Second Life Sketches: Let’s Put The Future Behind Us

By Warren Ellis

The following is an independent opinion column, and is not connected with Reuters News. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not endorsed by Reuters.

Twenty-five years ago, William Gibson quietly left a Canadian cinema fifteen minutes into a screening of Blade Runner.

The images spilling across the screen were too close to what he was visualising for the personal take on science fiction he’d been evolving over the last few years. He wanted a science fiction that rang with the grime and swagger of Lou Reed or Patti Smith, something culturally aware and shot through with his own peculiarly wry futurist pessimism. The future Los Angeles on the screen felt too close to the steely, dirty extrapolation of the Sprawl he was seeing in his head. So he left before it could colour his thoughts, and went back to banging out the ideas that would become Neuromancer and the short stories that would introduce the term “cyberspace” to a mainstream audience.

A little less than twenty years ago, I met Steve Roberts, who wrote Max Headroom. “The funny thing is,” he said, “I wrote Max on a manual typewriter. And William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter.” If you look at the old Max Headroom TV shows, you’ll note that all the computer screens are wired into old manual typewriter keyboards.

It must’ve been around 1989. I’d just been engaged by John Brown Publishing in London to write a “cyberpunk” comic. By ‘89, the subgenre in prose was all over bar the shouting. Gibson and Bruce Sterling, the great powerhouses of what had been labelled cyberpunk, were enjoying the decadent phase far too much, heading into their co-writing of the steampunk novel The Difference Engine. Richard Kadrey was already well off into his journey to the heart of darkness, and Paul Di Filippo, Rhode Island’s mad shaman of SF, was developing his personal newwave, the “Ribofunk” stories.

And while I was writing my story of corporate firewalled cyberspaces — on a manual portable typewriter, my only hands-on computer experiences having been entering stock numbers into a green-screen Amstrad or watching the screensavers spin in the John Brown offices — a guy called Neal Stephenson was thinking about cyberspace.

Snow Crash is some fifteen years old, now. It’s exactly the kind of debut work everyone wants to write. It struts with gleeful, impossible courage and dares you to say a word. Central to the novel’s conceit of neuroprogramming and revolutions of the head is its revision of cyberspace into The Metaverse: a place you visit with viewer goggles in the third person, represented by an avatar you style and clothe and move through the virtual world through. Which I imagine sounds familiar.

It’s no coincidence. Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Labs, started from the simple what-if question that seeds all of science fiction: what if we could actually invent this?

Once the rafters were raised, of course, a different question emerged: what do we do with it? To a generation of early adopters raised on Gibson and Stephenson, the answer was obvious. We show where we came from.

And so there’s a region called Gibson, upon which there is a city called Nexus Prime. It’s a cyberpunk set, a city deep and wide and styled as the paleo-future of the 1980s. You start on a high city square, surrounded by the gleaming spires of zaibatsu skyscrapers. Descend, and you’ll find the wrecked streets, the Gothic churches and blood-bucket bars. Under the streets are tunnels, leading to illicit clinics and bombed-out labs.

Gibson co-founder Spider Mandala told me that since its incept date Nexus Prime, one of the oldest builds in Second Life, has become something of an initiation for new users, one of the first places they explore. The Nexus Prime builders gave me an apartment in one of the tall buildings, where I sometimes stand and look down at the square, watching people discover the place for the first time. Occasionally you find combat groups using the deeps of Gibson for firefights. They’ll usually leave you alone, but on weekends it’s worth carrying a gun just in case.

Suffugium is its own work of science fiction. Cyberpunk-inspired but not beholden to any single work, it’s very much its own vision of the ‘80s brand of dystopian future, with a funny, satirical edge to it. Devil’s Moon is a strict recreation of Blade Runner, right down to the flickering video billboards and the drifting ad-blimps promising a new future in the off-world territories.

As Gibson and Sterling wrote The Difference Engine, so too did Stephenson write The Diamond Age, his own take on the antique-styled future subgenre called steampunk. And so, as there is Gibson and Suffugium and Saijo City, so there is Caledon , the state of regions devoted to neo-Victorian style. In addition, a region called Babbage appears to be currently under construction in the same style — I’ve seen Ordinal Malaprop, a gloriously insane designer from Caledon who gave the world the gun that fires bees, working on something there.

These regions are intellectual games and design experiences, but they’re also signposts. They serve as three-dimensional statements of where Second Life came from, and what brought these early users to the world. They are the ground-zero of the imagination, and challenges to the visitor. This is where we start, these places say. What comes next is up to you.