Slum Online

"Sakurazaka is also the author of All You Need to Kill , which was filmed as The Edge of Tomorrow. Slum Online was first published in 2005, which was a year after – and this is relevant – World of Warcraft. It’s about a young man, a student in Japan, who spends a lot of his time playing a massive multiplayer online game called Versus Town . It’s essentially a virtual world where everyone is a martial artist and beats the crap out of one another. It seems really fun, honestly. Again, it’s not about how Versus Town – this big complex global virtual world – works. It’s about its impact on this young man’s life. Slum Online treats the game with respect. It shows – in a way that’s very prescient, when we think about where we are in 2025 – how the online world and the offline world have equal weight, equal importance, equal emotional and almost physical impact on his life. It is a ‘light’ novel. Not a lot happens. It follows our guy as he tries to meet a nice girl and goes exploring his city in the offline world. Online, he is trying his best to win a martial arts competition. He’s trying to achieve success, and it encourages the reader to think about what that success means. Is it successfully holding down his first relationship, graduating from his college program, or winning this tournament? They’re all meaningful to him – it’s about that search for meaning. There’s a casual acceptance to the way this book treats its virtual world. It just is . It’s important. It absorbs his life and those of other characters. It can be incredibly seductive and addictive, but it can also be empowering and give a sense of friendship and belonging and connection. When we think about where we are now, and what we know now about how video games work, as the largest pastime in the world, and how we connect with them… This was an incredibly smart piece of cyberpunk that saw this coming very early on the road, and writes about it in an emotionally powerful way that’s equally relevant twenty years later. Yes, very much so. The core themes – how do we relate to technology? How does it impact our lives? – are global, and the movement has been global from its very early days. From the mid-1980s, you see cyberpunk works appearing throughout Latin and South America, through Russia and Eastern Europe, France, Japan, South Korea… Really everywhere. That’s because everyone, wherever you are, is facing a technological revolution or change that is relevant to you. We’ve seen technology spread and expand, and new technology comes from all different parts of the world. Cyberpunk is one artistic or cultural way of dealing with that change. As an aside, I was disappointed that I couldn’t find short fiction to include by Sakurazaka for the anthology. He actually wrote a short story as a follow-up to Slum Online , which is a really, really great piece of fiction – but it makes absolutely no sense unless you’ve read Slum Online . I’m glad to be able to talk about this great piece of cyberpunk that I couldn’t include in the book. I was really lucky. I speak English mostly (barely!). Once I had my definition of cyberpunk, the core notion of how The Big Book was going to define it, I briefed a network of translators, of friends, of authors I know around the world, and writers and journalists and even a filmmaker, and I said, “Tell me what you’ve seen that’s like this.” And some amazing work came back. I wasn’t able to include all of it, of course, but I was introduced to some amazing authors and artists and creators from around the world. We were able to get at least a few representative examples. We were able to include some of those seminal works from Mexico and from Russia, for example, that hadn’t been previously translated into English. And a relatively new story from South Korea… It was really important to showcase these, because cyberpunk is inherently global, and we needed all of the perspectives that the book could possibly contain. I can’t remember the final number, but there are over two dozen countries represented – which is still only scratching the surface. The framework is slightly different for the UK and US editions. Although the stories are the same, the order is a little different, just to keep everyone on their toes. But yes, the book is structured around the way that technology impacts the pace and scale of human affairs, so I needed to devise a way of dividing ‘human affairs’. So, what does tech mean for the individual and our individual identity? What does it mean for culture – the way that we look at art, or read, or eat, or play sports? Cyberpunk is a kind of soft science fiction in that it takes cultural impact seriously, which is brilliant. It also considers those broader layers of human affairs as well – how we connect with one another, and with a greater sense of society."