Pasts-futures

In Gibson 's Neuromancer (1984), the protagonist, Case, exiled from cyberspace , sleeps in 'the cheapest coffins' and roams the streets of Night City, a place that is 'like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism': 'Stop hustling and you sink without a trace.' Isolated and self-destructive, worn down until 'the street itself [has come] to seem an externalisation of some death wish' (13-15), Case is hired to go on a virtual reality quest, 'the Straylight run'. His goal, Villa Straylight, belongs to a family that controls the world's two most powerful artificial intelligences; it is also, however, the highly wrought product of minds that in many ways seem remote from the era of hypertech and cyberspace. '"The Villa Straylight," said a jewelled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly."' Its proliferating structures rise toward 'a solid core of microcircuitry', but are at the same time the emblems of an old family that has grown rich by exploiting others, 'growing inward' into a 'ragged tangle of fears' (242). As Ratz, the Chatsubo bartender, says, 'what grotesque props...castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europe...' (278).

Gibson 's novel, 'the quintessential cyberpunk novel', [i] is a fusion of the noir thriller, science fiction and the Gothic . Its computerised data-matrix, Gothic castle and crazed aristocratic family merge entertainingly with its hard-boiled protagonist living precariously and immorally on the seedy margins of a corrupt world. A debt to Chandler is often suggested, though Case is in fact closer to Kells, the protagonist of Paul Cain 's Fast One , an utterly cynical convicted criminal with a history of rash behaviour and drug addiction. In recent decades, particularly in the eighties and nineties, the label 'noir' has been applied to texts and films that combine elements of the noir thriller with future world and Gothic fantasies. Arguably this development is a return to origins. The hard-boiled tradition so inextricably bound up with noir is in part defined by the gritty realism of its style, its faithful representation of contemporary life and its hard-bitten response to socio-political corruption. In many respects, however, both literary and cinematic noir also have strong affinities with the literature of fantasy and romance , blending realistic representation with non-realistic and expressionist elements that are heightened, distorted, stylised and excessive - the knight of romance in Chandler, the mythic dimensions of Hammett 's Poisonville, the supernatural suggestiveness of Woolrich 's prose [ii] , the monstrous satiric grotesques of Thompson 's psychopath -narrator novels. [iii] Indeed, it is often this pull towards excess which gives noir its unsettling power, its savage intensity and its haunting sense of irreversible fate, and, in novels that centre on a protagonist like Chandler's knight of the mean streets, it is the essentially romantic figure of the tarnished hero who is the 'last man standing' against this mood of fatality .

'One can imagine,' James Naremore says, 'a large video store where examples of [film noir ] would be shelved somewhere between gothic horror and dystopian science fiction : in the center would be Double Indemnity , and at either extreme Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers .' [iv] The family resemblances to be found amongst noir, Gothic and science fiction are rooted in their shared history. The origins of science fiction are often seen to lie in later romance genres such as the Gothic novel. [v] Old terrors are newly imagined, and, in cyberpunk , an old vocabulary (castles, romancers, ghosts, gods, voodoo) is coupled with a vocabulary of AIs (artificial intelligences), cranial jacks, the deck and the matrix. Gibson 's fiction, especially Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), repeatedly moves between technological 'magic' and the supernatural . [vi] The questing cyberpunk hacker is routinely haunted by past evils, by age-old forms of exploitation, superstitious horrors and decadent aristocratic cruelty. The cyberpunk text is as likely to be analysed in a critical study called Gothic as it is in one called Cyberia, [vii] and the same is true for such recent films as Terminator , Alien and Blade Runner . It is not only recent texts, of course, that can be located and discussed within both genres: Frankenstein (1818) can be credited with creating one of the most powerful and enduring Gothic 'terror-symbols' but is also widely accepted as 'the first real science fiction novel'; Jekyll and Hyde (1886) occupies a central place in the Gothic tradition and is at the same time one of the most important early examples of 'science fantasy '. [viii]

The noir thriller is very often, like both Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde , a fantasy of duality, and Jekyll and Hyde, in particular, is a form of doppelganger narrative rewritten countless times in the literary noir of the twentieth century. An apparently respectable protagonist's dark side surfaces, cannot be controlled, commits murder and brings ruin and destruction. Other elements in Jekyll and Hyde - sinister locations, darkness and decay, the fragmentary narrative, the suggestions of psychological monstrosity and regression to barbarity - are also familiar ingredients of the noir thriller. What sets Stevenson's novel apart from traditional noir, of course, is the admixture of fantasy. In recent decades, however, the stylistic and iconic aspects of non-fantastic literary noir (the tough style, the hard-boiled investigator , the gangster and the small-time crook, the femme fatale ) have been reunited with literary forms in which there is a higher level of permissible fantasy, whether that fantasy is given a plausible scientific basis or involves blurring the distinctions between natural and supernatural . This kind of cross-breeding is to be seen in cyberpunk from Gibson 's Neuromancer trilogy in the eighties to such recent novels as K. W. Jeter ' s Noir (1998), as well as in other near-future narratives, such as the Ballard and Womack novels analysed at the end of this chapter. It is also seen in modern Gothic novels like those of Hjorstberg , Ackroyd and O'Connell .

If we think in terms of the defining features of literary noir, what we see in 'fantastic noir' is the intensification of two centrally important noir themes, the destabilising of identity and the inescapable presence of the past. As the comparison with Jekyll and Hyde suggests, divided identity is one of the shared preoccupations of the noir thriller and the Gothic novel. It is also frequently one of the underlying themes in the strand of science fiction which explores the interrelationship between the human and the technological . In non-fantastic noir, alienation from self can be evident in the fragmented narrative of a psychotic mind and in the confused or fearful responses of characters who encounter symptoms of this psychosis. In Gothic noir self-division can be literalised. So, for example, in Hjorstberg 's Falling Angel (1978), Johnny Faithful has actually devoured the heart of Harry Angel. In Ackroyd 's Hawksmoor (1985), the twentieth-century detective figure is haunted by his ghostly double, a late seventeenth- early eighteenth-century murderer .

Science fiction, too, has its dark doubles from Frankenstein on, but the distinctive science fictional means of destabilising our sense of unified character and human identity is by combining man with machine, or by challenging our perception of a human-mechanical divide. Man-machine symbiosis or brain-computer interfaces, the creation of artificial intelligences and biological engineering all disrupt our sense of the unity and integrity of individual bodies and minds. Bruce Sterling , for example in Schismatrix (1985), populates his future world with divergent species, the 'Mechs', enhanced by such things as brain-computer interfaces, and the 'Shapers', produced by the methods of bio-engineering. In Rudy Rucker 's Software (1982), giant artificial intelligences, 'boppers', extract the protagonist's 'software' (the information in his brain) and put it into a robot body. The sources of anxiety in fantasies of this kind are most often to do with external control (socio-political fatality ) rather than inescapable inner demons (psychological fatality). The boundaries between inner and outer worlds are breached, producing fragmentation and the dissolution of a coherent self and raising radical questions about the nature of being (what is the essence of the human?). The intersection with the noir thriller, however, is more evident in the way this metamorphosis into the 'posthuman' foregrounds the issue of agency , bringing protagonists to wonder, not without cause, whether they retain free will and individual autonomy. For Gibson 's Case, when he is trapped in the matrix by Neuromancer , the question is whether he has simply become a second-order electronic construct manipulated as an image by more powerful entities. Cobb Anderson , in Rucker's Software, asks himself what built-in programmes are now a part of him: 'Were the boppers in a position to control him on a real-time basis? Would he notice the difference?' (120).

This apprehension about loss of control is closely analogous to the noir sense of fatality found in those novels which associate fate with the machinations of determinedly corrupt, possibly conspiratorial political and economic powers. A familiar figure in traditional noir is the man who does not realise that his actions are being externally controlled. In Hammett 's Glass Key , for example, Ned Beaumont is unwittingly used by Paul Madvig, who is in turn under the sway of Senator Henry and his daughter, to whom Paul is a lower form of life, 'fair game for any kind of treatment' (780). The manipulating forces in the world of cyberpunk are generally less modest in their ambitions than the local if representative power brokers of traditional noir. Cyberspace transcends all local and national boundaries, and paranoia is on a correspondingly large scale, involving gigantic multinationals and omniscient intelligence organisations. This future-world projection, however, is not perceived as a fundamental departure from the more local forms of political and socio-economic control. Rather, it is the continuation of an old struggle by other means. Cyberpunk fiction moves away from the speculative dominant of 1960s science fiction , with its dramatic temporal and spatial dislocations, and turns instead to extrapolative world-building. [ix] Its 'near-future' narratives imply inextricable connections between the past (our present) and a future in which both the streets and cyberspace replicate and satirically distort the structures and corruptions of contemporary corporate capitalism .

This diminution of temporal distance is also a characteristic of the Gothic -noir narratives of Hjorstberg , Ackroyd and O'Connell . One of the distinguishing features of the Gothic is a 'fearful sense of inheritance in time', combining with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space to produce 'an impression of sickening descent into disintegration'. [x] The infernal cities of these writers are New York, London and the imaginary New England factory town of Quinsigasmond. They are all repositories of shadowy, ancient forces, but these dark powers are symbolically linked to the mechanisms, the buildings and the inescapable boundaries of the modern city . In the almost-present futures of Ballard and Womack , the past is equally determinate, leaving the characters of the narrative with buried fears, hatreds and desires, begetters of a future that is in essence a reversion to the past - an encounter with the Conrad ian 'heart of darkness' that no noir protagonist ever manages to leave wholly behind.

A Hell of a City

The themes of self-division and the inescapable past dominate William Hjorstberg 's Falling Angel , which was filmed by Alan Parker as Angel Heart in 1987. The Faustian story of a satanic pact is grafted on to what at first appears to be a hard-boiled detective story, beginning with a phone call to the Crossroads Detective Agency, 'satisfaction guaranteed' at reasonable rates. It is possible to see the surprises of the narrative as the result of a generic switch from crime fiction to the Gothic novel. In a sense, however, the Gothic is heavily present from the opening sentence: 'It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday's snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse' (1). Hjorstberg's skill lies in using throughout the language of superstition, curses, diabolic forces and evil incarnate to intensify and give horrifying substance to a noir narrative that centres on the investigation of dark secrets. It is a potent combination because we know that at bottom these narratives are the same. The hunter is indistinguishable from the hunted, and damnation is never negotiable.

'Harry Angel the famous shaman' (45) falls into a city in which there seems to be no way to evade the omnipresent Louis Cyphre. Ranging the city from its heights to its depths, Angel sees diabolical happenings at every level, though the real movement of the narrative is towards a recognition that evil is inescapable because it belongs to Harry's inner as well as his outer world. This is not just a matter of 'another bunch of crooks' in both high and demonic places (253). Harry's deficient self-knowledge is, of course, traditionally noir. Many a noir protagonist feels himself, like the amnesiac protagonist of John D. MacDonald 's Man-Trap , to be plunging through a long tunnel in which lights whip by 'illuminating fragments I could not understand' (152). When he finally recognises his true self he sees how deeply implicated he is and understands his fate. Like Angel, the noir investigator often finds that he has been somewhat careless in his choice of employer and fails to grasp why people keep dying around him. The noir amnesiac may all too effectively repress the memories that surface to give him nightmares - in Angel's case, of pursuer and pursued changing places and an evil twin embracing him with a savage kiss. What Angel adds to the noir thriller's scepticism about the possibility of goodness and innocence is a literalisation of devouring ambition ('Poor old Harry Angel...I killed him and ate his heart' ) and of the hidden self, Johnny Favourite, who has already earned damnation. The detective narrative's 'de-ciphering' has ironically revealed only a different sort of cipher, the true inner emptiness of Johnny Favourite. 'Where do you search for a guy who was never there to begin with?' (51). And alongside the satirically edged representation of the hollowness of the ambitious man is the final stress on the inevitability of death itself, the cipher as the 'zero' point that Louis Cyphre says is '"a portal through which every man must eventually pass"' (212).

Like Hjorstberg 's novel, Peter Ackroyd 's Hawksmoor subverts the rational confidence of classic Holmesian detection by imagining a connection that is only supernaturally explicable between pursuer and pursued, detective and murderer . However, where Hjorstberg provides a neatly dark resolution (the terrible truth of self-recognition), Ackroyd is more concerned with retaining a sense of ultimate, irresolvable mysteries, and thus moves towards a conclusion that is much more ambiguous than Johnny Favourite's incontrovertible failure to cheat the devil of his due. In Ackroyd's novel, this carefully preserved ambiguity serves the mainstream ambitiousness of metaphysical themes that are not fused with the kind of satirical observation to be found in Falling Angel . What Ackroyd presents in Hawksmoor are two mysteriously connected series of murders separated, in historical time, by about two hundred and fifty years, the modern murders coinciding in almost every detail with the sacrificial murders long ago committed or 'willed' by Nicholas Dyer, who has been given the approximate historical niche of the architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor. The twentieth-century investigator has only baffling, haunting glimpses of the past that has created his present. His name, Nicholas Hawksmoor, suggests something of the dšppelganger relationship between investigator and murderer: as characters move through the novel, they repeatedly encounter their own inexplicable union with other human beings and experience the loss or dissolution of their own identities. The whole novel is structured in such a way that we as readers experience the viewpoints of several different characters - the minds of the murderer, the victims and the detective. The main murderer in Hawksmoor has been given a name which suggests a victim (a 'dyer') rather than a murderer; he begins life during the years of Plague and Fire as an orphaned child, outcast , terrified, drawn in amongst others who live on the margins of society. The detective is denied his traditional role of explaining a comprehensible crime and acchieving neat closure. Ackroyd plays with the idea of the detective story that as a form moves towards an end which is really a discovery of the beginning (that is, of the origin of the crime), driving home the point that as metaphysical questions our speculations about origins and ends are unending and 'unbeginning', leading us back into an infinite regress of questions about where we came from and towards the equally unresolvable question of where we are going. We would like to think of ourselves as progressing, but instead only repeat the patterns of past ages. The crimes in Hawksmoor are part of a cycle, not specific acts pertaining to and resolvable at a particular time, but part of an endless repetition, and the investigator is himself constituted by the past, not detached from it.

Hawksmoor uses what seem to be supernatural events to undermine confidence that the evidence will be susceptible to empirical enquiry. Ackroyd 's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) develops a similar theme, the power of the irrational within the human mind, by creating a narrative in which superstition, prejudice and terror lead people to identify the Gothic monster, the golem, as the perpetrator of horrific crimes, but in which the actual source is something equally dark, mysterious and unknowable within the mind of a murderess (who is herself a victim ). As in Hawksmoor, there is a 'gothic' rapport between characters and the places they inhabit, with London providing a topography of dark spaces and fear-laden enclosures. Both books echo De Quincey 's 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', with its account of the Ratcliffe Highway slaughter. [xi] In Dan Leno, these murders are central to a plot which involves both performance and repetition of past crimes - the 'fine art' of re-enacting 'the immortal Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812...silently dispatched into eternity by an artist whose exploits will be preserved for ever in the pages of Thomas De Quincey' (25).

Like O'Connell 's novels, Dan Leno is dominated by the themes of performance and spectatorship which are central to many contemporary noir thrillers. The Gothic , associated as it is with excess, the violation of taboos and the expression of violent emotion, lends itself to an exploration of the acting out and witnessing of transgressive performances in which players and spectators alike exceed the boundaries of the permissible. What Ackroyd builds on in Dan Leno is the association between Gothic heightening and our equivocal enjoyment, as audience, of the gruesome spectacle of murder. Like the post-seventies noir thriller generally, this is written to appeal to our appetite for sensational crime and then to make us reflect on the nature of that appetite, on our uncertainty about the relationship of fantasy to act and on violence which is 'inseparable from its reproduction as spectacle'. [xii] Dan Leno is closer than Hawksmoor to the structure of the generic thriller. Much of the fragmented and deceptive narrative is seen through the eyes of a murderer whose identity we do not know until the very end. The combination of concealment and spectacle leads us to focus on the tension between secret deeds and a compulsion to display, to assert oneself publicly through dramatically violent acts.

The final revelation of the murderer 's identity adds to Dan Leno a preoccupation that is more commonly present in the work of contemporary female crime writers. That is, Ackroyd emphasises the need felt by a woman both to author her own story and to be able to act and perform as a man can. For Elizabeth Cree, who is on stage with Dan Leno, the theatre offers the means of transforming herself from a repressed and powerless girl: 'My old self was dead and the new Lizzie...had been born at last' (106). Lizzie feels that she attains the status of the Romantic male outlaw hero made famous by De Quincey , 'an outcast who enjoys a secret power...transformed into an avenger whose bright yellow hair and chalk-white countenance afforded him the significance of some primeval deity' (37). Although her genius for performance , her imaginative and mimetic powers, are perverted into the 'fine art' of murder, she is nevertheless remarkable for her inventiveness. She escapes herself by triumphantly taking on other roles, cross-dressing, developing a male 'slanguage' and writing an incriminating diary for her husband John Cree, on his 'tyro' aspirations to the artistry of the Ratcliffe Highway murders: 'I must admit that I applauded my own work' (24-30; 62).

The popular invention of the Limehouse Golem, widely supposed to be the perpetrator of Lizzie's crimes, raises other questions about the way the human imagination works. Rather than structuring the novel around the supernatural connections established in Hawksmoor , Ackroyd uses Dan Leno to explore people's need for supernatural explanations. The Golem is a Gothic conceptualising of the persistence of evil, 'as if some primeval force had erupted in Limehouse...Some dark spirit' for which London itself is responsible (83; 162). By incorporating George Gissing and Babbage's Analytical Engine in his narrative, Ackroyd suggests, as he does in Hawksmoor, that basic fears and needs will inevitably connect the human future with the past. Technology will not eradicate evil and indeed, ironically , will itself be blamed for ancient forces within man himself. The golem, like the computer, invokes 'the horror of an artificial life and a form without spirit', an 'automaton' (88; 269).

In exploring the need for explanatory myths, Ackroyd captures the atmosphere of avid bloodthirstiness and voyeurism that prevails as the public gossip about the murders. He is not, however, equally concerned with analysing the nature of such spectatorship or the implications of being the audience of violence . Jack O'Connell , on the other hand, responding in an oblique fashion to a society in which there is growing pressure for censorship, is much more intent on understanding the act of viewing transgressive behaviour than he is with the performance of the acts themselves. Novels like The Skin Palace (1996) and Word Made Flesh (1999) are an idiosyncratic mixture of thriller plots, Gothic atmosphere and the science fiction topos of the alternative or parallel world. Within Quinsigamond many of the more disturbing aspects of twentieth-century life are replicated in heightened, grotesque, often surreal ways and reflected in the fun-house mirror of satire . The invention of Quinsigamond removes recent history to a fantasy world. O'Connell is also, however, the most directly satirical of all the writers discussed in this chapter and he brings his novels very close to the climate of contemporary debate about the representation of sex and violence (pornography is a central issue in The Skin Palace, violence in Word Made Flesh). The Gothic scene-setting functions to make strange a very familiar set of conflicting views on the justification of such representation and on 'the Preservation of Dangerous Art' (286). Quinsigamond itself is like a stage. The streets, O'Connell says, 'seem to exist to be pure spectacle '. Sex and violence alike are filmed and fictionalised by the inhabitants, the images stored in subway tunnels and labyrinthine underground libraries and killed for by powerful individuals.

The Skin Palace centres on the clash between different myths of America. It is a land of criminal opportunity on the one hand, a land of free artistic expression on the other. Jakob Kinsky, the son of a powerful gangster , nurses his ambition to become a director of 'hyperreal' films noirs : '"Give me some crime, cynicism, claustrophobia...City grime. As much shadow as you can manage..."' (196-7). The novel is dominated by images of screens - from drive-in cinema screens and gigantic projections of multiple images to the television next to the couch. Characters define themselves in relation to the roles of creator, actor or spectator. Both of the main characters (Jakob and an aspiring photographer, Sylvia Krafft) are obsessed by the cinematic image, and, through their experiences, O'Connell poses the questions of risks and benefits. O'Connell suggests the excessiveness of the pornographic and voyeuristic compulsion, especially in his descriptions of Herzog's Erotic Palace, which is like a 'textbook example' authored by 'a visionary egomaniac living on hallucinogens and gothic novels...theatrical to the point of self-parody...' (67-8). Nevertheless he insists on the relationship between this compulsion and an appetite for understanding which is denied only by the dense (Sylvia's unsatisfactory mate Perry ), the criminal (the gangster Kinsky) or the mindlessly censorious crusader (the Women's American Resistance and Families United for Decency).

The most recent of the Quinsigamond novels, Word Made Flesh , is another extended meditation on the themes of voyeurism , violence and bearing witness. Here, it is violence rather than eroticism that is mainly at issue. The novel confronts readers with the question of what it means to be spectators of violent acts, and how you differentiate voyeurism from 'witnessing' in a fully human and responsible way. The first horrifying spectacle , a man being flayed alive, draws us in as audience, buttonholed by the conspiratorial, queasy patter of a narrator who only wishes that we could hold the blades ourselves; he sees us flinch, but we don't close our eyes, 'and that will make all the difference'; he encourages us to view the victim 'as more object than person. This has worked for others in the past' (11-17). The narrative contains both spectators and players, and the most pressing issue is whether you can try to understand the world of the players without yourself being corrupted, and without anaesthetising your sensibilities.

As in The Skin Palace , O'Connell 's narrative sustains the idea that image and story have transforming power. The object on which the plot turns is a book that contains the story written by a teen-age girl who has made 'a weapon of her epiphany' after witnessing the July Sweep, a pogrom in which her whole world 'was summarily destroyed and, literally, shredded into pulp' (179f). The power of her words in evoking a horrifying spectacle can be read as a demonstration of the sinister fascination of violence : the man responsible for the July Sweep wants to possess the book because in it he finds his deeds elevated to a legend. But the book is also a testament, a proof that words can transmute events into something that could convey the meaning of the 'Erasure' across 'space and time and culture' (310). Word Made Flesh , like The Maltese Falcon or Gibson 's Virtual Light , is a quest narrative, but the object sought is more important the falcon (an empty signifier of commodity fetishism) or the glasses of Virtual Light (offering a template of a future world that corrupt commercial forces aim to create). The fabulous manuscript of O'Connell's novel embodies the power of fiction itself to represent the past and shape the future.

The mean streets of the Metaverse

As the aspiring noir director in O'Connell 's Skin Palace scouts for locations 'that agree with the images already screened in the skull-camera', he points an actual camera at scenes very like those in Ridley Scott 's Blade Runner (1982 - see Fig. 9), looking down on Gompers Station, with its 'indiscriminate tangles' of 'recombinant junk' (367). For O'Connell this sort of scene signifies a European past of pogroms and dictators, the violence of which continues to haunt the New World. In Blade Runner the urban decay and detritus of the late twentieth century, dominating the look of the film's cityscape, are a visual reminder of the determining force of present corruptions (the evolving present-as-past) in a dystopian future world. Although neither Blade Runner nor the novel on which it was based - Philip K. Dick 's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) - open into a parallel world of cyberspace , Scott's visual reminders of the mean streets of the classic noir cycle have become an identifying feature of the aesthetic of cyberpunk . The inner city spaces of Blade Runner merge past and future. Images of urban alienation and corporate power structures in a sleazy, threatening metropolis are combined with modern 'add-ons'. In the making of the film, a 1920s set used for gangster films and films noirs was 'retrofitted' with 'a variety of mechanical stuff'. Ducts, rewirings, video monitors; matte-paintings were used to incorporate looming towers, so that the city resembled 'a vast, boundless refinery'. The remorseless pressures of consumerism were embodied in flying billboards and loudspeakers blaring commercials. [xiii]

In Philip K. Dick 's novel, dust and 'kipple' (junk) rather than vertiginous darkness characterise the future-world cityscape, suggesting ghost towns more than films noirs . But the sense of estrangement and dislocation, of loss of bearings, is equally strong. This is reinforced in the novel by the creation of a parallel world (not dissimilar to cyberspace in its disorienting effects), when Deckard is taken by a patrolman to a complicated modern building that he has never seen before. Accused of being an android himself and told that he comes from a phantom police department. In fact, he has been arrested by an android-dominated police department which inhabits a 'closed loop' cut off from the rest of San Francisco - an alter-world interlude that, like cyberspace, acts to bring different levels of reality together in disquieting ways and to loosen the protagonist's belief in his ability to distinguish real worlds from false ones. Deckard's crisis of confidence deepens when Phil Resch, whom he associates with android 'inhumanity', passes the Voigt-Kampff test: '"Do you have your ideology formed,"' Resch asks, '"that would explain me as part of the human race ?"' (108). This is at bottom a very traditional moral question, and one that has repeatedly been raised in the noir thriller: that is, at what point does one cross the line that separates humanity from inhumanity? Deckard admits to himself at the end, having killed the androids, that what he has done has 'become alien to me' (172).

As cyberpunk develops the ideas of manufactured or augmented selves and invasive technology, the more pessimistic implications are readily apparent. The protagonist, by coming into a closer relationship with the non-human, sacrifices a coherent sense of self, of human values and confident agency ; or, in other plot patterns, humans themselves are programmable and thus susceptible to the control of external powers. It is not necessarily characteristic of cyberpunk, however, to give expression to such doubts. Writers like Mark Laidlaw and Rudy Rucker , for example, celebrate the competence of the surfers and hackers who adventure through cyberspace , like Rucker's Jerzy Rugby, who walks away from The Hackers and the Ants (1994) as 'a free man with a dynamite story' (305). Many recent films that share something of the 'future noir ' look of Blade Runner are similarly up-beat, in the sense that individual action defeats those who abuse technological powers. So, for example, in Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven , 1990), which is also based on a Philip K. Dick story ('We Can Remember It for You Wholesale'), there are many noirish features, not just visually but in the theme of split identity and 'a really sophisticated mind-fuck'. In noir, however, the crucial discovery that Quaid is the 'bad' Hauser would be of decisive importance, and Quaid would exist only, as Cohaagen says, as 'just a stupid dream'. In fact, however, by the exertion of the sheer physical strength generally associated with Schwarzenegger action-hero roles, the protagonist is able to break away to become Quaid. The noir possibility hovers behind the 'open' end ('Kiss me before we wake up'), but it is the kiss and the 'dream' Quaid that carry conviction, and the end of the film functions to confirm the romantic possibility of action and of a clean break with an old, bad self. This pressure towards achieving mastery, whether by traditional heroic resolve (analogous to the masculine competence of action-oriented hard-boiled fiction) or by technological virtuosity, is strongly present in much cyberpunk, modifying the 'future noir' mood, bringing it closer to 'cyberian' optimism than to dystopian pessimism . [xiv]

The filming of Blade Runner itself might be taken to demonstrate the tension within future noir between optimistic and pessimistic forms of closure. Dogged as it was by production and post-production disagreements, Blade Runner emerged in its well-known variant forms. The version that was first screened in 1982, though characterised neither by technophilia nor by the romantic sweep of, say, the Star Wars trilogy, did move towards reasonably positive closure, with the voice over and the last scene, moving out of the grimy city towards togetherness without a termination date, bringing the film nearer to the up-beat ending of Total Recall . The Director's Cut, on the other hand, released in 1992, approaches the ambivalence of the more disturbing noir visions, not only resisting romantic closure but implying that Deckard himself may, after all, be a replicant. To open the film to the possibility of such a reading is to suggest comparison with those bleakly ironic noir narratives in which a protagonist finds that he is hunting himself or (here) his own kind. Although Dick 's Electric Sheep does not reinforce its moral ambiguities with this kind of doubling, some of his other fiction shares this destabilising ambiguity, particularly A Scanner Darkly (1977). This is a novel that develops in an uncompromising way a narrative pattern that implies the existence of a dark, unrecognised inner self. The consequent disabling of the individual's capacity for independent action creates a closed loop from which there is no escape.

One of Dick 's most compelling near-future novels, A Scanner Darkly is also the most despairingly personal. His painful experience of drug abuse in the sixties becomes the basis for a science fiction world in which other forms of control combine with addiction to produce a nightmare of noir entrapment. In his 'Author's Note' at the end, Dick argues that he is representing nemesis rather than fate, since any potential addict has the power to choose, but the punishment is conceived in terms of deterministic cause and effect: that is, once addiction has taken place, fatality takes over. Within the narrative choice is only really present in a Flitcraft-like episode in which Dick's protagonist, Bob Arctor, suffers a blow to the head that jars him into a rejection of bourgeois stability and tedium. Ironically, like many protagonists in the traditional noir thriller, Arctor finds not freedom but a worse-than-bourgeois entrapment. Within the context of a high-surveillance science fiction world, forms of entrapment are, of course, sufficiently thoroughgoing to make ordinary paranoia pale into insignificance. Like Blade Runner , A Scanner Darkly creates a hunter character reminiscent of the private eye , but here with a much stronger sense that he is a victim . He 'didn't volunteer' and 'never did know' (234). Those in control of the splitting of personality are entirely willing to sacrifice Arctor to get the information they need about the illegal growing of the plants that produce Substance D, 'the flower of the future', the substance that affects users by bringing 'death of the spirit, the identity ' (250-1; 233). A Scanner Darkly is the narrative of an assault on the protagonist's sense of self, with name changes (he is Bob and Fred and Bruce), his transformation by a hi-tech scramble suit into a 'blur', his splitting into hunter and hunted (when Fred is assigned the job of observing Bob Arctor), and his final loss of all grasp of who he is. Arctor is 'repeating doomed patterns', going through the same thing over and over like 'a closed loop of tape' (62-3). There is a stage in the narrative at which Arctor, giving a speech, deviates from his script, and he seems at this point capable both of ironising his role as 'the vague blur' and of a coherent critique of life in Southern California - a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed, as if 'the automatic factory' cranks out indistinguishable objects (31-2). This lucidity, however, is short-lived. The anxiety underlying Blade Runner is the humanistic fear of dehumanisation through violence . In A Scanner Darkly, the anxiety is centred on becoming another sort of replicant, simply a manufactured object incapable of breaking away from the master script of his society - 'Actor, Arctor...Bob the Actor who is being hunted...' (125).

The cyberpunk writers influenced by Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick are seldom so enclosed within doomed patterns, even when the protagonist (as in Jeter 's Noir) is named 'McNihil'. The technology which can close the circle of fatality - mechanisms of total control and omniscient surveillance - can also be pressed into the service of the action hero, and in so far as it envisages effective action cyberpunk moves closer to the traditions of male romance . Given its strong links with tough guy fiction, traditional noir has, of course, often crossed over into action heroics, retaining a distinctly noir character only if the action hero is ultimately unsuccessful or if, in victory, he is thoroughly tainted by the world of violence and corruption with which he is involved (Paul Cain 's Gerry Kells rather than Daly 's Race Williams ; Hammett 's Continental Op rather than Chandler 's Marlowe ). However noir the future world he traverses, the cyberpunk 'cowboy' tends to have something in common with the two-fisted (anti-)hero. High technology, like the Colt .45, can serve any ends, whether repressive or rebellious. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling are regarded as amongst the more pessimistic of cyberpunk writers. Their 'doomed vision' is characterised as a 'dark and hopeless' refusal to see 'technology as inherently liberating'; they harbour a belief in human programmability and create protagonists who allow themselves to be exploited by higher powers. [xv] Even Gibson's Case, however, shows himself capable of appropriating effective technologies and stepping outside of the closed loop of the addict's dependency, the consumer 's passivity or the subservience of the player who is confined to one game board.

At the end of A Scanner Darkly , the corpse-like protagonist can no longer act. He can 'react' (233), but his reflex programmed reaction in secreting one of the 'flowers of the future' leaves us with only a glimmer of hope in the final paragraph. Gibson 's anti-heroes, on the other hand, are not totally in the power of the anachronistic rich or of the interdimensional corporations, or even of the giant artificial intelligences. They are tinged with the rebellious glamour of Burroughs wild boys, '...glider boys with bows and laser guns, roller-skate boys,...slingshot boys, knife throwers,...bare-hand fighters, shaman boys who ride the wind...' (The Wild Boys , 147). Case, at the end of Neuromancer , fuelled by suicidal impulse and self-loathing, has no clear knowledge of what he is trying to achieve and no way of guessing the outcome. He is, however, capable of choice: '"Give us the fucking code...If you don't, what'll change?"' (307). Exhilarating action is still a possibility, as it often is in the hard-boiled strand of the noir thriller, even if the change effected in Neuromancer is left open to question and the 'posthumanist' bias of cyberpunk is evident in the fact that the main result of Case's endeavours takes place on a wholly non-human level, with Wintermute having 'meshed somehow' with Neuromancer, thus freeing itself to talk to its own kind. In Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive , however, there are elements of a more traditionally humanistic closure, with nature playing a redemptive role (Turner and the squirrel wood) and some positive human, or at least modified human, connections. Gibson's move away from the 'posthuman' perspectives of Neuromancer can also be seen in Virtual Light (1993), in which the central contrast is between an attempt to achieve a closed, coercive system and the opposing force of 'play' and unpredictable desire.

Michael Hutchinson, speaking of the dependence of authoritarian systems on citizens who can be counted on to act predictably, quotes George Bush's dictum, 'The only enemy we have is unpredictability.' [xvi] It is precisely this unpredictability in the exploitation of high tech means that typifies the key players in Virtual Light . The computer becomes less of a character in its own right and more an instrument which can be used either to oppress ('fate' in the hands of the megacorps) or to liberate, the means to realise desire. One of Gibson 's most prominent themes here is an immobilising, paranoid sense of fatality . The presence of the Death Star, an all-seeing techno-equivalent to fate, and the inter-connected mega-corporation leave no question about the sheer size of what the individual is up against: '"You don't know shit about shit...It's just too big for someone like you to understand"' (229). But there is also the possibility of tricking fate. Help comes from the Republic of Desire, an organisation (or disorganisation) demonstrating that the inter-connectedness of computers may facilitate mega-corporational control, but that it can also be empowering, preserving space for anarchic desires. The plot turns on the revelation of the fact that the corporate powers intend to 'do' San Francisco 'like they're doing Tokyo' (270), with the Republic of Desire aiding the protagonist, Rydell, because they hate the idea of a rebuilt San Francisco and a controlled, designed future. The existing San Francisco, full of hidden depths, forbidden zones and hard-to-grasp interactions, stands for the mystery, randomness and unknowability that act as some kind of guarantee of old-fashioned human warmth and connection. The bridge, central to this world, is an emblem of the carnivalised city . Gibson's hard-boiled protagonist is appropriately disorderly and unpredictable. Rydell fits the noir pattern of the wandering adventurer, questing across boundaries in pursuit of the woman carrying a fabulous object (the virtual light glasses, containing the plans for the new San Francisco) that signifies greed and the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. Gibson has a nicely ironic way of achieving closure, with Rydell in such deep trouble that he is ideally suited to a programme called Cops in Trouble ('in deep, spectacular, and...clearly heroic shit' [290]). But the emphasis on 'heroic' is real as well as comically incongruous. The values that Rydell has helped to preserve are as positive as those defended by Marlowe , but, as in much other contemporary noir, his strength is less a matter lonely integrity in mean streets than of energy sustained by spontaneous communal street life.

A 'Gibson for the 1990s' [xvii] , Neal Stephenson , in Snow Crash (1992), invented the word 'Metaverse', and, like Gibson, he uses poliferating realities to satirise consumerism and the addiction to spectacle as well as to celebrate possibilities for the anarchic expression of desire. The 'heroic shit' model of the player -narrative is immediately established in Snow Crash by the naming of the central figure: Hiro Protagonist. In a contemporary version of the noir ethic, Hiro uses the weapons of corruption against the corrupt - advertising (when he defeats the scrolls), programming, violence . He shares with the hard-boiled detective an alienated, counter-culture persona, being someone who 'needs to work harder on his co-operation skills' (3). He is half-black and half-Asian and lacks a firm class orientation; intelligent and tough, a resourceful outsider , he is his own man, willing and able to kill if necessary. As his name suggests, however, he is less developed, less vulnerable and less beaten down than the true noir protagonist. When we learn of his spectacular competence as the last of the freelance hackers and the greatest swordfighter, we begin to suspect him of having more of an action-hero lineage. He is a resourceful player who is ultimately successful, defeating with a hacker's ingenuity a plot for world domination.

'Snow crash' is a drug/computer virus premised on the mind/machine interface: '"Does it fuck up your brain?...Or your computer?" "Both. Neither. What's the difference?"' (41). Like other standard cyberpunk dangers, it evokes such dystopian fears as totalitarian control, loss of identity and loss of personal autonomy. The virus is metaphorically linked with the franchise. That is, what thrives in one place will thrive in another, and both are associated with an ethos of 'no surprises', comforting uniformity and an end to adventure . As in Virtual Light , the central theme hinges on the traditional humanistic opposition between individual randomness and the metaphysical and ideological certainties of religion and politics ; also as in Virtual Light, without deploying any techniques that are strikingly Gothic , the narrative suggests the interpenetration of past and future, confronting Hiro Protagonist with a threat that is at once very ancient and very up-to-the-minute. Snow crash produces a culture-wide version of the kind of assault on individual identity that, in traditional noir, destabilises an effective individual sense of self. An underlying myth of language formation carries the argument that the tendency of languages to diverge (post-'Infocalypse') acts as a kind of guarantee of independence, conferring immunity to 'viral infections' that bypass 'higher language functions' and tie into 'the deep structures', thus enabling 'viral ideas', from Nazism to 'crackpot religions', to establish themselves (369-76). The generally sympathetic criminality of the various factions in the novel (including the Mafia and a mutant member of the Aleuts) is set against the apparent normality and virtue of tele-evangelists, consumerist society and mass culture .

Again, then, this is the characteristic cyberpunk mix of the archaic with the hi-tech, blending pasts (ancient forces, age-old iniquities, buried evils) with futures (whether of technological empowerment or dystopian repression). This mixture has become a staple element of youth culture, whether in manga (the legendary Akira kept long dormant under Neo-Tokyo, 'a city in the wild grip of technology gone mad'), video games , virtual nightclubs and VR theme parks. [xviii] Recent future noir includes the 'cyber noir' or 'cybershock' novels, neoAddix (1997 - see Fig. 9) and Lucifer's Dragon (1998), by the British writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood , a freelance journalist who writes regularly, amongst other things, for the Japanese film magazine Manga Mania. As in the cyberpunk of Gibson and Stephenson , dark forces are met by technological efforts to defy fatality . In neoAddix, for example, bio-tech resurrection is one answer to an old order that seemed to have a monopoly of special powers: their trope is vampirism, that of the protagonists is technological enhancement. Grimwood's plot brings together the world of ancient aristocratic degeneracy (a sinister vampiric 800-year old Prince) with the modern world of corporate corruption. The heir to the psychopathic Prince will be drawn from competing and thoroughly corrupt tycoons, and battle is waged by means both supernatural and technological. 'Tek', magic, the subconscious, the ghost world, dream time and astral travel are all just a difference of perspective on powers of the mind that have evolved only in terms of the way in which information is accessed. Gibson's protagonists, Alex and the cyber-jockey, Johnnie T., appear to die and are resurrected by techno-wizardry: '"Do you remember who you are?....Doesn't matter. You'll be someone else when you wake up anyway"' (220). More than anything, it is this destabilisation of identity that justifies the label 'cyber noir', along with Grimwood's creation of dark doubles. Alex becomes that which he fights. Darker than Gibson or Stephenson, Grimwood ends neoAddix with an ultimate contest in which Alex must call on and accept 'the help of the Prince, and every other Grand Master who howled and gibbered in the wasteland of his brain', after which he recognises that he is 'no longer remotely human', and in the aftermath is more damaged and isolated than are most cyberpunk protagonists. Believing himself hideously scarred, with scars no one else can see, he lives in almost total isolation , 'the anchorite of San Lorenzo' (357).

The science fiction /Gothic /noir combination is by no means confined to novels that use cyberspace as the parallel dimension in which alternative identities can be created. The balance easily shifts toward the Gothic/supernatural , with the more dream-like and grotesque elements coming to the fore. Michael Marshall Smith , whose subsequent novels, Spares (1996) and One of Us (1998) also involve cloning and memory implantation, published his first novel, entitled Only Forward , in 1994 - a whimsical, funny and often macabre form of future noir in which the fantastic dimension is located in dream time, or dream accessed waking. The narrator, Stark , is a 'strong dreamer' who, like the hacker or cyberspace jockey, is a guideto a future world, a trouble shooter, a fixer and finder, and the epitome of hard-boiled cool. He is able to go into a tough neighbourhood, for example, because 'I look like the kind of guy who pimps for his sister not just for the money, but because he hates her. I can look like a guy who belongs' (18). At the same time, he always feels he has to play the hero and works less for the money than for what interests him or what is right. This private-eye-like integrity, however, is broken down by the exposure of his own dark side: he is himself the source of the evil he is tracking, and must confess both his unreliability as a narrator and his current sense of disorientation ('I'm not myself. Or maybe I am. It's been so long I can't remember' [254]). The nightmare that initiates the troubles of the narrative turns out to have been his own, and at the macabre, horror-novel climax, Stark recognises his guilt. The truth, finally, is not just 'more stark' but 'more Stark' (289). As this punning revelation suggests, Smith's tone mixes the blackly comic with the lightly jokey, and his playfulness extends as well to the noir sense of fatality : 'If there's anything I really hate, it's things going better than I expected...Things turning out well fills me with nameless dread...' (62). Only Forward is throughout a tongue-in-cheek narrative of a postmodern tough guy brooding on the persistence of his modernist anxieties: 'The rough beast doesn't just visit me occasionally: there's a regular fucking bus route' (67).

Invitations to the Underworld

Future noir has also developed in directions quite different from the elaborately fantastic world of cyberpunk . Two of the most genuinely and disturbingly noir near-future visions, both published in the mid-nineties, are Jack Womack 's Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993) and J. G. Ballard 's Cocaine Nights (1996), the first American, the second British. These are novels that have a clear place in mainstream fiction, though bookstores also shelve them with genre fiction, either with science fiction (Ballard on the strength of his niche as a science fiction writer) or with crime fiction. Both are first-person narratives of guilt and violence , patterned in ways very familiar from the noir thrillers we have examined. Ballard's is a story of the narrator's investigation of a horrific crime in an effort to clear his brother. It is an investigation that ends not only with a recognition that there is a sense in which his brother is guilty, but with him taking guilt upon himself (the investigator thereby being transformed into a man seen at the end as a malefactor). The Womack novel is in the tradition of narratives that involve an innocent narrator drawn into a world of deprivation and violence and crossing the line by committing an act of murder which leads irrevocably to utter isolation in savage surroundings. But the use of a young girl in the narrator's role makes Random Acts a striking departure from the tradition. Ballard and Womack are both imagining a semi-contemporary future, with the present sliding almost imperceptibly into near future. Ballard sets his novel in a leisured, privileged retirement community , Womack sets his in a desperately poor urban environment, but both use traditional elements of the thriller to explore the movement of a society towards violence. Womack's explanations have more in common with those of much earlier noir thrillers. Deprivation and casual injustice are shown to be irrevocably shaping the life of a girl who is not dissimilar to Ellson 's Tomboy - young, tough and doomed to take her place in a disintegrating urban environment. Ballard's novel, on the other hand, imagines a world without economic deprivation, sheltered from all of the destructive forces abroad in Womack's New York, and asks whether under such conditions violence would in fact disappear. Each is in a way an Edenic fable. In Random Acts, the former life of the nuclear family is the innocent, sheltered childhood world of an intelligent middle-class family living apart from the encroaching darkness. Cocaine Nights presents us with a Johnsonian Happy Valley in which all is supplied, but in which the spectacle of violence is required (though this, too, might be said to have an element of social determinism , with changes caused by economic satiation rather than economic need). What the deprivation and the boredom release is, in each case, something within - Conradian hearts of darkness revealed at the end of symbolic journeys.

Ballard 's science fiction novels, from The Drowned World (1961) on, made him the 'idolised role model' for cyberpunk writers, admired for pushing to the limits 'the bizarre, the surreal , the formerly unthinkable...' [xix] Cocaine Nights , which seems at first glance to be a realistic novel of Mediterranean retirement, is in fact very closely related to the bizarre and surreal body of his science fiction, its deceptive surface so strongly reinforcing our sense of the conventional and mundane that the emerging 'future' is all the more disturbing in its combination of banality and violence . As in much contemporary noir, crime is conceived as a combination of spectacle and game , fascinating, addictive and more dangerous than the participants realise. Conrad 's Heart of Darkness is an unmistakable presence behind Ballard's evocations of savage joy and frenzy that are, like the 'certain midnight dances', inextricably bound up with a savage violence not that far removed from the cannibalism , heads on stakes and 'unspeakable rites' with which Kurtz's midnight dances end. In his earlier novels (The Drowned World, The Crystal World ) Ballard often created narrative patterns that led critics to think, in spite of his denials, in terms of Conradian journeys into the interior, though with the Conradian theme modified (for example in The Crystal World) by imagining a journey towards the inner self, the core of the unconscious that contains brightness as well as darkness, a zone of transformation in which imaginative free play flourishes in opposition to the symbolic order, the world outside where the return of unconscious desire is suppressed.

In Cocaine Nights , Ballard uses a different structure: Dionysus on tour, rather than a journey to a forbidden zone, contained within an investigative framework that ends by revealing shared guilt. Ballard's Bobby Crawford parallels the 'mysterious stranger ' in The Bacchae - 'the god himself', the spirit of the instinctive group-personality and 'the ambiguous master-magician of pleasure and pain, beauty and cruelty'. [xx] When the protagonist, Charles, comes to the Costa del Sol it is because his brother Frank is accused of the murder of five people. He begins by thinking that Frank must be pleading guilty as 'part of some bizarre game he was playing against himself', but the 'game' is quite other than he imagines, and he is drawn into staying by an attempt on his life, which isn't so much a warning as an attempt to integrate him into the inner life of Estrella de Mar, '"a kind of invitation. Almost an invitation to..." "The underworld? The real Estrella de Mar?"' (174). It is for Charles, as it clearly also was for his brother, a liminal experience. On the face of it, all he does is fly to the present-day Costa del Sol, but even in the opening paragraph there is a sly insinuation of his affinities with Ballard's future-world protagonists, an implication both that he is crossing into an alien zone and that he is carrying with him his own repressed, forbidden repository of guilts and desires:

Crossing frontiers is my profession. Those strips of no-man's land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise...At the same time they set off a reflex of unease that I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. And even then there are the special pleasures of being exposed... (9)

The phrases here establish the most important terms of the following narrative: crossing frontiers, zones of promise, able to repress, forbidden dreams and guilty memories. The Costa del Sol, like other strange zones of Ballard 's science fiction , is both a realm of the imagination (a place that 'doesn't really exist. That's why I like the coast...' [17]) and a preview of the future: 'It's Europe's future. Everywhere will be like this soon'; '...It's the fourth world...The one waiting to take over everything...' (23; 215-16).

Until it is touched by the Dionysiac spirit of Bobby Crawford, the Costa del Sol is completely null. This is more than just a picture of a world of moneyed leisure. Ballard heightens the descriptions enough so that they become surreal and dystopian: the 'memory-erasing' cubist architecture of the houses and apartments with white facades 'like blocks of time that had crystallised beside the road'; the residents, preternaturally still, holding unread books and watching television with the sound off (34-5; 75; 215-16). [xxi] Into this 'walled limbo' (34), Bobby Crawford brings his youthful good looks (looking like 'a handsome and affable gangster ' [68]) and, above all, his extraordinary fluidity and energy. He is capable of changing everyone's lives but also full of 'dark, lurking violence ' (205). Having stumbled on to the truth that crime and creativity go together, Crawford puts people in touch with 'dormant areas' of their minds, making them fascinated by the 'other world' of crime 'where everything is possible', where they can break the rules and sidestep the taboos (245), 'leaving behind a treasure of incitement and desire' (263). Fires, speedboat chases, explosions, rapes all become communal spectacles : 'Crime at Estrella de Mar had become one of the performance arts...Brutal, but great fun' (146). This, then, becomes an alternative vision of the future. [xxii] Communal life is energised by transgressive behaviour: 'One of the modern world's pagan rites was taking place, the torching of the automobile, witnessed by the young women from the disco, their sequinned dresses trembling in the flames...a premonition of the carnival blaze that would one day consume Estrella de Mar' (158-60).

Estrella de Mar is first seen as 'a place without shadow', secure on its handsome peninsula, the 'private paradise' of 'a happier twentieth century' (65-6). Jack Womack 's New York, on the other hand, is a place close to the world of urban noir. Random Acts [xxiii] depicts a savage cityscape, the future of an America in which all urban centres are disintegrating into rioting, destitution and gang warfare. As their circumstances decline, the family of Womack's young narrator, Lola, is forced to move to the more marginal and dangerous parts of the city , journeying away from civilised security to live on the margins of West Harlem . Lola endures a Conradian journey not just to the 'worst' that the city contains but to a forced reassessment of her own identity , a reduction to a primitive level of being: 'I can't remember what I used to be like...it fears me' (231). She, is, like Marlow, shocked by how rapidly one accommodates oneself to appalling things: 'It was weird though that you could adjust to something so quick' (125). Feeling that all that is left to her is her 'rack and rage' (241), she at last beats to death her father's cruel employer, in what seems to her 'dreamtime': 'There's no denying I was mindlost' (251-2). Her capacity for murder is only one of the horrors discovered by Lola, who in the end commits herself to the world beyond all that is familiar, 'with the DCons' (256), the emblem of everything savage.

Random Acts is science fiction as extrapolation. The element of fantasy consists entirely of an extension of all the worst possibilities of urban American life. The jacket claims 'cyberpunk intensity' for the style, and the novel has in common with cyberpunk a strong sense of counter-cultural aggression. It is, however, far more genuinely noir than most cyberpunk, in part because it does not open up the possible alter-worlds of virtual space and imagined cityscapes, but instead presents the remorseless pressure of events which seem all too real, and which Lola increasingly finds herself unequipped to express: 'There's no wording proper what downed last night. The world brutalises however you live it whatever you do' (221). As everything, including her own language, breaks down, Lola's questions about the future echo the anxiety, fear and overwhelming sense of fatality that have recurrently been at the core of the noir narrative: '"How'll we endtime Iz?" I asked. "What's meant?" "Unknown" Iz said. "Spilling tomorrow into today's suited sometime but not once it darkens. Nada's changeable come nightside..."' (233).

[v] See, for example, Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (London: Paladin, 1973; 1988): Aldiss argues that science fiction , poised between romance and realism , shares with the Gothic novel a reliance on suspense, mystery and 'a limited number of startling props', that it transforms standard Gothic character types (cruel father into scientist; seducing monk into alien) and reworks plot patterns, such as the descent into 'inferno or incarceration', where the protagonist must go to complete his search for secret knowledge. See also Mark Rose, Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, New Critical Idiom, 1996).

[xxii] Ballard says, 'that's why the suburbs interest me...where one's almost got to get up in the morning and make a resolution to perform some sort of deviant or antisocial act, some perverse act, even if it it's just sort of kicking the dog, in order to establish one's own freedom.' Andrea Juno and V. Vale, Re/Search: J. G. Ballard (Hong Kong: Re/Search Publications, 1984), 15. 'Crime, and transgressive behaviour,' Ballard writes in Cocaine Nights , 'by which I mean all activities that aren't necessarily illegal, but provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction' (180-1).