The Slow, Anguished Death of the Cyberspace Cowboy

A BLURB ON THE BACK of my copy of Tomorrow and Tomorrow claims that Thomas Sweterlitsch is “leading the next wave of cyberpunk,” a huge endorsement given that Tomorrow and Tomorrow is his first novel. Calling to mind authors like William Gibson, the term cyberpunk is inseparably fused to images of sprawling neon metropolises and cyberspace cowboys. In an interview, Sweterlitsch minimized his role in the creation of any new cyberpunk, saying that he had no control over the blurb, but Tomorrow and Tomorrow can, in fact, help the reader imagine what the “next wave of cyberpunk” might look like. The novel challenges the politics, contradictions, and logic puzzles of a novel like Gibson’s Neuromancer, and the result is a sense of stasis, emphasizing the political disenfranchisement of the present. At the same time, the novel reproduces some of the gender politics of cyberpunk, employing a voyeuristic male gaze that renders women largely invisible.

The role of technology in Tomorrow and Tomorrow is clear in an early scene. Sitting in a bus, John Dominic Blaxton, the protagonist, experiences cyborg dysfunction, a quotidian reality of his world: “[M]y Adware autoconnects to wifi.dc.gov and the feeds tingle my skull — blacking out a few seconds before my vision reboots […] my profile bundled with so many pop-ups and worms that my vision strobes while it loads.” His Adware, a device similar to Google Glass that is wired directly into his eyes and brain, repeatedly clouds his vision and mind. In this same scene, Blaxton notes that “[t]he passenger across the aisle stares at the ceiling, giggling — he’s drooling down the front of his raincoat, utterly engrossed in the streams.” More often than not, the Adware transmits layers upon layers of erotic advertisements. Blaxton’s world is full of these moments of hacked masculinity: male bodies in Tomorrow and Tomorrow are often hardly able to function, penetrated by technology and saturated with drugs.

Blaxton, then, operates as a failed cyberspace cowboy, and this is clear in his constant struggles with his mental health, and his grief at the loss of his wife and unborn child: “I take my Zoloft every night, but every night I wake up dreaming of my wife.” Living in a world where not just his wife but his home city (Pittsburgh) have been obliterated in a terrorist attack, Blaxton’s emotionally distraught perspective suggests that something has gone terribly wrong with the digital spectacle that sustains his world. Blaxton feels powerless to change anything, but Sweterlitsch establishes a feeling of nostalgia, a longing for a time before things fell apart, asking readers to reject subjugation to the digital present. This nostalgia challenges the old guard of cyberpunk, where present precarity and future possibility often go hand in hand.

Media studies scholar Tama Leaver, in “‘The Infinite Plasticity of the Digital’: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment and Technology in William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy,” describes the techno-politics of the “old guard”; Case, Neuromancer’s cyberspace cowboy, he writes, interacts with cyberspace in ways that are “both pleasurable and [fulfil] many of his normal bodily urges: When he finally does ‘jack in’ to cyberspace, it is a highly charged, almost sexual experience.” Nothing like this could be said about Blaxton. Blaxton’s travels outside of cyberspace and inside the Archive — the virtual reality recreation of Pittsburgh that he frequents — lack this charge, circling a drain of on an idealized past. When he does almost have sex in cyberspace, the moment ends quickly and he calls it a “beautiful lie.” Sweterlitsch masterfully throws the assumptions of cyberpunk on their head, relying heavily on stasis, lack, and passivity as the modus operandi of most characters.

Sweterlitsch mixes other genre conventions, as well, writing in between science fiction and murder mystery. Blaxton’s initial job is to investigate deaths using the Archive, proving whether or not they occurred before the terrorist attack for insurance purposes. While the Archive recalls 1980s cyberpunk to some degree, the interplay between hacker and computer is much different: Blaxton’s cyber-travels often leave him discouraged, frustrated, and unable to delve deeper into his technological blind spots, exposing him as inept rather than an embattled hacker like Neuromancer’s Case. Though he does solve the mystery in the end, he relies heavily on luck and help rather than his own wits.

His frustration and stasis also emerge from the fact that Blaxton’s job gives him the opportunity to spend time with a digital facsimile of his wife: “Theresa. In the first glimpse of her, she’s edged with light — sculpted from a video when my retinal lenses were new.” The novel often constructs cyberspace as the medium of unhealthy obsession and locus of a nostalgic fantasy that obstructs real human interaction, mirroring some contemporary dystopic rhetoric concerning social media.

In examining this condition, Sweterlitsch looks more toward modernism and its predecessors than postmodernism and cyberpunk. The final lines of Tomorrow and Tomorrow repudiate cyberpunk and the “vast steps of data” envisioned at the end of Neuromancer, and offer instead a conclusion more reminiscent of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” as Blaxton imagines a future for Albion, the novel’s main female character:

I imagine that the roads she travels are beautiful, studded with mountains and lush with evergreens. I imagine that as the roads thin and the forests darken she feels safe, finally safe. I imagine a single road cutting through all those miles and miles of forest, all that infinite forest, a single road that someone could drive for hours, for days, and never see another human face.

The novel’s modernist melancholy and its pervasive disaffection with digimodern reality repeatedly references modernist literature and its predecessors, including W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Internalizing the alienation of Gatsby and Prufrock, the novel begins with an epigraph from a predecessor of modernism, Emily Dickinson: “There is a pain — so utter — It swallows being up.”

This image of being swallowed up signifies both the novel’s melancholia and the very literal absences of Pittsburgh (a symbol of the industrial past) and Theresa that cause Blaxton’s depression. As he travels through the Archive and becomes romantically enmeshed with Albion, the complex layers of melancholy in the novel become apparent: the loss of the city intertwines with personal loss, and not just his; the novel is filled to the brim with dysfunctional, and often violent, men. Both his family and his city have been erased from, and reduced to, the digital landscape of his present.

The repeated “I imagine” in the last lines, the need to fill the future with an unrealized possibility, emphasizes Blaxton’s desire to emerge from his digital stasis. Predicated on an Emersonian vision of nature and heteronormative desire, the basic components of the cyberspace cowboy — affinity for the digital, the masculine ability to hack, penetrate, and disembody, and the simultaneous threat of being hacked — dissolve in Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Blaxton is the one who is hacked and powerless as he desperately searches for the exterior of the digital spectacle.

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This sense of being hacked — and the nostalgia it produces — filter into the politics of the novel. Like its relationship to cyberpunk, Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s political convictions are sometimes contradictory and difficult to follow. Sweterlitsch has crafted a political hyperdrama viewed obliquely from Blaxton’s melancholy perspective. Although set in the future, the novel fuses contemporary malaise and nostalgia so well that it often feels more like realism than science fiction.

The mood Sweterlitsch transmits is not unlike what I feel watching Donald Trump on television and, almost prophetically, the president in Tomorrow and Tomorrow, President Meecham, though a woman, is also a protean media spectacle. At one point, a character mirrors the logic of making America great again when he admits that “I was — thinking, stupidly thinking, that her election would somehow bring everything back, that everything would turn out all right.” A few times during the novel, political executions are broadcast on television, one of the ways Sweterlitsch places entertainment in conversation with national violence. Halfway through the novel, Blaxton describes one of these executions: “She pauses before each prisoner, studying each body like a consumer pricing meat. She offers each prisoner a chance to recant, to swear their allegiance to the United States — but no one speaks.” Blaxton witnesses this event as an outsider, in part horrified, but also, as he says, since he is “not on the political fringe,” from the middle-of-the-road position that makes Blaxton an intriguing but unreliable character.

Still, in this same scene, Blaxton, with a background in English literature, is a sophisticated reader: “There will be torrents of pornography derived from these executions,” he notes, “classic Meecham sex vids spliced with death shots and the prisoners bleeding out.” Throughout the novel, though, the ability to scrutinize is often applied to female bodies; to some degree, the novel gets trapped in the spectacle it attempts to critique.

One example is a headline Blaxton notes early in the novel: “PRESIDENT MEECHAM REVEALED AS DORM ROOM SLUT!” For a novel focused on a protagonist obsessed with his dead wife, it is probably not surprising to find a voyeuristic male gaze. But Sweterlitsch produces a mood that suggests male stasis at the expense of female bodies, exposing some of the problematic gender assumptions of cyberpunk (and our own Trumpian politics), while simultaneously reproducing them. Women nearly disappear into fantasy within the novel, evident in Blaxton’s last moment of “imagining” Albion and the threatening mass of “Twiggies” (Twiggy is a minor character Blaxton meets) which he describes as, “Like a mirror image of a mirror, a thousand Twiggies receding into space everywhere I look.”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow operates at a heightened sense of melancholia, as if lamenting the ends to which cyberspace has been employed. It exposes the contemporary world’s titillating conflation of sexual pleasure and spectacles of violence, experimenting with older ontological and literary models in order to imagine beyond the passive cyborg bodies of the present. The novel, then, could easily be seen as conservative, seeking asylum in a pre-postmodernist world that offers the nuclear family, an equilibrium between nature and industry, and a less technology-oriented sense of subjectivity. But Sweterlitsch also imparts a sense of hope, dormant but waiting. Blaxton’s world has perhaps grown beyond this possibility, but rewind the tape a few years and you find us. The novel seems to ask: When did politics all go so wrong?

Blaxton is not always the best barometer of political resistance. If his dysfunction is a reflection of the injustices of the system under which he lives, wouldn’t regaining his emotional health only bring him to a state of acceptance, both of his loss and his reality? The novel does not answer this question, and one of the final scenes involves another public execution, solidifying the sense of the permanence of the political machinery of his world. At times, however, libertarian and progressive politics meet, embodied perfectly by graffiti Blaxton encounters early in the novel: “But the stream interrupts and reloads, bothered by all the vandalized and nonlicensed Tags setting off my Adware’s net security. Are we any safer than we were ten years ago?”

Unlike cyberpunk, Tomorrow and Tomorrow is invested in now, in emphasizing the threat of complacency, of the idea that the only resistance is to find personal mental health in a world of extreme tragedy. Blaxton’s ultimate choice to withdraw from his technology-oriented world is a gesture of privilege, an emotional escape valve that allows his individual development to overshadow the societal implications of continued inequality and despair. Rejecting the mythology of the cyberspace cowboy, Sweterlitsch represents a precarious digital future where the power and pleasure of disembodying is not a solution to dystopia. Tomorrow and Tomorrow refuses to be just another “cyberpunk” novel by engaging directly with the reader’s political realities. Readers, as a result, are offered a glimpse into the disaster that is their immediate future. If all the possibilities of agency in cyberpunk have dissolved, Sweterlitsch pleads that we find new ways to express agency — and quick.

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Daniel Ante-Contreras is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside.