How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters

"How to Get to Apocalypse is a collection of short fiction by Erica Satifka, whose work is all over the internet, but she pulled it all together for this book, including a couple of new stories. You’ll find all sorts of things in there, from alien invasions to long explorations of redundancy… The way I’d describe it is that if cyberpunk never existed until right now, and someone said, “Start from scratch, just look at the technology around you with no knowledge of the genre or its tropes. Don’t respond to anything that’s existed before you, and only look at where we are in this moment”… You would get this book. It is a little hyperbolic to call it the Neuromancer of 2021 – but it is a defining text for where cyberpunk is right now. It’s beautiful and it’s haunting and it’s about people, but in a world where, again, the technology has been robustly integrated into the system of the way people live. What does that mean for our jobs? What does that mean for our relationships? What does it mean for your sense of self and your identity? There’s a really powerful story in here, “Act of Providence”, about a woman who goes through a harrowing near-death experience and is one of the few survivors. She makes a deal to share her story so it can be recreated as an immersive virtual experience. It is part artistry, part disaster tourism. But does that memory still belong to her anymore? Who owns the copyright of her feelings, of her experience, now? When technology can create something so powerful, that makes these questions all the muddier. Some of Satifka’s stories are very small and focused, but they’re all very human and very powerful. They look at where we are going based on the trajectory we’re on right now. It originates in the here and the now. It’s also completely devoid of that aesthetic that goes through cyberpunk – there’s no neon, no rain. It’s a 2021 look at cyberpunk that is completely untarnished by anything that went before. According to various experts – and there are many amazing experts in cyberpunk – the genre ended at any point between 1985 and now. Cyberpunk is awash with people who supposedly killed it. One of the corresponding notions that resulted from this mass murder was the idea of post-cyberpunk: if cyberpunk is dead, what are we reading now? What’s come after it? And like cyberpunk, there are lots of definitions for whatever ‘post-cyberpunk’ is. I fundamentally disagree with the premise because I think cyberpunk itself is still relevant and thriving and doing incredibly well, if more diffusely. But within the book, I’ve baked up a spurious definition of post-cyberpunk, which is anything that mostly meets my rules for cyberpunk; something that’s 80% cyberpunk and shows how cyberpunk itself can be a platform for even more types of story. Maybe it has a non-human protagonist, or is set a bit further in the future, or isn’t grounded in a plausible technology, but everything else is still, for lack of a better term, ‘cyberpunk-y’. Cyberpunk has become more mainstream – it now permeates all sorts of other genres and ways of thinking. I think we’re in a world where lots of things are 80% cyberpunk, and that post-cyberpunk approach, which pays homage to its cyberpunk roots, is useful. Right now, probably one of the best examples is the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted Vauhini Vara and her short piece Ghosts , which she essentially co-writes with an AI. That feels like it’s an accusation – because a lot of people are co-writing with AIs in a really bad way – but what Vara does is use almost-first-generation AI as a way of dealing with the loss of her sister, and to try to give voice to her feelings. She writes about that experience, rather than handing the AI the pen, per se. I think that’s a really good example of post-cyberpunk, of thinking about technology as part of the process of feeling, as well as being. I love this story, but it made me cry and cry. I’ve not forgiven it yet."