Week 11: Johnny Mnemonic

I didn't have much time this week, so I read a short story instead of a book. Johnny Mnemonic was an interesting little read, and I think it did a pretty good job of covering the aspects of cyberpunk even in its limited span. We have the powerful femme fatale character saving the male protagonist, a nice reversal of roles which is common in cyberpunk. The woman is upgraded with some kind of cybernetic enhancements for fighting, as these types of cyberpunk women often are. I really liked the concepts within this short story, like the veteran dolphin who was hooked on drugs, the moving, pulsating killing floor where the story reaches its final battle, and the way “Johnny Mnemonic” himself was essentially selling his brain for encrypted storage protection. It was the nice blend of grimy underworld and futuristic technology that cyberpunk is often characterized with. The story wrapped up rather abruptly – following the defeat of the hitman, the protagonist quickly summarized how his life was going and the novel ended. While the tidy good ending was perhaps a bit rushed, I didn’t mind skipping along in order to get some kind of satisfying conclusion as a reader. I can kind of see this short story being adapted into a full length movie, with several more inserted fights with the hitman or events with the femme fatale before reaching its conclusion. Even in written form, the author’s descriptions were pretty visually striking. There’s a description of skylight glass breaking and reflecting as it rains down among the protagonist, and I could see clearly how it would be filmed. It’s interesting how the femme fatale characters in cyberpunk are often very sexualized and very robotized. For some reason, we seem to be constantly drawn to the idea of a female android. Siri, Alexa, Sophia, Cortana, the multitudes of developing AI being produced by Google, Facebook, and other companies – at least three quarters of the cyber intelligences I can think of are female. If it’s an AI designed to help, then it’s female. Perhaps it’s a similar desire that guides us to write multitudes of cybernetic women in fiction. Though I’m not sure if this is true, developers seem to like designing female AI because they think it makes them more trustworthy, more human, and more loveable. Maybe we think a female voice is meeker and less threatening, or maybe we have an unfair distrust of male voices. In any case, I find the cyberpunk female a complex topic that sometimes seems to take as many steps forwards as it does backwards.