Joan Gordon

I don't know . . . Some days I feel like I just don't fit in. Is it me?
Or is it some rigid, antiquated set of beliefs perpetuated by a tiny
ruling elite, designed to impose a system of logic and proportion on
a senseless, chaotic world? ( Zippy the Pinhead in Griffin)

An anti-hero is an amoral jumble of prosthetics: sounds like a typical entry in
the cyberpunk movement. The description also fits the narrator of Joe Haldeman's
"More Than the Sum of his Parts" ( 1985). Or how about
mechanical mind control combined with international violence? Not only does
this description fit the software loaded characters and Japanese locales of
cyberpunk, it also describes Haldeman novel Tool of the Trade ( 1987). And
the Sprawl of William Gibson? It is there, for a while, in Haldeman Worlds
novels ( 1981 and 1983).

Yet there is a profound difference between Haldeman's work and that
of the cyberpunk writers. One reason lies in Haldeman's spare prose style, a far
cry from cyberpunk's characteristically dense, metaphorical writing, and
another in his attitude toward violence. In cyberpunk, violence is thrilling and
fleeting-no matter how horrible, a part of the milieu. In Haldeman's work it is
awful, ugly, lingering, and central to his fiction's exploration of morality. In
cyberpunk, though the style is hot, flashy, and lush, the content is cool,
disengaged from emotion and morality. In Haldeman's work the reverse is so:
The style is cool, spare, and terse and involves hot, passionately involved
emotion and morality. A look at several works by Haldeman illustrates how
remarkably similar speculations about our techno-logical and political structure
can result in such significantly different fictions, how different Haldeman's
pessimistic version of modernism is from the weirdly optimistic postmodern
cyberpunk posture.

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