Square Eyes Is A User Interface Experience Unlike Any Other

Square Eyes features an interesting plot revolving around a woman named Fin who wakes up unsure of who she is after being unplugged from the network. She finds a woman seemingly living her life and slowly unravels a larger mystery about a program she was developing with enormous implications for basically everybody. That in itself would be enough to give it a read, in my opinion.

What is makes this graphic novel more compelling is the presentation. I have never seen futuristic, augmented reality better realized than in Square Eyes. The interface unfolds in intuitive ways, growing more complex as the story goes on and Fin begins to recall more and more of her past. It’s beautiful from a user interface standpoint but presenting the UI in tandem with the story makes for an intelligent and compelling experience; as a UI should be!

Additionally, every page; every spread feels carefully orchestrated to communicate details about the world. They are chock-full of them. It’s easy to get lost in pages roaming around spreads looking at details. This exploration is made even more satisfying due to the physical product itself, which is printed on nice, thick stock that lends even more substance to each page.

It’s a visual and physical feast that sets it apart. Other reviews, I have noticed, downplayed the plot; perhaps because the presentation is so incredible, the plot naturally takes a back seat for some. But I feel like what Square Eyes has to say about the world is prescient, especially regarding information being the number one commodity. Subtly reinforced throughout the reading experience, it can sometimes feel like the plot is shallow because it’s communicated all the time, presenting itself eerily within the world at all times.

With hindsight we now have regarding Cambridge Analytica’s role in various elections, and multiple other campaigns, the parts of the story where Fin feels disconnected from the world around her due to her being unplugged from the network seems like it might only days away for everyone. Our online experience is a curated bubble. But when everyone is in that bubble and you’re out of it, even when you’re attempting to interact with everyone physically, it’s a different kind of disconnect. Within this fiction, everyone is negotiating their own world in a more literal way due to the network. Their overlays are a far more curated experience that omits people even when they are right there with you.   

Notions around forms of online piracy and the ways they might intersect with social class throughout, illustrated further by the interface that blooms from Fin’s own hands, make for an accessible and empathetic approach to communicate technological anxieties that feel new and fresh. Anyone can understand this because of the physicality of everything to do with the product. It’s as real as your hands pressing the next, thick page aside to make room for the next, and that’s a unique, cyberpunk story only available through Square Eyes.

Is The Dispossessed Proto Solarpunk?

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

The anarchist collective on the planet Anarres migrated from the propertarian, capitalist planet of Urras when a previous revolution occurred. Rather than continue to contend with them, they have gifted this planet. Then, using the teachings of Odo, the center point of this revolution and who ostensibly is also responsible for structuring this anarcho-syndicalist society experiment, they establish this new way of living; retreating into themselves for generations.

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

When Shavek, considered a brilliant and unparalleled physicist on both planets, decides to make the journey to Urras in order to finish his work, he must first figure out his place in a new society at odds with his way of life and way of thinking. 

“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.” 

The narrative is very clever, alternating between him negotiating this new space and how this society works and is perceived by an outsider, while also flashing back to his life back in Anarres, slowly exposing the ways in which life oppress and alter the citizens on both planets. There are many astute ways in which the author uses Shavek's own life events to communicate complex ideas and offers the merits of each society while presenting a condemnation of each. 

The book is extremely well written and filled with a unique form of prose. The book was a pleasure to read and consume. But part of why I chose this book was to examine it in order to see if this was a proto solarpunk book. There are clear throughlines to cyberpunk, there has, in some ways, never been more of a punk protagonist. An actual anarchist! It's also subversive of typical cyberpunk protagonists generally in it for themselves but punk in that they are against establishment, authoritarianism, and capitalism. In this novel, Shavek is deeply wounded by society. It gets its hooks in him. Twisting his way of thinking and seducing him, attempting to commodify his work and ideas.

One definition of Solarpunk is: a movement focused on a positive, ecological vision for a future where technology is used for human-centric and ecocentric purposes. 

So the punk part is pretty clearly covered. Where the solar part comes in is somewhat more questionable for me, initially. Sure the anarcho-syndicalist society is kind of covering that aspect. We could take a lot of those principles and integrate it into an extrapolated version of our own society and get results for a much more sustainable future. However... it's not really technology that's doing this, right? There is little talk of technology at all throughout most of it, in either planets' culture and infrastructure even, beyond trains anyways. Written in 1974, it makes perfect sense that the book certainly wouldn't place any particular significance on these things beyond the physics that Shavek dedicates his life to. But what they are after from Shavek is faster-than-light travel; specifically in their ships, which was given to them by an alien race. 

Where this gets somewhat more clear is when another species or aliens are revealed: Terrans. They are Earth decedents which specifically state their planet is all but destroyed. An ambassador situated on Urras is the vehicle for the qualities of most solarpunk stories. A dystopic planet that seeks to get new technologies and cooperations from other forms of life to make their planet better.

“My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.” 

It is certainly atypical of the emerging genre. But when a lot of the sort-of meta-narrative of all these groups of people and species of humans, and their subsequent societies, are driving at getting this new technology for their own respective reasons. Some to conquer and establish superiority; others to forge a better life, and still, others to never allow for it to exist at all. There ends up being much more of a focus on technology than previously thought.

“Change is freedom, change is life.

It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed.

There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.”

Furthermore, as such a seminal work of fiction, it seems to claim that solarpunk having roots here is highly plausible. It won many awards and was a major contribution to the genre. Before cyberpunk even existed. After it was established, to have a different sub-genre emerge which used this as a foundation instead of other seminal works credited to cyberpunk seems only natural.

It could not be more punk. And it shows optimism in the face of the fear of technology, doing a very good job at exploring the issue more thoroughly than some other cyberpunk works by having whole societies project their uses and desires onto an emerging, game-changing technology only one man, Shavek, can provide; a punk no less, wanting to start a revolution within an anarchist state built from the ground up from it's own revolution. 

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

You can also listen to the General Intellect Unit podcast episode that features a more comprehensive breakdown and discussion of the book (and features me as a guest!) here.  

The Human Engine In Heavy Weather

I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'—what end? What civilization, for that matter?...the kind of trouble we got, they aren't allowed to have any end.

It's the year 2031 in Heavy Weather, and perhaps unsurprisingly, things haven't gotten better. Global economies have crashed. Governments hardly function. Currency, communication, and borders have rapidly changed due to the massive changes heavy weather has caused. Once lush and fertile land is now ravaged by drought. 

...so that's really what you're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?

Oh, not for a living.

The book alternates between Jane and Alex Unger. Jane makes her way to Mexico to break out her younger brother Alex from a clinica. Alex is billed to the reader as having a lot of problems, not entirely uncommon after the collapse of 1st world nations as we know them. Alex ostensibly suffers from a myriad of retroviruses and Jane, believing the clinica is ripping him off and not curing him at all, decides to bail him out. 

...the code was cryptware—it reencrypted itself every goddamn month and demanded a payoff before unfreezing.

During the State Of Emergency, when the heavy weather first became a huge problem for mankind after constantly disregarding climate problems, almost all data and information systems went down. Society collapsed as countries were not prepared to deal with massive climate swings, some people decided to take matters into their own hands. Calling them "Structure hits", people would take down buildings that contributed to global warming and other systemic problems. Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls were a blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard black wobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves of hollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow and dignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deep thinker. 

The concept of hacking has undergone a bit of a change as well. "Hacking" seems to refer to any modifications to anything at all. From kites to ornithopters and especially--to heavy weather. After Jane breaks out Alex they return to the Storm Troupe. This band of misfits chase "spikes" in weather in an attempt to gather more information on it. Still little is known about it, apparently, but this troupe, each with their own way of hacking something, aim to find the mother of all tornadoes: the f6. 

I hack kites...Balloons, chaff, ultralights, parafoils...chutes are my favourite though, I like to structure-jump.

Throughout the novel, we find out that there are still spooks working for what is left of a functioning government. There are still border guards but they don't really care about the imaginary line on the ground anymore. Technology is still somewhat futuristic but not typically cyberpunk, ie, there are no cybernetics. There is no Internet, either. People live poorly and barely survive. All that is left is the individual drives people have. These punks only care about money in so far as how it can help them better hack heavy weather. 

...all workable standards of wealth has vaporized, digitized, and into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thing air. 

This is where the book really shines. The world building, the technology, and the fiction specifically about these storm chasers and how they hack them is very cool. They use ultralight manned drones to scout out ahead. There are ornithopters with tech that casts the cameras feed into the helmeted view of people piloting them back at camp. When they send these into the tornado to "punch the core", they gain even more data. It's exciting and interesting.

As the Emergency had deepened, the packing Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair. 

Things lag a bit with character work, which is for the most part good. Marrying speculative climate change fiction with cyberpunk is genius and the characters mostly do the premise justice. Jane is a pretty well realized female protagonist but also used as the main vehicle for communicating her main drive, hunting these storms, is really the only thing that defines her. The troupers all substitute some aspects of their lives and only feel like truly functioning human beings when they are being adrenaline junkies, all other wannabees who don't feel the same way never stay. 

There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive and people who probably won't. 

This idea that Jane can only be whole while she is pursuing something only somewhat works due to the books ending, which I was pretty lukewarm about. The sins of the previous generation are visited upon the next generation of people. There are too many people in the world for it to sustain it. You're still only useful if you can contribute the way they want you to, despite it being post-capitalism and a mostly dystopia world. 

It's me alright, it's very much part of me, but it's not something I'm in command of and I don't control it. It's like a force, a compulsion, that tears at things, and shreds them, and chops them up, and comprehends them, and I don't control it, and I never have. I can't. You understand?

Yes. I do understand. It's like a spike, inside. 

These are all somewhat interesting things to explore but they always end up on the peripheral and feel a little bit weird when injected. It wants to say so much more and sometimes comments on misogyny in organizations like the Texas Rangers, as well as what is expected of women like Jane. But this is mostly Twister with cyberpunk aesthetic and an interesting bit of speculation. It doesn't have the deep questions good cyberpunk fiction often has along with the action. It's too bad because it does dip its toes, it just never gets in.

We were just trying to kill the machinery. Get rid of it. All that junk that had killed our world, y'know?

The world and the action is worth the cost of admission and it is a fast read. This concept inspired a whole new game design I've been working on, in tandem with other fiction. More speculative fiction on climate issues married with post-cyberpunk is something I would love to see more of.

You can nab the hardcover of paperback cheap these days, interestingly though, you cannot get it digitally. 

Even the blackest cloud has a chrome lining.   

Subterranean Rage: Red Spider, White Web

"What do you know? Kimi ga nihonjin dewaarimasen. You're not human. You're not a man. You're not even white."

In Misha's Red Spider, White Web (the only first wave cyberpunk novel written by a Native American I have been able to find) there is an unapologetic sense of creeping reality that will hook you from the start. People praise early cyberpunk for being speculative while being dark and gritty—showing the downside of our capitalistic excesses. But they often are critiqued for still showing this world from a clear sense of privilege, too. Foreign cultures are fetishized, non male characters are rarely fleshed out very well, and a multitude of other problems.

She liked the high places, away from the subterranean rage of the working class. No one was there to mirror her image in their funhouse looking-glass.

...Ded Tek was a city of hot lavenders, ketchup reds and taffy yellows. It was all wrong, the color and the acidic rain and the grinding morning cold.

Red Spider White Web does away with all of that. Though I still need to read some first wave cyberpunk to fully consume the first wave, in my mind, this is the best first wave cyberpunk to have been written—by far.

It starts by having the main character—Kumo—struggling to navigate her way through a bleak dystopian city. She has a hell of a time getting through and she's just trying to get some coffee. Some damn coffee!! Misha sets this punishing, demoralizing tone very well and never lets go. This city is disgusting. It is disheartening with most every interaction, "it's" clearly targeting marginalized individuals too, as Kumo experiences all of these things on a daily basis going through a routine; then shrugging it off and plowing forward. If you thought "woof, Case has it hard," in Neuromancer, ha! This book shows just how much cyberpunk missed the mark when it came to depicting these themes accurately and well; and why marginalized folks who wrote (and still continue to write) cyberpunk were better at it and brought an entirely different experience to the table to consider.

...it's a sinister wonderland. My life, cleaned like a revolver, levels in the direction of happiness. Come on. It's a Marxian dream, possessions divides, individuality erased, money gone, voices stilled, sorrow a luxury that can't be bought.

Kumo is literally starving everyday and still chooses not to eat some food because it is bad for her, essentially described as though it were like eating plastic, having no nutritional value what-so-ever. She knows that if she consumes it, her stomach will temporarily be sated but she will be sick later and would rather continue starving. She is fierce and never acquiesces to anyone; life, her friends, her way of life, her morals. Nothing.

Mari looked at Kumo and shuddered. Even with a certain savage grace Kumo looked put together all wrong. Too large where it should be small, to small where it should be large. Too misshapen to be a true human, yet too human to be a good animal.

The main character's, for the most part, are all artists. Barely making ends meet by peddling their various wares at a market where they are gawked at and fetishized by people with credits. Kumo is a holo-artist, and art, as we learn throughout the book, is the only thing that matters to her. As long as she can do her art, she cares about little else. And even her art is transient, just like the moments she gets to practice it as well as its perceived value in this world. Fleeting and ephemeral.

"You cause a lot of trouble for people Kumo," Motler complained...
"I mean to," Kumo said, once again thinking about her art."

In the face of a very remorseless and sometimes difficult to even read, let alone imagine, circumstances; we also learn that these artists that literally are trying to get by (and are happy when they can even bathe) sleep in straw with lice and bugs, have to piss and shit in buckets in the streets—are also being preyed on by another source. Murders unfold throughout the book, targeting artists and ramping up a slow burning legitimately all-too-real kind of horror as an undercurrent to a cyberpunk dystopian story.

Kumo spoke again.
"To watch me is to eat glass. Can't you feel me glittering in your stomach?"

Artists are faced with an alternative, in which they can try and "sell out" and go sell their art and ideas to Mickey-san. Essentially a parody on Disney world that is hyper effective at deconstructing commodification of art and capitalism, in general. Should they stay and continue to be targeted or use the only "good" thing they have to try and enter a safe space? Just one of the book's themes and shown through the eyes of many of the characters, all the while building tension and showing that the world that started out more real than most cyberpunk, can still get worse; and, because of this biting, hard world, the moments of true joy and are a reprieve—are truly meaningful and touching.

"You'd sell out too if you had half a chance."
Kumo snorted and shook her head. "You can't sell out if you don't buy in..."

Every character is marginalized and intersectional in some way, including the main antagonist, which...can't really be considered one almost? Without giving too much away, it's something you'll have to read for yourself and decide. While character's are sexualized by others, the dynamics, including power, are extremely well written and considered. Written in 1990 there is one character, who is intersex and that has she/his his/her pronouns throughout. Being misgendered sometimes based on the characters, and having a sexual interaction that is very well handled for once (I think). And always using both sets of pronouns when not being viewed specifically through the eyes of a character currently in focus.

David's pale face blushed and his/her heavy-lashed lids closed softly over grey eyes. A Concert pianist---disowned by family because of his/her sexual gender---that is---both genders. His/her full pouting mouth took in the station with a hunger and horror. S/he coughed.

Misha tackles topics other cyberpunks never dared and with a deft hand combined with what seems like to me, a lot of thoughtful consideration. The book is brutal and won't let up, hitting on its themes with every paragraph. The character's experience real anger and that anger isn't minimized like in a lot of other cyberpunk stories that interact with marginalized characters. In fact it is explicitly stated out of character that it is valid, and since it is from no character's perspective, it is not taken to be subjective but instead an unequivocal statement of fact.

If you take a step back and examine the text, Misha's prose are all like that. Where generally the prose in cyberpunk is to allow for the reader to release a build up of tension or compare technology to something else, Misha instead uses her prose to never. let. up. Ever. This sort of becomes something approximating horror, and builds the tension in a crafty way and from multiple angles. The descriptions are visceral (in the older terminology of the word), there is blood and guts and shit, and things people do not want to think about in unyielding detail.

You're sick. You were nearly killed. All kinds of shitheads are out to tear you to pieces. You were in pain, hungry, cold, filthy. Here you have safety, comfort, even, even love." JuJube put his hands on her face in a gesture of practiced affection. They trembled a little with an almost instant desire. "And you want to leave---because of your---your twisted visions."
Kumo pushed his hands away. Her hunger for affection was lost in her desire for her art.

This horror is never a surprise either, the book begins from a point of view of the killer as though you yourself are the one killing someone; making the reader automatically complicit in the atrocity unfolding. And, in some ways this death is mirrored in the examination of western culture (which is exceedingly more evident as it progresses) and made clear with the ending; it is a very good ending.

He could feel her tendons in his hands, the flesh melting away, the taut strings of desire snapping one by one.

It is a hard thing to read sometimes, but well worth it. I am not sure there is anything that could have been improved and it is good that this was published, and a sad thing that as soon as it did, the self proclaimed gatekeepers of cyberpunk itself attempted to shut the doors. From what I can tell this book flew under the radar.

How many rough blows had she suffered? How many times had she been an unwilling step for the selfish souls of her fellow opposite gender? And the Pinkies, so white and so male, were like living stiff boots of conquerors.

If you are within the US, you can buy Red Spider, White Web directly from the publisher: http://www.wordcraftoforegon.com/speculative.html