Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
I am off to Washington, DC this weekend for the annual meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA). I suspect many readers of this blog will be at the AAEA meeting. If you see me there, please come and say hi.
Once I am back from DC, my wife, our two dogs, and I will spend three days driving from Durham, NC to our new home in Saint Paul, MN. As a consequence, there will no new posts until August 19. See you on the other side!
Q: What’s wrong with cyberpunk?
A: A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
Q: What was that dissident influence? What were you trying to do?
A: I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. I was tired of America-as-the-future, the world as a white monoculture, the protagonist as a good guy from the middle class or above. I wanted there to be more elbow room. I wanted to make room for antiheroes.
I also wanted science fiction to be more naturalistic. There had been a poverty of description in much of it. The technology depicted was so slick and clean that it was practically invisible. What would any given SF favorite look like if we could crank up the resolution? As it was then, much of it was like video games before the invention of fractal dirt. I wanted to see dirt in the corners.
From a fascinating Paris Review interview with William Gibson, author of the hugely influential and award-winning 1985 novel Neuromancer, and the man who coined the term “cyberspace.”
Here is an excellent study guide for Neuromancer. Gibson’s Twitter feed is also one of the most interesting out there.
As with Mexican migrants today, not everyone welcomed [the influx of French Canadians to New England in the early 20th century.] One Massachusetts official called French Canadians “the Chinese of the eastern states” in an 1881 report that described them as “indefatigable workers” who had no interest in assimilating and drove American wages down. …
Besides helping to fuel New England’s manufacturing boom, thousands served in the world wars. Rene Gagnon, whose Quebec-born mother worked at a shoe factory in Manchester, NH, was one of the Marines photographed raising the American flag over Iwo Jima in 1945. The author Jack Kerouac was born of French Canadian parents in Lowell, Mass.
Far from causing the collapse of the republic, these largely unregulated border crossers helped build the United States we know today.
What the French Canadian experience shows is that our current obsession with border security is inconsistent with our history, undermines our economic vitality and is likely to fail.
From an op-ed in the New York Times last week by Stephen R. Kelly.