The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s

When I saw the announcement for the Marvel Age of Comics series, I said to some friends of mine that they seemed like the comics-related version of the 33 1⁄3 series, and apparently, I was more right than I new. They are published the same publisher (Bloomsbury), and I came across a press release that that says they were "inspired in part by Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books."

Where the 33 1⁄3 books gave an author's idiosyncratic take on an album, the Marvel Age of Comics seem to cover a notable storyline or era in Marvel history. I decided to sample the series with The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s by Paul Cornell. I suspect that, like the series that inspired them, these books will vary in how they are written and the insight provided, but on the basis of this one, I plan to check out more.

Cornell gives a compelling overview of the decade, breaking it up into the runs of the various writers (Thomas, Englehart, Shooter, and the fill-in writers), and examining how their approaches and concerns influenced the title. In centering the narrative on the writers, the artists are perhaps given short shrift, though George Perez is singled out for a good deal of praise. Cornell his talent for scene composition and character expression likely influenced writers both working with him and thereafter on the title.

Cornell's description of the series and its virtues is personal, reminding me at time of Morrison's Supergods, but is more concrete and informative rather than speculative. The complete Marvel neophyte will be confused, probably, but and the Avengers scholar might find it shallow. It appears to be gauged for the familiar, but not the expert, which is probably the right approach.

Hardwired

Recently, I decided to fill a gap in my cyberpunk awareness and check out Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1986). I've sampled Williams' short fiction before: his contributions to the Wild Cards shared universe, "Wall, Stone, Craft" from my years subscribing to the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy; and "Red Elvis" and "Prayers in the Wind," stories that left an impression even among other worthies in Dozois' Years Best Science Fiction collections. I figured I was long overdue to read what is perhaps his most famous novel.

In the near future of Hardwired, the Earth has lost the Rock War (a kinetic orbital strike) with the Orbital stations in the control of various corporate blocs. The territory that was formerly the United States has fractured into the rival states, scrambling to hold onto what they can in the face of environmental degradation and exploitation by the Orbital blocs. The novel has two protagonists. One is Cowboy, a cybernetically enhanced ex-pilot, now a panzer (a hovercraft or ground-effect type vehicle; storywise a futuristic truck) driver, running contraband from the relatively more prosperous West to the beleaguered East Coast. The other is Sarah, an enhanced street tough and bodyguard in Florida, trying to keep herself and her prostitute brother alive after she becomes a "loose end" following a job she took for a corporation.

Hardwired seems clearly post-Gibson, but Williams crafts a cyberpunk future all his own. No Blade Runner-inspired Sprawl here really or heavy Japanese overlay. Hardwired sets much of its action in rural areas, even more rural in his future than today, on lonely, roads, or in smaller cities like a partially drowned Tampa that becomes an evocation of the developing world under the colonial boot heel.

William's Cowboy has a much more on-the-nose name than Gibson's console cowboys. The callbacks and parallels to the Old West of reality and of celluloid myth are much stronger. Hack science fiction of the past was often derided for utilizing plots cribbed from horse operas and given a futuristic veneer, but William's work recalls the Western in a way that gives it resonance similarly to how the work of Leigh Brackett so often does. In fact, Cowboy reminds me more than a little of Brackett's outlaw protagonist in "The Citadel of Lost Ships," even down to their "the family lost their land" backstory.

Beyond the Western, the run down and discarded nature of Hardwired's America has a very 70s feel. There are echoes of car movies like Vanishing Point, but also 70s Neo-Noir. It prefigures Cowboy Bebop a bit in some of its worldbuilding and influences.

I enjoyed the novel a lot. It's fairly pulpy, I suppose, though that's never been a downside to me. It is very 80s, too, in how it is written. It's prose in interesting enough and quintessential early cyberpunk: Chandlerian simile and metaphor with a science and technology obsession. The occasional snippets of news or ad copy go for black satire at times similar to Robocop, still a year away. It's themes, though, are just as relevant, today, perhaps even more so.