 1989/1991, 358.148 McHale 1992, 236.149Guattari, “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects” (Crary - Kwinter 1992, 16-18).