The (Not Yet) Utopian Dimension and the Collapse of Cyberpunk in Walter Mosley's Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

Rankin, Sandy. "The (Not Yet) Utopian Dimension and the Collapse of Cyberpunk in Walter Mosley's Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World." In New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, editors. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 2008: [315]-338.

See for the Mosley Futureland collection but also for commentary (negative) by Futureland and Rankin on some central works/motifs of cyberpunk.

Because Futureland repeats many of the well-worn tropes of cyberpunk, it may be mistaken for cyberpunk, albeit "late" cyberpunk with the important contribution of "black people" and "black culture." The cyberpunk tropes include, but are not limited to: the presence of an all-powerful multinational corporation, an eccentric-genius CEO, designer drugs, elite luxury enclaves, postindustrial urban decay, anarchistic computer hackers, the synthesis of human and machine, and encounters with a cyberspace artificial intelligence or alien divinity. (Rankin p. 317)

After going over a number of cyberpunk examples, Rankin tentatively concludes, before moving on to additional Marxist critique:

Hence, in cyberpunk, the sweet hereafter — or here-elsewhere — is the no-place of cyberspace or its dream-space equivalent, in which the protagonists individually escape (except when they are playing data cowboys and burning chrome in the last frontier, sharing a thrilling consensual hallucination). It is a dream-space of virtual shadow figures, a substantially empty space in which cyberpunks typically long to remain. Whether in private hallucination of shared, the cyberpunks [with William Gibson as a partial exception] wish to escape the "meat of the body, to escape the materiality of the world — a mystical, Thanatontic wish and its representational fulfillment if there ever was one. (pp. 320-21)

Relevant for humans and technology in Futureland itself is, first (in Rankin's summaries) the story "Whispers in the Dark" where the key character Popo "believes God talks to him through the radio static" kills his uncle Chill and an elderly character in a kind of euthanasia, which he thinks will send their consciousnesses to God, "but not to heaven. (Heaven is 'somewhere else.') Chill's consciousness finds itself in some kind of cyber-hereafter space that begins 'sweet' [...] but ends not so sweet" when Chill's call to God goes unanswered.

Popo goes to prison and there develops "a computer program that contains an AI, who may or may not be divine" but is "an 'intelligent ether'" and "a 'vast store of consciousness" — and the voice Popo heard as a child. The AI, called "Un Fitt" works with Ptolomy to "create revolutionaries" dissatisfied with being among the oppressed and will be set against a world where "'Our judges are machines, our prisons and military and mental institutions are planning to mechanize their human components with computerized chemical bags. The spirit is being squashed fro the sake of production and profit. If we don't do something the [human] race itself will become a mindless machine' ([Mosley pp.] 309, 311)" (Rankin p. 324).

In the final stories ("En Masse" and "The Big in Me"), one Neil Hawthorne is horribly injured, and Ptolemy "merges Neil's consciousness into the computer program with the AI Un Fitt" (Rankin p. 329). Rankin stresses that "In contrast to Gibson's Case," and Case's contempt for the "meat" world and love of (and seeking love in) cyberspace), "Neil Hawthorne longs for the sensuality of the body, for real human company [...]" (Rankin p. 330).

Short-form conclusion: "[...] Mosley's Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World|Futureland is not cyberpunk but an allegorical anti-cyberpunk parody, intentional or not [...]" (Rankin p. 326).

RDE, finishing, 29Dec21