Hosts in the Shell Cyberpunk Podcast

 

HOSTS IN THE SHELL: HOW WE JACKED INTO CYBERPUNK AND ENDED UP TALKING TO RICHARD K. MORGAN

Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Okay, yes, obligatory Gibson quote deployed. We can begin.

There are moments when you look at the increasingly improbable sequence of events that constitutes your creative life and wonder whether somebody has accidentally loaded the wrong save file.

Interviewing Richard K. Morgan is one of the latest of those moments.

This week, Hosts in the Shell, the cyberpunk podcast I co-host with fellow author and professional dystopian enthusiast Jon Richter, hit Episode 70. And sitting virtually across the table from us was the man who gave the world Takeshi Kovacs.

Richard. K. Freaking. Morgan.

Yes, author of Altered Carbon. Broken Angels. Woken Furies. Black Man/Thirteen. Market Forces. Thin Air. The A Land Fit for Heroes trilogy. And now No Man's Land.

Somehow, he agreed to come onto our slightly feral little cyberpunk podcast.

Even better, he was brilliant.

So brilliant, in fact, that our conversation became a two-parter. Part One is now loose on the network: 40 minutes and 59 seconds of Morgan talking cyberpunk, writing and the worlds he has created, with Jon and me attempting to maintain the pretence that this is all perfectly normal. Buzzsprout's official description calls him a literary hero, “cyberpunk royalty”, a fascinating interviewee and a lovely bloke. Having now interviewed him, I'm not going to argue with any of those.

 Listen to Richard K. Morgan on Hosts in the Shell – Part One

But the really weird thing is tracing the fun data trail backwards to see how we got here.

ORIGIN STORY // TWO WRITERS WALK INTO A DYSTOPIA

Jon and I originally collided through the Neo Cyberpunk writing scene.

We were both contributors to Neo Cyberpunk: The Anthology, alongside a suitably dangerous collection of writers including Anna Mocikat, Matthew A. Goodwin, Nik Whittaker, Mark Everglade, James L. Graetz and others. Jon contributed Cleaners; I unleashed Buzz Kill 2.0 (now a comic too)!? Get a copy here: NEO CYBERPUNK

It was one of those gloriously indie projects where you suddenly discover that there are other people out there whose brains have apparently been damaged by the same combination of William Gibson, Blade Runner, black leather, neon, corporate dystopia and an unhealthy suspicion of technology. Yeah we’re still getting the 

The actual moment Jon and I properly met came when he invited me onto his Dark Natter podcast in 2021. Dark Natter was Jon and Liam Martin's show dissecting works of dark fiction, and I naturally responded to this opportunity by choosing Richard Stanley's magnificently grubby 1990 cyberpunk killer-robot movie Hardware.

We talked. And talked. And wandered off-topic. And came back. And wandered off again.

In other words, all the essential ingredients of Hosts in the Shell were already present.

We got on so ridiculously well that afterwards Jon floated an idea:

What if we did a podcast together?

Specifically, what if two cyberpunk writers spent unreasonable amounts of time talking about the films, books, games, comics, anime, technology and assorted cultural detritus that had infected our imaginations?

Reader, we jacked in.

That original Dark Natter encounter was eventually smuggled back into the Hosts feed as Episode 52, appropriately subtitled “the first time Jon and Matt met!” 

WELCOME TO THE SHELL

Hosts in the Shell launched in February 2022 with Akira, The Matrix Resurrections and, inevitably, Ghost in the Shell.

The basic operating system hasn't changed much since.

Jon and I pick something vaguely cyberpunk. Sometimes actually cyberpunk. Occasionally something whose cyberpunk credentials would not survive even cursory peer review. We watch/read/play it. We hit record. Then we see where the conversation takes us.

The official description remains pleasingly straightforward: we're “writers and cyberpunk fans” discussing the genre's greatest works and interviewing other cyberpunk creators. 

The guest list, however, has become increasingly surreal.

We've talked Luther Arkwright with Bryan Talbot, Altered Carbon with T R Napper, Peruvian cyberpunk with Gustaffo Vargas, Silo with Hugh Howey, non-human intelligence and considerably more with Adrian Tchaikovsky, and actually interviewed Bruce Bethke, the bloke who coined the word cyberpunk.

And now Richard K. Morgan.

If William Gibson turns up next week asking whether we've got a spare microphone, I am assuming reality has finally developed a buffer overflow.

THE COMPLETE HOSTS IN THE SHELL ARCHIVE

Because looking back through it is actually quite alarming, here is the whole glorious, malfunctioning machine so far, reconstructed from the show feed. Buzzsprout currently lists 71 releases including the original unnumbered trailer. 

TRAILER – Hosts In The Shell trailer!

S1/

E1 – Akira
E2 – The Matrix Resurrections
E3 – Ghost In The Shell
E4 – Johnny Mnemonic
E5 – Cyberpunk indie books
E6 – Total Recall
E7 – Cyberpunk philosophy
E8 – Snow Crash
E9 – Robocop
E10 – The underclass in cyberpunk
E11 – Upgrade
E12 – Luther Arkwright with creator Bryan Talbot
E13 – Batman Beyond and cyberpunk/superhero crossovers
E14 – Blade Runner
E15 – Escape From New York
E16 – Avalon: bonus episode mashup with the L0wl1f3 podcast!!
E17 – The Terminator
E18 – Cyberpunk (and psychedelic) music with Kavus Torabi of The Utopia Strong!
E19 – Neuromancer, the Sprawl Trilogy, & William Gibson
E20 – Quake
E21 – Minority Report
E22 – Cyberpunk Day special!!!
E23 – Cyberpunk body horror
E24 – Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
E25 – Christmas special: best cyberpunk of 2022!!!
E26 – Judge Dredd (vs Dredd!)
E27 – Cyberpunk 2077 (season finale!)
E28 – Bonus episode! Neo Cyberpunk: Volume 3 trailer
E29 – Audio trailer for DARK FICTION by Jon Richter
E30 – Hosts' big night out! (Plus Fanatical's Cyberpunk Dystopia Bundle)

S2/

E31 – Pluto
E32 – The Peripheral (with Tim Standish)
E33 – Audio extract from Scarred by co-Host Jon Richter
E34 – Fallout
E35 – Cowboy Bebop (with Killtopia creator Dave Cook)
E36 – Red Dwarf
E37 – Demolition Man (with Matthew A Goodwin)
E38 – Iain M Banks
E39 – Gareth L Powell talks William Gibson's Burning Chrome and other influences
E40 – Larry Kuperman from Nightdive Studios talks System Shock, science fiction, and the art of video game preservation
E41 – Westworld
E42 – Christmas special with ultra-exclusive guest... err, ChatGPT
E43 – Terminator Zero (with James L Graetz)
E44 – Alita: Battle Angel
E45 – The Fifth Element (with Don Hartshorn)
E46 – Strange Days
E47 – Altered Carbon (with T R Napper)
E48 – Casshern
E49 – The Matrix trilogy (with Keith Anthony Baird)
E50 – Nemesis
E51 – Peruvian cyberpunk with Gustaffo Vargas
E52 – Hardware (bonus episode from the Dark Natter archives – the first time Jon and Matt met!)
E53 – Season finale!! Ghost In The Shell (2017 live action movie)

S3/

E54 – Hosts In The Shell season 3: a shambolic cyber-trailer!
E55 – Ghost In The Shell: Standalone Complex
E56 – Watch Dogs: Legion (with SD Miller)
E57 – Alien: Earth
E58 – Elysium (with Phil Stitelmann)
E59 – I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
E60 – Cyberpunk villains (with Tim Standish)
E61 – Short Circuit
E62 – An interview with Hugh Howey, creator of the Silo series
E63 – Mad Max
E64 – An interview with Bruce Bethke, author of 'Cyberpunk' (and inventor of the word!)
E65 – Streets of Rage
E66 – An interview with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of Children of Time and Shadows of the Apt
E67 – Robocop (the 2014 remake)
E68 – Philip K. Dick (with multi-award-winning cyberpunk author T R Napper)
E69 – Fallout (season 2)
E70 – An interview with Richard K Morgan, author of Altered Carbon! (Part 1)

HIGH TECH. LOW LIFE. TWO CYBER-IDIOTS WITH MICROPHONES.

Looking at that list, what makes me happiest isn't really the number of episodes (there are more on the way) but rather the trajectory.

We started because two writers discovered they could happily enjoy an hour arguing about cyberpunk. Since then we've talked to indie writers, filmmakers, comic creators, musicians, game people, award winners, bestselling authors and some genuine architects of the genre.

And yet it still basically feels like Jon and me having the a fun conversation just like we had that first time on Dark Natter.

Only now, occasionally, Richard K. Morgan is sitting there too.

Which is frankly flipping ridiculous but wonderful!?

So if your idea of a good time involves replicants, cyborgs, megacorps, murderous artificial intelligences, dystopian wastelands, questionable 1990s straight-to-video action movies, cybernetic existential crises and two middle-aged British authors arguing about whether something is actually cyberpunk...

You have found your people.

Welcome to the Shell.

We have such sights to show you.

Jack into Hosts In The Shell on Buzzsprout

Read my last post about the podcast HERE

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION review (or is there?)

 

THERE IS NO ANTIMEMETICS DIVISION (or is there?)

by QNTM

reviewed by █████ Adcock

I read There Is No Antimemetics Division on my trip to Palestine.

Apparently.

I remember opening it. I remember thinking this is exactly my sort of sci-fi-shit. I remember something about ███████████, and a woman called Marie Quinn and the deeply upsetting possibility that the reason you can’t remember where you put your keys isn’t middle age but actually an extra-dimensional conceptual predator chewing pieces out of your brain.

After that things get a little… ██████████████.

qntm’s spectacularly weird sci-fi horror asks ‘how the fuck do you fight something when remembering it exists is precisely what you can’t do?’

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

Oh.

Fuck.

Imagine The X-Files getting drunk with House of Leaves and you might be somewhere close.

Antimemes themselves are ideas/entities/things which resist being remembered or communicated. And qntm doesn’t just use that as a clever monster gimmick. He lets the infection eat the novel itself. Information vanishes. Documents lie. People disappear. Connections you thought you understood suddenly have █████████ where their emotional support beams used to be.

At one point we get the deliciously broken:

“we can't even write the reason why we can't write it down down,”

Which may be the most accurate synopsis possible.

There’s something genuinely horrible here too. Not jump-scare horrible. Not there’s a bloke with an axe behind the shower curtain horrible. This is ontological horror. The growing suspicion that reality has already lost and nobody noticed because not noticing is literally how the enemy works. It made my brain itch in the best possible way.

And then forget that it was itching.

████████████████████████████████████
██████ DO NOT THINK ABOUT THIS ██████
████████████████████████████████████

The prose moves like a bastard. It’s funny, horrible and occasionally weirdly moving, often overlapping. Full of people trying to save humanity using memory drugs, bureaucracy, insane contingency plans and the desperate hope that somebody wrote something down before everyone forgot why the fuck they were holding the pen.

And buried in all that nightmare fuel is possibly the coolest mission statement in recent sci-fi:

“Ideas can be killed… With better ideas.”

YES.

That’s the good shit.

Because underneath the antimemes, ████████ and reality-devouring horrors, There Is No Antimemetics Division is ultimately about something surprisingly human: what remains of us when memory goes? If love is forgotten, did it matter? If nobody remembers your sacrifice, was it still heroic?

I had thoughts about this but unfortunately ████████████████████████████████████████████████████.

So.

Should you read it?

Absolutely.

Have I explained what happens?

No.

Could I?

███████████████.

Did it happen at all?

Out of a potential 5, you have to go with a Darkmatters:

ööööö

(5 - because ████████████████████. Wait. Which book were we talking about?..)

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...

T R Napper Interview

Matt Adcock (@cleric20)

meets T R Napper (@TRNapper)

With his latest book 'This Machine Kills Billionaires' hot off the press, I got to ask the man himself some questions... Check my review of the book here

Matt: Was This Machine Kills Billionaires born from righteous political anger or ???

T R: Strangely enough I don’t think it was anger, although I can see how a reader might wonder. Obviously, the seed of the story came from current events – oligarchy, dizzying technological progress, and the fusion of the two. But this duo are also core concerns of cyberpunk, and in that way, something I’ve written about throughout my career. 

Matt: Huldo is being taught ethics by people who ultimately want to own, regulate and monetise it. How should / can we control something potentially godlike?

T R: Well we can’t. That’s the whole problem. 

Matt: The book commits the dangerous act of making the reader occasionally think, “Well, perhaps the murder machine has a point.” How much fun was it pushing us across that moral line before making us realise where we were standing?

T R: I’m glad that was your reaction, and I’m glad it made you think. While I have very strong political and ethical convictions, I’m not much interested in beating the reader over the head with them. The most engaging stories, for me, have a certain ambiguity at their heart, and force the reader to think for themselves. 

The thing is, I was pushing myself across that line. I was taking a certain type of moral imperative to its limit, and seeing where I ended up. It’s fair to say there was a certain vicarious pleasure in writing the demise of several (fictional) odious billionaires – but by the same token, the story forces you to think about the difficult questions even this poses. Something that seems quite simple is actually fiendishly complex. 

Matt: Cyberpunk has always been suspicious of corporations, but the real world now appears to be competing aggressively with the genre. Is it getting harder to write dystopian satire?

T R: I don’t think it’s harder to be writing dystopias, because the permutations and evolutions of dystopia are myriad, and they are a fascinating territory to explore. We are living in a timeline that sees us slowing sliding into dystopia, where inch by inch day by day we give up more of ourselves and our autonomy. We’re sleep walking into this future, and I think art is one place we can effectively call this out. 

As for satire, this is certainly harder. How many times have you gone onto social media and wondered if a headline is from The Onion, or a deliberate troll, or real life? 

Distinguishing the real, in general, is becoming much more difficult, I should add. Videos, pictures, text – indeed objective reality – has been shattered and so many are living in their own shards. 

Matt: You’re brilliant at showing that technology rarely destroys everybody equally. The wealthy get immortality, optimisation and private bunkers; everyone else gets an app informing them they’ve been replaced. Can cyberpunk represent against the uber rich?

T R: Thank you. I mean William Gibson said it: the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. One of the things I’ve felt important in cyberpunk is to explore what the future does to us, and how specific groups of people experience the future differently. 

As a character says in one of the bonus short stories contained in the collection: ‘If you were poor, you suffered the future shock. Your whole world turned upside down. But for the rich, the future was just a news item. Never a shock, not even an inconvenience.’

Cyberpunk can certainly call this out, and place it in narrative form, so I suppose that in this sense it can represent. But what changes? I’m not sure, mate, but by god we need to maintain our rage. 

Matt: Huldo can examine morality at a scale and speed humans cannot, but it learns its values from humans, which seems less like education and more like deliberately infecting a new intelligence. Did writing it make you more or less hopeful about AGI?

T R: The vision I have here is of the best possible AGI. It would’ve been easy to show a malicious one, or chromium skeletons with glowing red eyes. But I thought it far more interesting to show a new god that is, at its core, a deeply moral being. The book, I hope, shows the flaws in allowing even the most benevolent of tyrants to gain absolute power. No one being should hold this much power, and yet Silicon Valley and its equivalents across the globe are desperately trying to create the singularity. 

The question of god (in the form of an AGI) forces us – among other things – to consider free will, because here is a god that might deny a choice it doesn’t agree with. A new god, any god, that can actively manifest its will in reality, is terrifying. 

LLMs won’t gain these powers. They are a dead end in terms of the development of AGI. I tend to think it is further away than some currently claim (I still believe true AGI is decades away, at minimum, and do not believe such a creation will ever be self-aware). 

Matt: Imagine Huldo has read your complete back catalogue and is now conducting your ethical performance review. Does T. R. Napper survive and what incriminating evidence does the machine find first?

T R: Oh Huldo would barely glance at me. I was a humanitarian aid worker for a decade, and I’ve working in the disability sector for the last seven years, in addition to my writing. I work also work with military personnel suffering PTSD, in an arts therapy program. 

I’m one of those chumps who’s never motivated by money. A fool who’s never sought to enrich himself at the expense of others. Whatever my numerous flaws, none are of the psychopathic CEO/Dictator strain that would draw the attention of Huldo. 

I’m small fry, and Huldo is only interested in the whales. 

Matt: The stories are angry, but they are not nihilistic. Community, loyalty and small acts of care keep surviving in the wreckage. Do you consciously need that thread of humanity in your work, or does it fight its way in despite your best dystopian efforts?

T R: I’ve always argued that cyberpunk is a humanist literature. So I don’t think I have to do it consciously as such, as I always start from the human. I’m always interested in the human cost of this dizzying technological progress, the consequences of the reckless greed of the ruling class.

My approach, in a way, begins from community, dignity, loyalty, and love, and if it’s angry it’s because I’m angry at what is happening to us, and if it is bleak, it is because our most plausible futures are looking quite bleak. 

Our humanity is worth fighting for. That is the essence of cyberpunk. 

Grab your copies of T R Napper's books and find out more about him here

>>> Imagine a cyberpunk world where the Earth is becoming hell? One man with powers and his robot sidekick might be our only hope... This is high tech / low life meeting the forces of hell!?

Click banner below to hear a FREE 5 mins sample of my audiobook which is becoming a graphic novel too)...