It seems like, recently, everyone’s been rushing to pronounce the imminent doom of everything sfnal.

There’s been the gloomy blogging about whether there’s any point in short fiction (a primer on that discussion is here) that took place while I, failing to notice the form’s untimely demise, have just finished enjoying the shit out of Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (in Subterranean Press’s beautiful little hardback)was busy reading Nina Allan’s awesome first short story collection (buy it damn you, buy it) and the excellent Zencore!, (Nemonymous seven) and then picked up two great new compilations edited Ian Whates (disLocations and Time Pieces).

Then Ridley Scott announced the end of sf cinema and a many nodded and rubbed their chins as though this had proven exactly what they always expected (and hoped, secretly, because those damned movies just weren’t as grown up as their books) ignoring the fact that the past twelve months had been a fantastically fecund year for intelligent, not to say provoking, sf cinema, as evidence by perhaps the highest quality Hugo “dramatic presentation” shortlist ever (perhaps 2000 – if we forgive the bizarre victory of the mediocre Galaxy Quest – and 1983 come close).

So, anyway, given that everyone else is notching up the death of various bits of science fiction it hardly came as a surprise to find, on page 64 of William Gibson’s Spook Country, that cyberspace wasn’t just dead, it had never been born.

“Someone told me that cyberspace was ‘everting.’ That was how she put it.”

“Sure. And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen. Right here… We’re all doing VR every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles and the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? … One day you will… have internalised the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and grinned at her.” (64-65)

Having just finished Spook Country you can see this as marking a point where Gibson puts some very significant and deliberate distance between his past work and his current direction (although perhaps not as much as some commentators have claimed given the way that story unfolds – but I’ll try and come back to that in another post) but I did think that this passage cast an interesting light on another post-cyberpunk book I’d just finished.

As I noted here before, Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End was an enjoyable book that seemed to have something important missing from it. I think reading Gibson, I’ve worked out what it was – it was a sense that we shared in the “future shock” of his central character. It was that we’ve “internalised the interface” to the point that the tricks that Vinge hopes will amaze us just don’t seem to offer that big a hurdle.

It’s not for the want of Vinge trying. He projects into his future a Rip van Winkle-esque character, Robert Gu, who is old-fashioned even by current standards – a poet who is a literary snob so deeply entrenched in the ways “high art” and the academy that his computer experience halts around Windows 3.11. He is, effectively, forced to create a character who is already out-of-date to boost the sense of shock that his protagonist must overcome.

And that made me wonder whether Gibson is right. More than twenty-five years ago, when Gibson was imagining his form of cyberspace in “Johnny Mnemonic” and those other early stories, contact (for that minority for whom there was any meaningful contact) with the “information revolution” was by DOS and the command line. Even Apple were still living in the land of CP/M!

The last quarter of a century has seen the shift from the text-based to the visual interface – and much of our expectation of how that interface should work has been shaped by the speculations of sf writers and movie designers. So, even though we’re still not living in the world of all immersive cyberspace or the all connected info-sphere, we can see it from where we stand. We can imagine it, in films like Minority Report or I, Robot (average films, awesome design) we’ve seen it and we expect it to happen, we’re only waiting for the engineers and the business model to catch-up with our expectations.

In politics there is the idea of “discounted expectation” – if something is talked about often enough, far-enough in advance then the public have become so inured to the idea that, by the time the change actually happens – a tax rise, a hospital closure – they’ve already discounted its impact and hardly notice. Parties use it to try and reduce the adverse reaction to the unpopular policies they’re planning to introduce and to encourage people to discount the popular policies of their opponents. It’s why tax rises in the UK are now announced two years in advance.

Well, it seems to me, we’ve already discounted our expectations of the cyber-future. We might not live in Neuromancer’s fly-through digi-space or Rainbows End’s infinitely embedded info-sphere but our experience of the already existing media-environment means we have a pretty good idea of what it will look and feel like. Our 24 hour, always on, wireless, broadband, interactive and hyper-connected lives have us thumbing our Blackberries (or texting our mates), carrying our entertainment libraries (books, music and increasingly DVD collections) on our hips while shouting at people no one can see and only we can hear.

What this means is that we can find our own way to cyberpunk universes from here – and for most of us it won’t be cool trenchcoats and shotguns (“If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy.”), it’ll be consumer goods and passing the time on the commute home. And we don’t need gurus or prophets to guide us to that future anymore, we’re over the last hill, we can see it ourselves. Moses, sit down, you don’t get to come the last mile.

Of course there are still people who are going to get left behind by the technology. Eventually, I suppose, we all will. But then that’s the job of one generation – it’s supposed to leave the last one behind. This weekend my daughter (four) beat me at tennis on the Wii (and I was trying) and it would never have happened if we’d been playing the game with a joystick and d-pad – because she can’t get her head around those yet but the Wii interface she can thoroughly internalise. I can already sense the obsolescence creeping up on me. I don’t get social networking – though that may not be technological, it might just be because I’m a grumpy bastard and functional hermit – and for the first time I recently sat down and tried to learn some new computer stuff (PHP and MySQL) and decided that it might be more effort than I have left in me.

But, at least for the moment, the technological plateau before us doesn’t seem to offer the kind of precipice of incomprehensible future shock that it did 25 years ago. But of course Gibson got here before me, didn’t he, when he noted way back then, that the “future is already here, its just not equally distributed”.

Which brings me back to Vernor Vinge and Rainbow’s End, by a too convoluted a route. You see the thing I think the thing I found missing from this novel was the sense that Robert Gu was somehow an empathetic character – he’s obviously stuffy and hard to like but at a more crucial level, Vinge needed us to be able to empathise with his predicament, his technologically enforced isolation and that he was the party injured by time. But Vinge has had to make his character such an extreme case to emphasise the drama that he seems either utterly incredible or the deserved victim of his own bloody-mindedness. In either case his journey from Nobel-winning poet to minor tech-guru doesn’t ring true.

Of course the future has its way of surprising us. Perhaps the event horizon of a singularity is steaming, invisible and unstoppable towards us even as I speak and in a decade or two we’ll all be left like Vinge’s Gu (is it me, or does that sound like a nasty medical condition) lost in a world we don’t comprehend. But I wonder if the majority of us haven’t already “internalised the interface” (or at least the fundamental parts of it) to the point that the machines are going to have to work like we want, not vice versa.

I’ve always thought that Steven Pinker pretty much nailed it when he said in an essay in Prospect in 2000: “The future, I suggest, will not be unrecognisably exotic, because across all the dizzying changes which shaped the present and will shape the future, one element remains constant: human nature… We can also predict that our mind will shape, rather than be reshaped by, the information technology of the future. Why have computers recently infiltrated our lives? Because they have been painstakingly crafted to mesh better with the primitive workings of our minds.”

A bit like space travel, cyberspace is going to turn out to be a bit humdrum, a bit unspectacular, a bit “what’s the big deal” – it will have to be, because that’s the only way it’ll be accepted, because that’s the only way “the primitive workings of our mind” will be able to internalise it. That’s why Gibson is right – we’re already living in cyberspace – and Vinge’s vision of generations left-behind because of a communications revolutions does not ring true like it once did.

We’ve already discounted the revolution. Now we just want to be let play with the toys.