Who Goes There?

When you think of cyberpunk the first author to come to mind is almost certainly William Gibson, who didn’t invent the subgenre but very much codified it with Neuromancer; after that it becomes a bit of a free-for-all. Cyberpunk goes back to the ’70s, before Gibson started writing in earnest, and you can even see inklings of it in the late ’60s, perhaps most profoundly in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which both have cyberpunk-y elements. But as far as the heyday of cyberpunk goes the author maybe most cited who is not Gibson would be Bruce Sterling—despite the fact that much of what Sterling has written has not been cyberpunk. It could be that Sterling is not as popular as he should be because he’s such a versatile writer, covering seemingly every subgenre under the sun and even ssometimess venturing into fantasy, all while retaining a certain attitude you’d expect from someone who grew up in Austin. He’s a bit of a punk like that.

1985 was a pretty good year for Sterling that also showed off his range, with the vicious short story “Dinner in Audoghast” (alternate history), probably his most popular novel with Schismatrix (space opera), and today’s story, which is………. arguably cyberpunk. “Green Days in Brunei” has a few hallmarks of the subgenre but would nowadays be more likely classified as solarpunk than straight cyberpunk. The “green” of the title refers to money but also green energy. I’ve been on a streak with the past few novellas I’ve covered (not counting serials) and the streak continues here, as this story is pretty cool. It has naught but the skeleton of a plot but it’s a story that much more hinges on characters and speculations about the future.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1985 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I actually have a physical copy of this issue, but it’s easier to copy lines of text off a PDF. I ended up with six pages of “notes” for the damn thing, because Sterling packs a lot into this novella. It was then reprinted in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection, which unlike a few of the other early volumes you can find for reasonable pricess online. (Don’t try to collect the first volume unless you have money to burn.) It was later reprinted in the Sterling collections Crystal Express and Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling.

Enhancing Image

Turner Choi is a Chinese-Canadian twenty-something working officially as an engineer in what is set to be a robot shipyard in Brunei, a very small country on the island of Borneo; unofficially he’s also a computer hacker, although given the limited means he’s not able to do anything fancy. The shipyard in question is supposed to become fully automated, bringing industry back to Brunei with minimal human labor. Brunei is smaller than a lot of American cities, with Brunei Town itself housing only a hundred thousand people, with basically nothing to indicate it as standing in the 21st century. “No cars. No airport. No television.” It’s circa 2020 and a second oil crisis in the ’90s sucked out what little industry the country had before. Now it’s kept afloat with a very small pocket of money—an aristocracy that can almost fit on the head of a pin.

Said aristocracy, however, made a deal with Kyocera, a Japanese corporation (it’s not the ’80s if the Japanese aren’t depicted as economic juggernauts), and that’s where Turner comes in. It’s Turner’s first big job and it might be the toughest he’ll ever deal with, as he and his crew are basically expected to turn shit into sugar. The robot factory for the shipyard is condemned and has been untouched for two decades. This would not be such a problem if not for Brunei’s lacking in metals, never mind that Turner has to do some hacking on the sly to access what we might now call the internet—although here it’s basically just email and chat rooms. His Bruneian contact is also someone not easy to get along with—that being Jimmy Brooke, a former British rockstar, a “deaf, white-haired eccentric,” who came to Brunei years ago and never left. Brooke is curious, as for one he’s the only white character of importance in the narrative, but we’ll elaborate on him later.

There are only a few main characters, the last of these being Seria, a young woman who piggybacks off Brooke’s antics and who is, as it turns out, the sultan’s (rebellious) daughter. Turner hits on Seria one night and it does not occur to him fast enough that getting in with a literal princess might not be the best idea. In terms of personality Seria might be the best character, despite only existing in relation to the men in her life, including Turner, Brooke, her brother (who is mostly offscreen), and her rich dad (who is kept entirely offscreen). Turner and Seria hit it off despite the former looking a little ridiculous with his lumberjack jacket and knee-high boots that his mom bought for him. If not for his Chinese heritage, Turner would look like the typical white Canadian, perpetually gloomy from having lived in Vancouver—which hey, at least it’s not Toronto. In fairness to Turner, his personal life before coming to Brunei was a bit of a mess.

Where to start?

The shadow hanging over Turner throughout the story, aside from the stress of satisfying his employer, is the fact that he and his brother Georgie are kin to a real bastard: Grandpa Choi, now elderly but who back in the ’70s gained infamy as a corrupt cop in Hong Kong. The combined financial success and public scandal of Grandpa Choi seemed to have disastrous results for Turner’s dad, who sank into alcoholism and met an untimely death prior to the story’s beginning. We also find out that Turner’s old college girlfriend (having been separated for a few years now) is a barely functioning drug addict, and the one time we get an interaction between them is pretty uncomfortable. Turner is a classic rebellious hero, especially in the context of cyberpunk, being a romantic who is also trying to escape his past. The little computer shenanigans we see are framed romantically, both in how Turner’s l33t haxing powers are romanticized and how the romance between Turner and Seria is intensified through online messaging.

Something that caught my eye was how Sterling seemed to understand, even in this early period, how online messaging affects relationships differently from in-person talking, be they romantic or otherwise. When communicating via text you open a door to your inner consciousness that would normally be closed when talking with your mouth. Get a load of this passage describing the escalation of Turner’s relationship with Seria and how their texting only heightens their sense of intimacy:

Turner realized now that no woman had ever known and understood him as Seria did, for the simple reason that he had never had to talk to one so much. If things had gone as they were meant to in the West, he thought, they would have chased their attraction into bed and killed it there. Their two worlds would have collided bruisingly, and they would have smiled over the orange juice next morning and mumbled tactful goodbyes.

I need to read up more on what would’ve been computer culture when it was in its infancy. Sterling is known for his fiction, but he has also written extensively on the history of computing and the hacker subculture that spawned from it. 1985 sounds almost impossibly old for discussing such a topic, but remember that Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroess of the Computer Revolution was published in 1984 and Sterling certainly would have known about it. One of the few quibbles I have with “Green Days in Brunei” is that it falls for what was then the common trap of framing hackers as heroic, noble figures—a pill that would be harder to swallow nowadays. While Turner is written as flawed, with his pride certainly getting in the way, Sterling doesn’t question the nobility of his illicit hacking in contrast with the shadowy bureaucracy of the Bruneian government. That Turner’s antics ultimately do much good might stretch the modern reader’s suspension of disbelief, but then its optimism is overall well-founded.

Turner has fallen in love, which dramatic purposes usually is something that results in disaster—or at the very least conflict. Which it does, as it should. It started as a job he would do before returning to Canada, but now he has a reason to stay in Brunei; mind you, it won’t be the only reason. Sterling makes the most of tropes that nowadays might read as predictable, even going to some lengths to justify the contrivances in the plot. Turner and Seria meeting is highly unlikely, sure, but given the small population it’s not as unlikely as if they were to meet in New York. Even the laughably outdated technology is justified by the fact that Brunei is a backwater, both from lack of industry and deliberate political choices. The Green Party (no, not that one), while kneecapped by the aristocracy, has worked to turn the country into almost one big greenhouse.

Turner, Seria, Brooke, and later Dr. Moratuwa (more on him in a minute) fit into archetypes that will be familiar to cyberpunk fans, but who are elevated above their archetypes through some pretty sharp dialogue. Would “Green Days in Brunei” have benefited from being written by a Chinese or Malaysian author? Maybe. The problem is that Sterling manages to be (somehow) both idiosyncratic and a bit of a chameleon. You can discern a Sterling story by how it’s written, but his willingness to tackle different zones of interest with ease makes it so that while you can try to emulate Sterling’s style, you would be hard-pressed to actually pull it off. I would would say the novella shows its age, given how easy it is to indulge in exoticism with former colonies (this is, after all, a post-colonial narrative), Sterling manages to be sensitive and forward-looking enough that it doesn’t read as exploitative; rather it reads as coming from someone early enough in their career that they’ve honed their skills and have not yet turned reactionary.

There Be Spoilers Here

Despite his appearance and rock-and-roll lifestyle, Brooke knows more about the workings of Brunei than he lets on—even saving Turning when the latter stumbles upon a political prison. It’s here that we meet Dr. Moratuwa, a decrepit former activist who still has some fighting spirit in him; being a devout Buddhist probably helps. It’s also here that we find out the true purpose of the robot shipyard, which is to construct primitive but robust rowboats that can cross the seas without need for electricity. In a way, although Turner’s employer isn’t aware of it, the purpose of the robot shipyard is to bring back the age of sailing—using modern technology to produce ships that are made of simple materials and which anyone with at least one arm can work. And the plan will work, so long as Turner does his job.

But then a wrench gets thrown into the whole thing: Grandpa Choi is on his deathbed. Not that Turner and Georgie have any love for the old man, and indeed in the one scene where Grandpa Choi talks she shows himself to be a real asshole, but it’s during this argument between Turner and his elder that Grandpa Choi, in a moment of devilish joy, reveals that Turner is set to inherit the old man’s considerable (and blood-drenched) fortune. Our romantic leads have now both come to a crossroads, wherein Turner wants to abandon his inheritance and Seria wants to give up her title. The rich suffering a case of conscience and giving up their wealth for the good of the world is a major point here, even given metaphysical significance when Moratuwa says, “Buddha was a prince also, but he left his palace when the world called out.” If only the rich in the real world were capable of feeling remorse or empathy. It thematically ties things together, but our leads’ decision to abandon their wealth in favor of the Green movement is probably not a conclusion a more jaded writer would read—which doesn’t stop the ending from feeling genuinely triumphant.

Sterling makes a few points by way of characters clearly speaking for him, and if I were to go over then one by one we would be here all day. This is a tightly packed narrative that feasibly could’ve been expanded into a novel (add a couple subplots and you’re set), but I much prefer single-minded works like this that are easier to reread. No doubt I’ll only enjoy it more when I eventually get around to it a second time.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure if the ending rings as true now as it did back then; at the same time, with the growing prominence of hopeful SF (specifically narratives which speculate on alternatives to capitalism in the future), said optimism may be prescient. I don’t know if the Sterling of today would’ve written this story, because it strikes me as being written by someone who wasn’t much older than the main characters, and who hadn’t yet been broken down by the harsh reality of genre publishing—never mind that it was written before the horrific consequences of the Reagan years fully sank in. “Green Days in Brunei” reads more like a reaction to the oil crisis of the ’70s than the austerity politics of the ’80s, but its attempt to reconcile modern technology with green energy is admirable. It helps that this is about as sincere as Sterling gets, rivaling only that great “romantic gesture” of his, “Dori Bangs,” which might still be my favorite.

See you next time.