Week 11: Cyberpunk and Steampunk
Discuss the types of reality rendered in the works you read and watched for this week's assignment. Describe the effects of these reality on the narrative and the implications for the presumed reader.
This week I read the short story Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. The story revolves around Parker, a man whose relationship recently ended with a woman named Angela. He copes by using sense recordings called ASP in order to sleep at night. He lives in a dystopian America, where major cities in the country have fallen into ruin. He replays Angela's "tape" of her sensory perceptions, which allows him to experience and see things that Angela did, and experiences part of her trip to Greece. Through this story the most obvious reality that has been rendered is the ASP. I imagined the ASP experience of viewing other people's sensory perceptions to be like the Pensieve from Harry Potter, where people can store their memories and have others watch them. This ASP affects Parker in the narrative because it allows him to wallow in the past, as he is missing Angela. Instead of dealing with the present and the break up, he keeps reliving her memories and her feelings instead of living and dealing with the reality of his life. Throughout the short story, we have a sense that Parker doesn’t really care for much, he only seeks out immediate gratification through the ASP as his outside world is grim. I believe the reader is supposed to understand the underlying meaning of this story, as we are reminded that our past is our past, and wallowing in it and indulging in it will prevent us from moving forward.
This week I read the short story Fragments of a Hologram Rose by William Gibson. The story revolves around Parker, a man whose relationship recently ended with a woman named Angela. He copes by using sense recordings called ASP in order to sleep at night. He lives in a dystopian America, where major cities in the country have fallen into ruin. He replays Angela's "tape" of her sensory perceptions, which allows him to experience and see things that Angela did, and experiences part of her trip to Greece. Through this story the most obvious reality that has been rendered is the ASP. I imagined the ASP experience of viewing other people's sensory perceptions to be like the Pensieve from Harry Potter, where people can store their memories and have others watch them. This ASP affects Parker in the narrative because it allows him to wallow in the past, as he is missing Angela. Instead of dealing with the present and the break up, he keeps reliving her memories and her feelings instead of living and dealing with the reality of his life. Throughout the short story, we have a sense that Parker doesn’t really care for much, he only seeks out immediate gratification through the ASP as his outside world is grim. I believe the reader is supposed to understand the underlying meaning of this story, as we are reminded that our past is our past, and wallowing in it and indulging in it will prevent us from moving forward.
I can't remember how it's described in the story, so I wonder how the ASP works. You bring up that it could act like video tapes or the Pensieve like in Harry Potter, which I got at first too. I thought it acted very similarly to a projector and a VHS player because the hologram is on a cassette tape. I know the rose from the hologram can break into thousands of tiny pieces, so it could also act similar to other types of holograms (Joi from Blade Runner 2049 or hologram calls from Star Wars, for example). But Parker's not letting go of the past makes sense, and that message fits this theme well. Steampunk seems to like to be pessimistic, which is an interesting take on the normal storytelling formula.
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