Ladies and gentlemen,
It is my utmost pleasure to finally announce that I will very soon be self-publishing my debut novel, Accra, as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle. If this is your first time hearing about it, Accra is a psychological mystery/thriller set in near-future Africa, during a time of widespread brain-computer interfacing. You can read more about it here. I’ll be giving out more information and exact details about this release over the coming weeks, but all I can say for now is that it will be available for purchase pretty early next year. The first print edition will later be released in time for the book launch in Accra, in the summer of 2012.
Deciding whether or not to self-publish wasn’t an easy process, but I found myself steadily gravitating towards the idea over the past few months, and now, I’m quite confident that this is the very best course of action; all things considered. From a philosophical standpoint, it’s quite clear to see that the current stream of emerging technologies (such as digital books) are about to change the nature of our civilization in many more ways than we can possibly imagine, and so it seems to me that the most logical thing to do in the face of such monumental change is simply to accept it and keep moving forward, rather than resist and stagnate; at the risk of regression.
Additionally, there are many fast-growing industries providing online services which give us [non-corporate persons] access to increasingly powerful means of production, thus enriching the free market of creativity and simultaneously overturning one of the core industrial paradigms of the past few thousand years; the importance of [starting] capital. Ten years ago, I would probably have had to sit on my manuscript for years before it could ever see the light of day, but today, I have the power to make it available to billions of potential readers across the globe, and all for a grand total cost of zero.
These are just a few of the reasons that helped me to embrace self-publishing and digital books sooner, rather than later (for both reading and writing). We’re still several decades [of research, design, and experimentation] away from perfecting the fine art of digital storytelling, but it only makes sense that we begin exploring this new domain in earnest, as early as possible. But don’t get me wrong; I’m no hurry to see the end of the printed word. I’m actually a lot more attached to books than I’m normally willing to admit, but I’ve managed to reconcile myself with the reality that print has already been made obsolete. The order of things has been permanently changed; for better or for worse. All that remains is the implementation.
I chose the Kindle for its ubiquity, functionality, and quite frankly, the sheer potential to generate relatively high amounts of revenue. I do disagree with the extent to which Amazon strives to monopolize the book business (among others), but hopefully we’ll see more companies stepping in to provide equal or even more competitive services as we approach the final mass exodus towards a completely digital society. In the future, I hope to explore the massive potential of digital storytelling in all its various incarnations; to step outside the boundaries of our past and embrace the full potential of our future.
Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that my writing is only a small part of a much wider [albeit diffused] effort to promote all kinds of science fiction pertaining to the African people. I’d like to encourage you all to support the movement by reading and spreading the word about African writers such as Nnedi Okorafor, Ivor Hartmann, and Lauren Beukes, as well as writers like Alastair Reynolds and Ian MacDonald, all of whom are boldly exploring the immense creative potential that this genre has to offer.
I’ve had one hell of a trip writing this novel, and I sincerely cannot wait for you all to read it. We’ve finally arrived at on the outskirts of our destination, and I’m sure those of you who’ve been with us since the very beginning will be especially glad when the novel is finally released. But even as this threshold looms before us, our journey is still far from over. I strongly believe that the coming decade will usher in a tidal wave of fiction concerning the future of Africa and the developing world as a whole; a wave of stories quite unlike anything the world has ever seen before. So please fasten your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen; we’re in for a wild ride...
Yours truly,
Jonathan
Hello cyberpunks and -punkettes, here’s a new article of mine that’s just been published by cyberculture legend R. U. Sirius on his latest webzine; Acceler8or. This one is entitled ‘Developing Worlds: Beyond the Frontiers of Science Fiction‘, and here’s the opening paragraph:
Imagine a young African boy staring wide-eyed at the grainy images of an old television set tuned to a VHF channel; a child discovering for the first time the sights and sounds of a wonderfully weird world beyond city limits. This is one of my earliest memories; growing up during the mid-nineties in a tranquil compound house in Maamobi; an enclave of the Nima suburb, one of the most notorious slums in Accra. Besides the government-run Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, only two other television stations operated in the country at the time, and satellite television was way beyond my family’s means. Nevertheless, all kinds of interesting programming from around the world occasionally found its way onto those public broadcasts. This was how I first met science fiction; not from the tomes of great authors, but from distilled approximations of their grand visions.
Be sure to check out some of the other interesting articles on his site as well. Also, I’m currently on holiday in London for a few weeks, and anyone intetested in meeting up a coffee and chat can feel free to buzz me on my gmail. Any time I lose here is being made up for with tons of sci-fi inspiration from this mind-boggingly surreal post-industrial megapolis. I’ll be back with more updates and comments on this insightful experience.
That badass piece of artwork you are looking at is the cover for the first issue of Jungle Jim, a bi-monthly African pulp fiction magazine. They officially launched at The Book Lounge in Cape Town on Wednesday, 31st May. My short story ‘Virus’ will appear in Issue #4, which is due on July 15. Check out their website for more info.
Writing a novel is like watching a tree grow in real-time. It can be a genuinely wholesome and fulfilling experience, but it’s mostly a slow and agonizingly painful process, especially after you’ve come to love the little world you’ve created and can’t wait to share it with the big one. This month marks exactly two years since I got an itch to write a sci-fi novel, and even though I’m still months away from the finish line, at the current stage of development, I’ve never been so close. The next few months should mark the final stage of this arduous journey. In the meantime, I happen to be a firm believer in shameless self-promotion, so in this blog post I’ll be dropping a few hints of what you can expect from the upcoming novel.
Which shall henceforth be known as Accra.
Unless my publisher comes up with some bright ideas. But I’ve recently started to consider taking the path less traveled–that of self-publishing. Since my father’s untimely passing just over two months ago, I’ve begun to have the sneaking suspicion that life may in fact be too short to sit around waiting for some benevolent cartel to lend me a printing press, when technology empowers me now more than ever to circumvent that quaint bit of bureaucracy. I know there’s a much higher commercial risk involved in self-publishing, but it seems more in tune with my personal values to continually adopt emerging technologies and evolve beyond outdated models. Either way, I’ll be giving the idea a lot of thought in the coming months.
And now, for a brief description of the novel.
Accra is a speculative fiction novel set in the year 2057 AD, at a time when neuroscience has reverse-engineered the brain to uncover the inner workings of the human mind. Two-thirds of the world’s population have been implanted with biocores–organic microcomputers that interface between the brain and cyberspace, linking billions of people worldwide to the wireless Grid. The novel is a threefold narrative that weaves together the stories of a desert soldier, a data thief, and a cyber-crime investigator who are thrust into the heart of a dark conspiracy in one turbulent night on the fast-paced, hi-tech streets of Accra.
And a similarly brief synopsis.
A teenage girl leaves her home in a coastal village to find work in the city of Accra, but after months of failing to find employment she is led into the dangerous world of cyber-crime, where her life quickly begins to spiral out of control. A retired cyber-crime investigator is called in by the Accra Police Force to deal with a cyber-terrorist threat, but the series of inexplicable occurrences that follow lead him to the blood-stained trail of a sinister plot in the corridors of power. These two stories are inextricably linked with a third; the gradually unfolding memories of a mercenary soldier, narrating a life of struggle and oppression in the heart of the Green Sahara; a story which culminates in a star-cross’d quest for freedom and justice, where all roads lead to the city of Accra.
A traditional cyberpunk dish prepared with African spices and served by the fireside.
Accra is equal parts mystery, thriller, and adventure, corresponding roughly to each protagonist’s storyline. The Sahara Desert will be prominently featured in the novel, incorporating some minor techno-ecological adjustments, as you might imagine. Naturally, the Accra metropolis will be the setting for the most part of the novel. My love for Africa and it’s unique heritage will be conspicuously evident on a page or two, but my vision of a future Africa is by no means boiled down to guns and roses. Accra is an earnest attempt to paint a plausible and comprehensive near-future scenario for the continent as a whole, and that means working out the nitty-gritty implications of diverse existing trends into the future and documenting the results; be they good, bad, or ugly.
About the writing process and final product.
Most of the time I have spent on this novel has gone into developing the story world, as well as the plot and narrative structure, which form the centerpiece of the story. It should be complex and labyrinthine enough to make your head spin, but simple enough to make you go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the end. It should ultimately leave you with more questions than answers, or conversely, with more answers than questions. Expect lots of action, drama, hard science, black magic, dark romance, and transhumanist philosophical quandaries, but above all, expect the unexpected.
Whatever that means.
I hope I haven’t given away too much, or conversely, that I haven’t been too cryptic. There’s a lot more that I haven’t said or even hinted at, but like any writer who’s worth his ink, I’d do well to save the best for last. Finally, I have a serious question for anyone reading this: Would you advise me to search for a traditional, prestigious paperback publisher, or be a cowboy and self-publish online? I’m not trying to skew the results, but the latter would mean the novel being available by the end of this year.
Yours Truly,
AfroCyberPunk
What does it really mean to say that we live in a fast-changing world? The meaning of this well-worn phrase seems to have narrowed greatly over time to focus mainly on economic development while glossing over the many social implications of technological progress. The world has only just begun to grasp the importance of this aspect of development early in the 21st century, and there is so much more we can discover by paying attention to the critical new developments that are occurring all around us.
The sakawa phenomenon is one example that hits close to home, particularly if you live in West Africa, where the practice is known by several different names. The true meaning of the word is unclear to me, but I first encountered the term in reference to certain types of rituals performed by traditional priests with the specific intention of granting obscene wealth to the seeker. As a rule, the wealth comes at the cost of an early death along with a similarly prohibitive bill, livestock and alcohol inclusive. The practice has undergone a rapid transformation over the past few years, having been cut out from the past somehow and pasted into the future, in a unique fusion between high technology and centuries-old tradition.
The cyber-crime epidemic in West Africa has been the main driver of this change, luring untold thousands of young men and women to taking the fastest route out of the poverty trap. Despite the fact that these youth are growing increasingly sophisticated in their schemes, a significant number of them seem to be turning to traditional belief as a means to guarantee a high rate of success. Those who engage in this practice, dubbed sakawa boys, employ the services of traditional priests with the purpose of supernaturally enforcing the co-operation of their ‘clients;’ the potential victims of their online scams.
Sakawa boys have managed to hack Africa’s natural mystic; redefine her unique cosmology, and twist it to suit their purposes. As destructive as their activities are, we still can learn from this fascinating illustration the way in which cultural evolution occurs over time, mediated by technology, in constant exchange with the rest of the world, growing ever more nuanced and intricate with each step forward. I expect to see many more of such interactions between culture and technology in the near future, and I’m sure that if we pay more attention to such phenomena we will be better able to navigate through the turbulent waters of our near future.
***
This article was originally published in the December 2010 edition of DUST Magazine. It’s just a thought to keep in mind for now, but I plan to deal extensively with the sakawa phenomenon in the near future.
Greetings Fellow Sojourners,
This is your elusive Captain speaking. Despite my notable absence from the helm of this spaceship, I’d like to assure you all that we are still directly on course for the boundaries of the contemporary imagination which have yet to be breached. At least, those of you following my Twitter account (@afrocyberpunk) will know that I’m still alive and profusely tweeting.
To say that I am currently going through a difficult time would be an understatement. I spent the first quarter of this year juggling the obscene demands of my university with my characteristically turbulent personal life, and just when I thought things couldn’t get much worse, I lost my father to a prolonged illness. This occurred two days before my birthday which, needless to say, has been the worst birthday of my life. I’m still in the process of adjusting to this new reality sans my long-time mentor and commander-in-chief, but if anything, he taught me to be strong and defiant in the face of adversity, and I have also been fortunate to receive a great deal of support from many admirable people.
My father was a humble man with big dreams and grand ideals who succeeded in infecting me with that same bug. While I will always miss him, it’s obvious to me that I must do everything I can to make up for his absence, so that the course of history may ultimately be improved in spite of this tragedy. And while my life will never be the same, I still find solace in that the future of African science-fiction remains as bright as ever, due in no small part to his contribution in my life. I now work with a heightened sense of duty and urgency; for all that I am, I owe to him, and everything that I do from this point onward must exceed even his grandest aspirations. In this regard, I ask you all to tighten your seat belts and hang on for the ride of the century.
Yours Truly,
AfroCyberPunk
A new year has arrived, and the world is on the brink of utter chaos. Heralded by bomb blasts in Nigeria, this new year sees the Ivory Coast caught in the grips of a post-election crisis with no end in sight, and a new nation due to born from the troubled womb of Sudan.
The picture isn’t any less bleak around the world, with the West having to retake a hard course in economics, Wikileaks publicly disrobing decades of international diplomacy, and the war on terrorism fuelling the rise of fundamentalism.
What have we learned from all this besides the fact that diplomats lie regularly to our faces, dictators don’t like to lose elections, and the school of hard knocks has an exceptionally bad macroenomics program?
Precious little, but there is still a lot we can be happy about. We can look forward to another year of ground-breaking scientific discoveries, the next steps in the evolution of personal computing, or the very thought of being at the frontier of a brave new world.
I’m happy to finally be on the home stretch of writing my novel; to have the finish line so clearly within sight. After twenty months of development, its more than a relief. With any luck, the world will still be there when I start looking for a publisher.
Season’s Greetings,
AfroCyberPunk
Hi all, I’ve been underground for some time thanks to inhumane levels of schoolwork, but I’m back to keep this blog grinding through Christmas. At the moment, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been featured in the December edition of DUST, a free magazine based in Accra. An acronym for Discover Urban Style and Trend, DUST celebrates urban life in Accra and documents the many flavors of culture that thrive in this city.
As well as publishing my short story, Virus, the magazine also contains an article I wrote called Sakawa Boys: Hacking the Natural Mystic, which touches on the confluence between cyber-culture and black magic here in Accra. I intend to further explore the issue on this blog in the near-future, but for now you can have a teaser from the online version of the magazine.
You can find the December 2010 edition of DUST here: http://scr.bi/hPdoMi
In a freak streak of luck dating back to my radio appearance in September, I received an invitation from African Writing Magazine to submit an article as a guest blogger on their website. The article I wrote was originally titled ‘On the Future of African Science Fiction,’ but due to its similarity with the title of my first post on AfroCyberPunk, it has been changed to ‘Fast-Forward: The Future of Science Fiction in Africa.’ Here’s an excerpt of the article:
Think about the future, just for a moment. I want you to envision what life might be like on this planet in about fifty years from now. Even if you aren’t a fan of science fiction, you might conjure up images of grand societies with laser weapons and jet packs, of course. But in that same future, allow your mind to travel to Africa. What do you see? Can you imagine what life might be like for someone living on the streets of Nairobi, Brazzaville, or Johannesburg fifty years from now? You’ll probably find that it’s not very easy to imagine Africa in the distant future, simply because there isn’t enough African science and speculative fiction to fuel the imagination. The genre has never gained a major following among African readers for good reason; the widely optimistic view of technological progress underlying traditional science fiction simply doesn’t resonate with much of the experience on the continent.
Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (Naptip) said officials visited Mali this month to follow up “horrendous reports” from victims, aid workers and clergy in Mali.
They said there were hundreds of brothels, each housing up to 200 girls, run by Nigerian “madams” who force them to work against their will and take their earnings.
“We are talking of thousands and thousands of girls,” Simon Egede, Executive Secretary of Naptip, told a news conference in Abuja.
“We are talking of certainly between 20,000 and about 40,000,” he said, but did not give details of how the figure had been reached.
In a statement, Mr Egede said girls were “held in bondage for the purposes of forced sexual exploitation and servitude or slavery-like practices”.
From Scotland, sans Love: The Toxic Waste Blues
Tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic waste from Scotland are being illegally dumped in Africa and Asia every year with the help of organised criminal gangs, according to an investigation by the Scottish Government’s environmental watchdog.
Mountains of broken televisions, defunct microwaves, worn tyres, contaminated paper and other waste exported from Scottish homes and businesses end up threatening the environment and endangering the health of people in Nigeria, Zanzibar, Ghana, Indonesia, Pakistan, China and elsewhere.
Meltwater Foundation: Starting Up the Start-ups
“Phase (1) of MEST is a rigorous two-year program where fully sponsored students, known as Entrepreneurs in Training (EITs), receive hands-on education in software development, basic business fundamentals and entrepreneurship” . . .
“In phase (2), the incubator stage, the MEST entrepreneurs get seed funding and incorporate their companies. Their main focus in the incubator is partly to develop a commercially viable go-to-market strategy and partly to further develop their prototype, therefore enabling it for a commercial launch.”
In South Africa: Gaming, Meet Security
Says Sergey Golovanov, Malware Expert at Kaspersky Lab; “The gaming industry has become extremely lucrative and has evolved into a fully-fledged economy with well developed demand and specific customer requirements, as trading in-game objects is now considered an essential part of any game in itself. It therefore comes as no surprise that fraud and overtly deceiving online gamers has long since become popular among cybercriminals.” . . .
Cyber criminals are engaging with gamers in various ways, either luring or direct intrusion – stealing passwords to gain access to accounts, exploiting game vulnerabilities and making use of malware. One method used by cyber criminals is to enter a game or a forum on a game server and offer a bonus, or help in the game, in exchange for other players’ passwords. The cyber criminal who makes such an offer is not as naive as he may initially seem.
20 Essential Works of Cyberpunk Literature
A portmanteau of uhhh “cyber” and “punk,” the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction takes readers to the fringes of mainstream society. In worlds where technologies both benevolent and malevolent reign supreme (not to mention the occasional multinational conglomerate with pervasive political clout and the hottest machinery), writers lovingly dissect a number of different themes that question humanity’s interactions with its inorganic creations. . .
Any readers hoping to gain a thorough understanding of what the subgenre entails should make an effort to understand the beginning, middle and end rather than heading straight for the purely “cyberpunk.”
The radio show last night was brilliant. I read out my debut short story entitled ‘Virus!’ which is a heavily abridged version of the first chapter in my upcoming cyberpunk novel. The reading was broken up into three parts, but the host did a great job of bridging the parts with very incisive questions that added depth to the story. My fellow guest was an enthusiastic poet named Gabriel Amoh, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of his poetry, and even more by his explanations of their meanings. I’ve already received lots of positive feedback to the story here in Ghana, and I can’t wait to upload the podcast for those of you who missed the show, hopefully sometime this week. In the meantime, I have just published the short story on AfroCyberPunk for the first time. Enjoy…
Virus!
The portholes were set to un-shade as the airplane descended into heavy clouds and out of the blinding glare of the West African sun. The small plane trembled through the haze before breaking out to a panoramic view of the sprawling metropolis.
Accra stretched out to bridge the horizons, barely held in check at the southern coastline, where its hyperactive edge threatened to spill over into the Gulf of Guinea. From above, the city seemed without a plan; a vibrant mosaic of infrastructure, haphazardly diced and spliced to make use of every square foot of space. Ramshackle settlements jutted out into the ocean, perched above the water on nests of illegal support structures. Massive holographic logos hovered above the skyline in a brilliant display of optics, familiar corporate logos visible from miles away…
I have quite unexpectedly been granted the privilege to appear as a guest on the Writers Project radio show, which airs this Sunday evening on Citi 97.3 FM, Ghana. The Writers Project of Ghana is an organization that promotes writing through workshops, public readings, and their radio show on Citi FM. I didn’t have any completed cyberpunk stories at the time I was contacted, so I have specially adapted the first chapter of my novel into a short story called ‘Virus!’
Those outside Ghana can listen to the show live on the Citi FM website from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM (GMT), so you can work out when exactly that is in your time zone. For those who are interested but can’t tune in for whatever reason, I intend to upload a podcast of the show sometime next week. While the full novel is still several months away from the bookshelf, this sneak preview should help to take a little edge off the long wait. This Sunday, I hope you all turn on, boot up, and jack in.
It all began in August 2009 with District 9, the acclaimed blockbuster by South African director Neill Blomkamp about an alien refugee camp. This was followed closely by Pumzi, a short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu about a post-apocalyptic East Africa. Now the largest movie industry in Africa has joined in on the action with the July 2010 release of the sci-fi movie Kajola by Nigerian director Niyi Akinmolayan.
Kajola is the Yoruba word for commonwealth. In the year 2059, Nigeria becomes a totalitarian state. After a second civil war, the rich relocate to the Island areas of Lagos state and turn it into an ultra modern city. The war torn mainland of lagos state is disconnected and abandoned.
A rebel leader, Allen learns of a plot codenamed Kajola to build cities on the mainland and eliminate the remaining survivors. He leads a rebellion against the govt. and must be stopped by Yetunde, the police chief. Though mortal enemies, both discover that everything they thought they knew were nothing but lies. Its a story of love and lust and it heightens the fact that if we don’t deal with the segregation and negligence issues facing the country today, then our future is quite predictable because TOMORROW IS TODAY.
While certainly not a masterpiece in terms of CGI effects, this movie represents one of the few definitive attempts of an African director to break into the science fiction genre. The movie breaks away from traditional Nigerian movie plots, delivering an imaginative vision of a future Nigeria that is as relevant as it is rife with cyberpunk themes. These three movies may well mark the beginning of an exciting new trend in African cinema which only confirms my belief that Africa is cyberpunk.
This will serve as the new home base for the AfroCyberPunk movement. We’re currently re-grouping at the moment, so please subscribe to our RSS feed and wait for next briefing to be dispatched.
Hello readers, I know I promised to have another article soon but I don’t and you can be sure that I hate myself for it. On the upside, I recently had an interesting interview with blogger and social connector Johnny Laird, who asked me questions about my upcoming novel and plans for the future. Here is an excerpt of that interview:
Q: Jonathan, What was it that first inspired you to write, and who are your biggest influences?A: I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of virtual reality and how media can be used to transport the mind into another world. I began writing because it gave me the ability to create worlds that others could enter as if they had stepped right into my imagination and I showed them around. For that reason, most of my earliest attempts at fiction were interactive hyperlinked stories.
I owe many of my ideas to the ground-breaking work of countless writers and thinkers, so it’s hard to single out a few of them. My greatest single influence must surely be William Gibson, especially if the ripple effects of his work are taken into consideration.
Q: Can you tell us a little about what you are working on at the moment.
A: I’m working on a novel set in Accra, Ghana circa 2060 AD, at a time when clinical neuroscience has reverse-engineered the human brain and uncovered the inner workings of the mind. Two-thirds of the world’s population are implanted with biocores – organic computer interfaces between the brain and cyberspace which link billions of people worldwide to the Internet.The novel explores the psychological consequences of mind altering technology through the interwoven stories of a data thief, a computer programmer, and a cyber crime investigator who are drawn inextricably into the heart of a dark conspiracy in one turbulent night on the streets of Accra.
First of all, let me apologize for taking even longer than usual to update the blog. I’ve been consumed with the not inconsiderable task of writing a novel and haven’t had enough time to find inspiration for a new article. Not to worry, I’ll be getting on that as soon as this current wave of procrastination dies down long enough for me to tear myself away from the novel. Which will be very soon, I promise.
And thirdly, I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be working with Vajra Enterprises, a D&D style role-playing game publisher on creating an African cyberpunk setting. Here is an excerpt of their press release:
Vajra Enterprises, publishers of Fates Worse Than Death, is proud to announce that they have added Jonathan Dotse of the AfroCyberPunk blog as a consultant on the future of Africa.
Jonathan Dotse’s new blog, AfroCyberPunk, has gained recent fame in the science fiction community. Jonathan’s insightful and well-written essays have made a strong case for Africa as the natural home of a cyberpunk-style society.
At Vajra Enterprises, Jonathan will develop the future of Africa in its Fates Worse Than Death setting.
With any luck Africa will become the next hotspot for science fiction publishers.
Afrocyberpunk Lives!
Martin Bergesen martin.bergesen @ gmail.com
The good old, forehead-slapping days of obvious “why-didn’t-I-think-of-that?” ideas aren’t past. This was Jonathan Dotse’s experience on 13th May this year when he revived the cyberpunk genre and took it to Africa via a blog post, only to be linked by God, everyman, Bruce Sterling and Warren Ellis (though not exactly in that order). Why the strong response?
Well. If you were to say “cyberpunk” to the average science fiction fan nowadays, you might catch a wet glimpse of neon black nostalgia in their eyes. No wonder, for cyberpunk was simultaneously the most techno-romantic and dystopian genre sci-fi has ever seen. Its main ingredients were often a dystopian and polluted metropolis, with the populace oppressed by futuristic technology. The only bright side? Super-cool hacker rebels that used the technology to their advantage in the fight against the huge mega-corporations that had taken power from the states. In other words, deliciously gloomy.
As a vision of the future, cyberpunk quickly became obsolete. As we entered a new millennium and the millennium bug (anyone remember that?) didn’t kill us all, the internet became a casual place where everyone connected through pastel-colored social media and paid their phonebills. Even cyberpunk godfather William Gibson, who predicted both virtual reality and the Internet in the 1984 novel “Neuromancer,” ended up writing about the present. It was exciting enough. In the face of web 2.0 we said our sad, but necessary, farewells to the future 1.0.
But the cyberpunk future was not dead; it had only moved South, without anyone noticing. Anyone except Dotse, that is. The 22-year-old was born and raised in Ghana, lives in the country’s capital Accra, and is a budding sci-fi writer.
- I studied at the University of Windsor in Canada for three years, and at first I could not imagine a sci-fi novel set in Africa, he says.
It was only on the plane home to Ghana that Dotse had second thoughts. As he peered over the bright lights of Accra below him he realized that many themes from the genre he was so fond of were present here, right outside his front door. States that had lost control, severe corruption, private companies with ever-increasing power, and disillusioned but tech literate youth.
- I saw a counterculture forming around new technologies. I saw the rapid technological advances that were changing the way ordinary people dealt with the world. And I saw a lot of unregulated access to technology.
It struck him that Africa was already cyberpunk.
Dotse is far from the first person to connect sci-fi with Africa. Both South African Neill Blomkamp’s action hit “District 9″ and the Kenyan short film “Pumzi” view the continent through technological eyes. But Dotse’s perspective is fresh because it simultaneously feels nostalgic and relevant. His inspiration is mainly the technological relationship between the West and South. The Western world’s technological advances have been subject to laws and regulation. The trend has been gradual and has been tailored to user needs. In African countries, however, these technologies arrived fully developed, unrestrained by law and open to abuse.
- The catalysts are access to high technology and the lack of an organizing framework. There may be variations in relation to income and availability of technology, but the common feature in each case is that the level of regulation cannot be compared with the countries the technologies were designed for.
Although he is for technological advances, he is concerned about this lack of control.
- In modern Africa, there is to some extent an acceptance of lawlessness, and therefore we are more dependent on each other than the “system” to maintain law and order. The problem is that this model is not particularly well suited to handle technology and the power it grants the individual to undermine the entire system.
The effect of this bias, he said, among other things appears in terms of hacking.
- Hackers here have almost carte blanche on what they can get away with. For instance the internet banking sector has been hampered for many years, simply because they feared the consequences of running normally. Much of what is going on is only known through rumor, since the police do not have the full capacity to deal with it. With so much free scope, it is not difficult to imagine what is going on in secret.
Time will show what Africa’s technological destiny will be. Meanwhile, Dotse is busy writing his debut novel, a story set in the middle of the twenty-first century, when people have computer implants in their brainstem called “biocores” that manipulate their minds.
- I want to explore what effects it would have on our humanity and our consciousness, Dotse explains.
And where does the novel take place? In Accra, of course.
Jonathan Dotse’s blog can be found at afrocyberpunk.wordpress.com.
Photograph by Ebenezer Gwumah.
The most valuable natural resource to a society’s development is its ore of ideas.
Much more than a brand of esoteric entertainment, science fiction has long been a source of prophetic knowledge that has influenced the destiny of humankind. From ‘1984’ (Orwell, 1949) to ‘Neuromancer’ (Gibson, 1984), the course of history has continually been altered by the ripple effect of this unique brand of ideas on our immediate future.
Already a challenging art form, science fiction is rapidly growing in complexity in the age of high technology, as anyone imagining a future society is forced to explore the consequences of several new trends on innumerable disciplines interwoven through many layers of society. However, each accurate guess proves to be well worth the effort, to ever-increasing orders of magnitude.
Of course, future prediction is old business, having been pursued by the most inquisitive minds throughout human history, from ancient Greek philosophers to our contemporary career futurists. Yet, in the widening grey area between the document in a scientific journal and the novel on your bookshelf, there lies a multiplicity of universes begging to be explored.
Science fiction is a fragile network of bridges between the scientific world and the general public.
It is hardly an easy task to expose the many dynamic relationships between the lab and the street, and less so to fashion them together into a coherent, gripping piece of entertainment. But when well-executed, it allows the average person to grasp the critical underlying factors of these relationships and gain some skill in uncovering these patterns on their own.
Science fiction takes the thoughts of a few individuals and feeds them into the collective processing machine of an entire society. Instead of being confined to a roomful of academics, these ideas are freed into the Darwinian domain of coffee houses and dinner tables, to be prodded and picked apart from all angles until a refined vision resurfaces through natural selection.
Under the guise of entertainment, science fiction spearheads the formation of vital discourses into the complex cause-effect relationships between technology and social phenomena, sharpening the collective awareness of trends within a society. The more people are exposed to these trends, the more they are inspired to study them, and the more they aspire to influence them for the better.
You don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re from. Or is it the other way around?
Simply knowing what problems lie around the bend spurs the proactive development of solutions before those problems have time to take root. As we visualize what could be in our future, we gain insight to the implications of the actions we take today, putting our current reality into a grander perspective.
For instance, cyberpunk literature played a significant role in streamlining the regulation of information technology because of the huge discourse community that surrounded cyberspace as it was still in its infancy. The graphic detail in which cyberpunk described the possible abuses of the Internet provided specific objectives to achieve while guiding its development in the West.
This is likely the most recent example of a highly probable scenario being averted just as it began to materialize. There are lessons in here for Africa to learn, particularly as a disturbingly similar kind of situation shows signs of appearing on our continent. And the learning process begins with the simple dissemination of an idea.
A society without science fiction may be standing in the light, but is surely stepping into darkness.
It is clear that exposure to science fiction today has a significant impact on those who go on to build the societies of tomorrow. Had African leaders of the past been given a glimpse of the effects globalized technology would have on our geo-political landscape, we would most likely be living on a vastly different planet today.
As Africa marches onward into the future it is important that we as Africans begin to critically visualize the developments that will take place on our own soil. It’s not enough to import science fiction and translate it into the local languages. Our vision must be based on our own unique reality – cut from the cloth of our own societies and tailored to our specific needs.
It’s about time our youth had a realistic vision of their future, so they know exactly what paths to follow and can be prepared for whatever lies along the way. Africa desperately needs science fiction to expand the frontiers of the African thinker’s imagination, to free it from the past, guide it through the present, and follow it into an unbound future.
For a while, it seemed that cyberpunk was dead.
The Internet counterculture of the West went mainstream faster than anyone could have predicted and the grim forecast of the cyberpunk movement became a self-defeating prophecy. Many dark realities were prevented from coming to be. Far from the sinister age of corporate dominance many envisioned, the digital era has liberated an entire world of individuals from obscurity, empowering them beyond their wildest dreams.
However, this power didn’t come without regulation. The surveillance capabilities of the West have been well orchestrated to secure a significant degree of control over its citizens’ virtual lives. Its law enforcement continually strives to gain jurisdiction over the ever-expanding boundaries of Net, making it a far stretch from the lawless frontier cyberpunk predicted.
But here in Africa, development has been dangerously asymmetrical. By the time any product hits our soil it’s already fully-developed and ready to be abused by the imagination. Technology designed for vastly different societies invariably trickles down to our streets, re-sprayed, re-labeled, and hacked to fit whatever market will take it. Regulation? You can forget about regulation.
Whatever rules the creators imagined fly out of the window as freighters are crammed to bursting with the second-hand remains of their creations, damn wherever they’re heading as long as they can be cleared from port. Similarly, the Net’s architecture fails to reflect the reality on our continent as the expansion of cyberspace exceeds the reach of our road networks. How do you track someone who doesn’t have a social security number or a physical address? Someone who never really made it onto the Grid?
It’s no surprise then that lawlessness is the rule on our end of the networks, ‘do what thou wilt’ the full extent of cyber-regulation. This will remain the case as long as Africa continues to wear hand-me-down systems; until she acquires her own truly tailor-made networks. With the huge logistical frameworks that need to be implemented, spanning vast swathes of geographical terrain, political regimes, and language barriers, a cyberpunk future for Africa seems all but inevitable.
And even if we manage to overcome these hurdles, cyberpunk can never really die. There’s just too much human nature embedded within its code – it thrives on uncertainty and unpredictability, on severe human limitations juxtaposed with the radical and unlimited power of our own technology. It will always find a home somewhere on this planet until we collectively reach Utopia – if we ever do – whenever society grapples with brave new technology. We have not seen it’s last.
Cyberpunk will be reborn.
