Headcrash

Bruce Bethke is one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre and the man who invented the term cyberpunk itself. I love his short story of the same title which started it all! Headcrash was his first novel and its a crazy ride through the early days of cyberpunk. Many authors and readers take the genre extremely seriously, some even see it as a political movement--which is, of course, total nonsense. Others believe cyberpunk is dead while some purists dont want to touch anything that was written after 1990. In Headcrash Bruce Bethke makes fun of this in a hilarious way. The book is a parody of the most common cyberpunk tropes and he even makes fun of the term cyberpunk itself. At a certain point in the story, the hero of the book, a hacker named Max Kool is introduced to several secret groups in cyberspace. There are cryopunks, cipherpunks, ciderpunks...and the worst of them all: the cyberpunks. This is clearly a very loving slap on the hand to those who complain theres not enough punk in cyberpunk... Sadly, this wonderful book is out of print and hard to come by. But if you can find it somewhere secondhand, I highly recommend giving Headcrash a shot. Its brilliant and a must-read for all cyberpunks!

Its anarchic, somewhat uncontrolled, and rather free-form. The ending is weakly executed, relying on a deus in machina that isnt really hinted at anywhere earlier in the text. But apart from that, this has got to be the funniest SF novel of the decade. Bethkes portrayal of humourless and politically correct corporate culture, and the hive-like working conditions endemic in the software business, is spot-on; he also exhibits a very un-american talent for irony and sarcasm (which seems to have flown right over the heads of some of the other people whove posted reviews here). Put the two together and you get an explosive, anarchic comedy of errors set against a backdrop that will give software engineers everywhere a shudder of deja vu.

I found this piece simply, delightfully dapper! Rather than wankering around trying to re-invent the wheel of cyber-noir (read: high tech hard boiled hard/soft sci-fi techno mysticism add water have story gumbo), this book introduces a level of cultural and technical extrapolation that simply doesnt occure elsewhere as brilliantly. For example, William Gibson, albeit a genious on an even playing field, gets very fuzzy around the edges on the technical front. Thats fine, sure, but when you pick up a book and personally HAVE an understanding of current technology, and additionally, know a bit about how that came to be, fuzzy doesnt work. Fingers need to be stuck into the proverbial stigmatas, the deeper the better, and this book delivers all the wonderful techno-babble derived from all the real nick-knacks that are and have been. Bethke has an understanding of the corporate atmosphere rivalling Scott Adams, a verve for banter similar to ol guru Douglas Adams, a perception of how artificial intelligence might actually play out that envokes Rudy Ruckers works, and an understanding of dual existence (of real geek versus virtual glam). He constructs actions, reprocutions and most of all consiquences as subtle and deep as a Haruki Murakami short story, but also makes a point of tying in all the contrived gimics (while similtaneously satiring) that have made Critin and Speilberg such wealthy men indeed. He scribes rich descriptions of settings and manages to work them into the narrative without destroying the pace (something Bruce Sterling could stand to work on). Bethke unabashedly looks at trends, gender issues, cultures (contrived and otherwise), political correctness, decades worth of ridicule vs. acceptance, Orwellian beurocracy (no one gets fired anymore, he he), Artistic derevations, HTML scripting/hotpoints (one click to nowhere)/java-esque applets vs. linear text, generational memory, musical persistency, pop/pulp mass media entertainment, coloquialisms (new and old, like quoting Star Wars/Trek without knowing where the utterance origionally came from, or caring), network games on the LAN during business hours, all this and a singing coffee maker, too. There is a lot of little things going on here, snippets of jibe and awareness that the casual tourist might easily pass by. Honestly, as a jaded, cynical reader who makes PC video games for a living, it has been truely refreshing to read a book that was so dead on target about how things are and could easily be, a book that doesnt curb bets or hide away flaws behind mystical shaman-come-author drivel. I can understand why he won his award. Phillip K. Dick had, above all else, a sense of irony. Like Phillip, Max Headroom, Jeff Noon or Neal Stephenson, Bethke has presented a piece that depicts said irony. The delightful surprise here is that Bethke (like a technogeek Hunter S. Thomson or William S. Burroughs) bothers to pull away all the curtains and pull off all the scabs to present all the oxymoronic, intermingled, ever mutating elements that create the great ironies of the world at large, now and to be. He even comments on all the resolution issues plagueing multi-player games today: to 3dfx or not to 3dfx, optimized build vs. debug, even to cache texture memory or to just run wireframe (he, of course, makes all that quit amusing, as if it werent already amusing enough). Makes for one hell of a ride, and I can only hope for more to come. Cheers!

This is the funniest cyberpunk novel I have ever read. This book takes a crack at evrything from political correctness to whacked out religion. Some parts are so funny you have to stop reading because of the tears in your eyes!

Bethke did a great job of getting into the details of network technology, extrapolating the future, including the inside jokes, and keeping the book readable. On top of all that, its funny and it has a good plot with some seriously STRANGE twists to it. With any luck, well see more books in this style from Bethke. Ill be first in line to pick one up.

A light hearted and much needed satire of a genre obsessed with being deadly serious. Someone had to write a book like this eventually, and Im glad Bethke did it. The plot is well constructed, the ending is intriguing, and the story itself is loaded with so much comic fodder and food for thought that Ive found myself re-reading this book several times, often without even intending to. Should be on every SF fans bookshelf.

Headcrash started out slowly for the first chapter, which was devoted to establishing the nerdy thought processes of the narrator. After that, it kicks into high gear and never lets up. Set in 2005, the plot is kind of a funny version of Neal Stephensons Snow Crash (without the Sumerian mythology) crossed with Jay McInerneys Bright Lights, Big City, with some doses of William Gibsons Neuromancer. The narrator works as a tech-nerd at a huge corporate conglomerate, with a horrible boss, gets fired, and is approached to cause some havoc at his former employers information database. Much of the novel is set in a virtually real Internet -- and for once, an author writing about virtual reality does NOT resort to the if you die in here, you die in reality trick. Bethke pays homage along the way to an impressive collection of pop culture: The Godfather, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sesame Street, Brave New World, and Doom and other first person shooter games among others. He takes aim at political correctness (theres a law against Ethnic Humor).

The book is worth your time!! It is on my shelf next to Microserfs and Snowchrash. The ending lives up to the title--it stops and you want more.

I think some coworkers recommended this book back when it was first published, but I refused to read it being a Gibson snob at the time. Im glad I finally read it. It immediately moved onto my short list of favorite books. The world & sense of humor kind of resemble early Shadowrun (without magic), or the Cyberpunk 2020 pen-&-paper RPG, or the Steve Jackson GURPS Cyberpunk rules.

Headcrash is a very good Cyberpunk-style book, especially considering that it is his first effort. The style is straightforward and much easier to ingest than Gibsons novels, which tend more towards the artsy end of things. I preferred Stephensons books Snowcrash and especially The Diamond Age, but Diamond Age and this book suffered the same problem: a weak ending. I dont know if it is something about this subgenre that demands obtuse/confusing endings, but I get the feeling that it is the ride, not the destination that is the point. I will certainly read any other efforts by this author-- the ride is good enough to keep me interested.