As I have written before, the three great science fiction works of the first half of the '80s are Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott, "Clear" (1983) by Cybotron, and Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson. With these three, we get the images of the urban future, the sound of the urban future, and the language of the urban future. LA is the city in the movie, Detroit is the city in the music, Tokyo is the city at the center of the book. The movie takes place in the real of urban space, the music transitions from urban space to synthetic cyberspace, and the book is the immersion of real and synthetic space in cyberspace. (The transition from cyberspace to urban space also opens the movie Tron, which was released the same year as Blade Runner.) The world in which we find all three spaces converging is the precisely the one we live in now.

The cultural critic and professor Roy Christopher sees it in another but still similar way. For him, the defining cultural movements of the 1980s are hiphop music and cyberpunk (novels and film). They are, for him, two suns rising on a Western world with an atmosphere which, when fully formed, will fill the lungs of the inhabitants of the 21st century. This is a key theme in his new book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future. In order to understand the cultural impact of hiphop today, one has to examine its deep technological and science fictional origins, and how those origins are closely related to the way computing and biological technologies are represented in early cyberpunk fiction and film. There is, for Christopher, a correspondence. And we will discuss these correspondences and other aspects of his new book tomorrow at 7 pm at Elliot Bay Book Store.