This week’s Guest Star is long time friend of the Gutter Jared Shurin. Jared is the editor of The Big Book of Cyberpunk. His previous anthologies have been finalists for (and usually lost) the Hugo Awards, World Fantasy Award, British Science Fiction Awards, and British Fantasy Awards. He’s a certified barbecue judge.

~~~

Cyberpunk and barbecue are both bastard offspring of systemic betrayal.  

Cyberpunk literature is perhaps best exemplified by William Gibson’s famous Neuromancer, now celebrating its 40th birthday. It grew from both post-modernism and speculative fiction, and is now more of a broad movement than a clearly defined genre.   

Cyberpunk can be an aesthetic–neon and rainy. Cyberpunk also can stand for consistent themes, such as discussions of our relationship with technology and a technocratic society. Cyberpunk can also describe a mode of writing and creating, when using new technologies or experimental techniques. If someone refers to a written work as ‘cyberpunk,’ it could be because it has a deep discussion of techno-feudal Silicon Valley culture, intrusive surveillance, or the increasingly-fuzzy boundaries between real and artificial life. A ‘cyberpunk’ work could be co-written by an AI, published on processed microplastics, or distributed as a zine, liner notes, or series of in-game manifestos. A book can be cyberpunk because of how it looks, how it feels, what it says, how it was made, or any combination of the four. To this day ‘cyberpunk’ works transcend genre classifications, and continues to push the boundaries of what even constitutes a ‘book’.

Barbecue is similarly elusive. Or barbeque. Or BBQ. Even the name is ill-defined.

Like cyberpunk, barbecue is best described as mode or a movement, rather than a specific category of dishes. Barbecue, too, has, or is, an aesthetic: casual, open air, the scent of burning wood and searing meat. It is a flavor profile: smoke and fire; fatty, buttery, deep and rich. It is a context: one has, or goes to, a barbecue, which is a specific occasion with its own customs and traditions. And barbecue is a technique or process, one that is distinct from its imitators. It is a specific, if varied, series of methods that involve cooking foods slowly, using the flame or heat from wood, charcoal or–god forbid–gas. ‘To barbecue’ is ‘to grill’ as Neuromancer is to a self-published novel about breasty androids boobing boobily under the light of fake-Kanji neon. It is an appropriation of the aesthetic without any contemplation of the themes underneath. 

Of the two, Cyberpunk has a more modern origin story. Without being unduly reductive, a bunch of authors took in the early 1980s, saw the spiraling inequalities of Reaganism, the mass proliferation of lowest-common-denominator culture, and the meteoric rise of personal computing. Cyberpunk was a means of speculating on what futures could result from a fusion of these three trends. What, if any, were the limits of socio-economic disparity? How could pockets of local culture resist incorporation? Would technology further empower or disempower us? Cyberpunk was a way of painting the extremes of the haves and have-nots; warning us of the excesses of the former and imagining new avenues for the latter. 

Cyberpunk exists in, and because of, capitalism’s long shadow. But it also casts a (flickering, neon) light of its own, as a mode of resistance. Although oft-painted as a ‘dystopian’ genre, cyberpunk is more dynamic. Dystopia implies a finality to the system, whereas cyberpunk perpetually looks for new ways to challenge it. Corporate empires control the financial system? Cyberpunk posits a black market and the barter economy. The rich get the best toys? The rest find ways to invent and cobble together new ones. All culture is crushed into a homogenous whole? Old traditions are maintained and new spirituality developed. To cherry-pick examples from The Big Book of Cyberpunk, in Justina Robson’s “The Girl Hero’s Mirror Says He’s Not the One”, the protagonist wrestles with her own conditioning to become more than the killing machine she was socially-engineered to be. In Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s “Études”, we see the triumph of soulful, human effort over technologically-aided proficiency. Brandon O’Brien’s “Fallenangel.dll” has clever scavengers repurposing the tools of a police state for rebellion. Cyberpunk is always imagining forms of rebellion, new uses of technology, creative kit-bashing of old parts, and inventive and innovative ways to build, hack or re-appropriate what rightfully belongs to the people.

Barbecue has older and deeper roots. Barbecue was born, as historian Adrian Miller notes, in the culture of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas.  In retellings of Columbus’ voyage, there are written mentions of how people cooked over shallow pits and open flames as early as 1513. As Adrian Miller writes in Black Smoke:

‘Foreshadowing what Europeans would do with much of the Americas, Columbus and crew took and devoured everything they considered edible, without asking permission.’ (Black Smoke)

Miller also finds that the techniques of cooking outdoors, in and over pits, using smoke and flame, were passed from Native Americans to African Americans. Sometimes directly, as in the case of Henry ‘Poppa’ Miller, progenitor of Kansas City-style barbecue, whose father was Cherokee, and learned from his family. But the techniques and traditions were more likely to be passed along indirectly, through stories and styles that fused with West African, Caribbean and other culinary traditions that shaped the cuisine and still continue to this day. 

Barbecue is inextricably linked to slavery. Miller outlines this thoroughly  in Black Smoke: how formal plantation barbecues were political spectacles used to ‘justify’ slavery and how excellent Black chefs were valued for their barbecue skills and a  rare few even managed to earn their freedom. He argues how barbecue, like slavery, became an intrinsic part of Southern culture. 

While Black cooks were forced to produce elaborate meals for their enslavers, barbecue also played a much more meaningful role within the Black community. Barbecue was well-suited for ‘secret meals’. A whole pig could be spirited away, and cooked slowly in a pit–avoiding the open flame that would give the game away. It would be eaten at night, surreptitiously; often following  a furtive religious service. These barbecues were the means of an oppressed community to come together and enjoy a taste of freedom. There is a striking dichotomy between the mass-produced spectacle for the oppressor and these more intimate and ceremonial occasions. The former is an appropriation; the latter a means of resistance. To this day, ‘barbecue’ still implies a community event. One does not host a ‘grill’. 

Barbecue continued to thrive and adapt in the wake of industrialisation. The expansion of barbecue followed the path of the railways and the Black labor that built them. Wherever industrial hubs sprung up, labor was necessary, and barbecue came with it. Barbecue requires skill, not tools. It is generous to inexpensive and undesirable forms of meat–offal, ribs, and other discarded offcuts. It makes the inedible into the delicious, thanks to the skill of the pitmaster and the care of slow-cooking. As barbecue spread across the nation, it drew on new ingredients and techniques, informed by the availability of ingredients, but also the heritage of other immigrant and exploited communities. Historian John Shelton Reed proudly states that American barbecue is the equivalent of ‘European wines or cheese; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes.’ The spices and sauces of barbecue are the true American melting pot, brewed under the nose of the ruling class. 

Barbecue was a tradition of the colonized, the enslaved, and the exploited. It served as a form of culinary culture, a way of self-expression, and of ‘hacking’ discarded materials into something new and beautiful. It was a way of survival–making meals out of the unpalatable. It was a way of thriving–creating value from nothing. And it was a means of resistance–a way to create and bind and reinforce community resilience in the face of oppression. 

Admittedly, to compare barbecue and cyberpunk does the former a disservice. Barbecue is a movement that was borne organically and authentically, from the experiences of marginalized people looking to find ways to survive and thrive. Cyberpunk, by contrast, feels slight. It is a movement constructed on university campuses and science fiction conventions, far from the shadow of slavery. Especially given that, at its inception, cyberpunk was largely the playground of white men. However, that founding cabal of ‘punks– Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker and others used their privilege to raise awareness of, and equip us to combat a new form of oppression that they foresaw. Technology, specifically the proliferation of personal, globally-connected computing, could be the tool of the system or a means to challenge it. In the initial cyberpunk works, they gave voice to this concern, but also encouraged imaginative forms of resistance. 

Perhaps most importantly, cyberpunk quickly expanded beyond this initial cohort of writers, becoming a global literary form, and one adopted then expanded, by a vast diversity of voices. The cyberpunks got the ball rolling, but the ensuing avalanche of works came because everyone could utilize this form as a means to describe their own possible futures. Authors such as Micha, Nisi Shawl, Gwyneth Jones, and Candas Jane Dorsey quickly joined the mix of prominent cyberpunk voices. There’s something remarkable in that the most prominent cyberpunk figure today is Janelle Monáe: queer, Black and working class. They continue to push the boundaries of transmedia storytelling, and also exemplify how cyberpunk has transcended its monocultural origins to become something truly intersectional.

Like barbecue, cyberpunk, as a technique of telling stories about our uncertain relationship with technology, has been able to adapt to local contexts and incorporate local ingredients. It was, and is, a wake of speaking about contextual concerns ranging from American cultural imperialism (James Lovegrove’s “Britworld™), social erasure (Khalid Kaki’s “Operation Daniel”), toxic and intrusive work culture (Yun Ko-eun’s “P.”), or rampant corruption (Victor Pelevin’s “The Yuletide Cyberpunk Yarn, or Christmas_Eve- 117.DIR”).  Cyberpunk has an unparalleled ability to incorporate new perspectives and local contexts into its universal themes. Not unlike barbecue.

The metaphor is well and truly strained, it is probably fair to confess what truly unites barbecue and cyberpunk is my love for them both. Oddly, I got into both at the same time. I grew up in Kansas City (like Pat Cadigan and Janelle Monáe), so an appreciation of barbecue is a part of my own DNA. Most of my family’s cooking was done outdoors. My Bar Mitzvah was (infamously and sacrilegiously) catered by a local barbecue joint. I’ve been a lifelong member of the Kansas City Barbecue Society. It is my heritage, and a part of my identity. But so too is cyberpunk. I’m far from a hacker, and even further from a punk, but cyberpunk helped inform my view of the world. Like all 90s geeks, I saw in Neuromancer–and in the pages of Wired, OMNI and 2600–an exciting and terrifying future. Dire predictions of techno-totalitarian rule sat side by side with compelling, aspirational tales of scrawny heroes like me getting to Fight The Man (and still be home by 8 to watch ST:TNG). I saw a future made by brains, not brawn and an uncertain world that was equal parts promise and blind terror. At the time that I first trained as a barbecue judge, I was also writing my term paper on the language of Neuromancer. Cyberpunk too is part of my identity.

And that, if you’ll excuse the outrageous sentiment, the beauty of both movements, literary and culinary, is that they have, by choice or circumstance, become open to everyone. Both barbecue and cyberpunk are inherently invitational and communal, adaptive movements that allow anyone to participate. That’s why they’re both rebellious: there’s no permission required to be a cyberpunk or a barbecuer. They’re also why they’re both hopeful. They’re spaces for everyone to grow, share, and experiment.

Further reading :

• Black Smoke by Adrian Miller
• The Prophets of Smoked Meat by Daniel Vaughn
• Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J Murphy and Lars Schmeink
• Mirrorshades, edited by Bruce Sterling

~~~

Jared Shurin is the editor of The Big Book of Cyberpunk.(And in the UK find it here). His previous anthologies have been finalists for (and usually lost) the Hugo Awards, World Fantasy Award, British Science Fiction Awards, and British Fantasy Awards. He’s a certified barbecue judge.

Keep up with his doings at www.raptorvelocity.com.