Started reading Last Tango in Cyberspace. Shades of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, GITS, Blade Runner and so forth. Breaks the fourth wall with reference to Tyrell Corp from Blade Runner and Weyland-Yutani Corp from Alien. References to the old New Journalism, including Joan Didion and Hunter Thomson. The MC even keeps a hardcopy of Frank Herbert’s Dune in his bag. Dune is a huge plot point for this story. I’ve read all these writers, all these books. The author is smart, but I’m smarter. I think I will see this one through.
Finished Last Tango In Cyberspace by Steven Kotler. It was a story about the development of an empathy drug called Sietch Tabr (Dune reference) and the corporate interests trying to develop and control it. An interesting theme, especially with the MC, a guy called Lion Zorn, being what’s called an empathy tracker. The main message of the book seemed to be that we, as a species, are not ready for total empathy – it needs to be developed gradually. The author makes much of our use and abuse of animals as a prime example of where our empathy is at. He makes the interesting point that it may have been our early relationship with wolves (and later, dogs) that started us on the road to empathy. There was some cool writing. I liked the author’s fixation on details and snappy fractured dialogue. Sometimes his characters were a bit too cool for school, but that’s classic cyberpunk. Actually my main concern was the fact Lion Zorn is a Jew, and that name sounds a lot like Zionism. It seems to me the Israeli leadership, for one, could do with an empathy drug right about now. As Lion says at one point: put it in the water supply.