Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 146

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Popular Culture Review

Kroker’s concept in Spasm), the concept of terminal-identity (described in the
work bearing this title by Scott Bukatman), and a large corpus of questions
concerning the cyborg. The challenge for theory is undoubtedly the character in
these works, as well as the atmospheres and situations in which the author places
them. These are as unusual as they can be, and they also leave ontological questions
in their wake, questions associated with the status of non-space, space-time,
immateriality, non-geographical articulation of the net, recent life-like artificial
and would-be-worlds.
The state-of-the-art technology of smart machines holds a special place in the
modelling of such (techno)atmospheres set between issues of elegies and
technometaphysics on one hand, and techno or, better raving ecstasy on the other.
In a daring way it evokes extreme, even transgressive, situations and drives the
‘parties’ involved into states of the ecstatic and the reaching beyond; they search
their own limits and radiate even beyond them. The machines of advanced
technologies are therefore also machines for articulating (techno)metaphysical
questions and for producing extreme atmospheres. These are the machines which
organise and arrange actions and reactions of objects and individuals, so that they
find themselves totally immersed, as in a whirlpool from which they try to save
themselves by giving away part of their most authentic properties.
Techno-Metaphysical qualities also accompany the actions of characters, the
secret, often even transcendental goals. The goals of these characters with
destabilised identities, as a rule, point to the experience of the distant, the reaching
beyond and the unusual, the particularly terrifying and horrible. In Sterling’s novel
H ea vy Weather, which anticipated the now fashionable film-makers’ interest in
extreme atmospheric conditions (for example, S tonn ch a sers and Twister), the role
of transcendental and apocalyptic experience in Heavy W eather\s taken by tornado
F-6, described as apocalyptic transcendence, as something which will grant the
heroes the last and the supreme experience. Sterling conveys that in the monologue
of Jerry: “People, you’ve all seen the simulations, you know, what I mean, when I
say F-6. But people, the damned thing is finally upon us. It is here, it’s real, no
playback this time, no simulacrum. It is with us in stark reality....This thing is
Death, people. It’s a destroyer of worlds. It’s the worst thing human action has
brought into the world since Los Alamos” (Sterling 1994: 218).
These words do not frighten the Storm Troopers, who get their kicks from
heavy weather. The tornado-chasers are protagonists of the contemporary, extremely
aestheticised world, oriented towards intense pleasure on frequencies as extreme
as possible — to hear more than can be heard, to see more than can be seen with
the human eye, to touch more than can be touched in a world of material objects.
These are the imperatives of their hedonistic desire, which is techno-coded.
These characters already belong to the realm of techno, the rhythm of their