A Foreigner’s Guide to Polish Cyberpunk

obi-oba_koniec_cywilizacji_fn.jpg, default, Still from ‘O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization’, directed by Piotr Szulkin, 1984, pictured: Krzysztof Majchrzak, photo: Renata Pajchel / Zebra Film S, A Foreigner’s Guide to Polish Cyberpunk

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Although for many years, Polish cyberpunk creators were cut off from technological innovations, they were still able to keep up with their Western colleagues.

To start, an excerpt:

Text

‘She is gone’, says Szogun. He swallows the bile; you can almost hear the acid hissing on his tongue; the vodka refuses to go down.

He tightly grips the glass and releases it, afraid of breaking it. He watches as the gleaming glass reflects moving phosphorescent digits on one of the walls. Robal displays stock quotes on it: letters and numbers move silently, making up a sort of digital ECG of the world: London, New York, Tokyo and Berlin, as if any of Robal’s guys could relate, or be interested in the least. Robal – he’s a hell of a joker.

Doesn’t matter; Szogun likes these numbers. Szogun likes numbers in general. When he looks at the display, he sees the binary building blocks of Carbonatrix, the digital DNA of a better world. Longing hits him like a pneumatic arrow shot from the thickets of the neon jungle; it hits and evokes a gesture beyond consciousness. Szogun reaches towards his neck, under the collar of his leather jacket, and fondles his socket. A chromed three-phase Commodore, a real gem, knocking out the slow-tape computers from the alleys based on DDR components, loaded into him with force by clouded mechanical surgeons. Warm, soft skin and hard, cold steel. Ugly and the Beast.

‘More?’

‘More.’

Splash. A shudder. Vodka raises the ceiling, at least a little. The General on the telly salutes to an angular hat. Szogun burps from the sausage – this is his small contribution to the unique aroma of the place.

Author

Trans. AD

Elements of the world presented in this passage can be recognised immediately: a daring mix of Polish folksiness with high-tech props and the black-as-coal noir mood of classic cyberpunk. Could this be the Polish response to Neuromancer? As we look towards the release of Cyberpunk 2077 – the long-awaited video game from CD Projekt Red, the creators of the hit The Witcher – let's take a closer look at the colour of the sky over the Polish cyberpunk demoscene.

There: at the intersection of technology & violence

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Still from ‘The Matrix’, directed by Larry Wachowski, 1999, photo: Entertainment Pictures / Forum

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First, a quick obligatory synopsis: what kind of vision of the world does cyberpunk hold? The classic texts of this trend – created in the 1980s and 1990s – describe the reality of the near future, whose tone is set by hyper-capitalist, supranational corporations. Here, human life is only valuable in so far as it can be converted into data bits, and the main objects of desire are advanced digital technologies that allow you to go beyond the animal in the human. Or – on the other side of the same coin – they are a source of danger that kills the humanity in men.

At the time, it was not so certain, but after three decades of bitter cyberpunk lessons, today, we are closer to knowing that if you want to remain a homo sapiens, then maybe you can't separate the spirit from the body.

In a nutshell: cyberpunk is about technology and violence… and what is born when the two worlds intersect.

In publications such as the short story ‘Cyberpunk’ by Bruce Bethke (1983), the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984), the anthology Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling (1986), the novels Synners by Pat Cadigan (1991) and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992), basically all the most important gadgets, motifs and ‘elements of the scenography’ appear, which from then on are invariably associated with the convention. We find here rebellious hackers living on the fringes of cyberspace cowboy law; intra-cerebral implants enabling direct contact with the virtual world; cyborg implants enhancing the body's capabilities and drugs which are broadening the spirit’s horizons; a ubiquitous noir mood from dark crime fiction and the nihilism of protagonists living mostly in harmony with the punk motto ‘No future’...

Cyberpunk captured the collective imagination and from that moment on – along with subsequent inventions and technical breakthroughs ‘in real life’, which with every decade pushed the boundaries of what was digitally possible – it only grew. In those first works from the 1980s, it is easy to recognize the reality of America during the presidency of Ronald Regan translated into the language of literature: squeezed ever-so-tighter into the clasp of the Cold War, gnawed at economically by thriving Asian companies, entering the era of advanced technologies in which the tone will be set by Silicon Valley and the ideologies and attitudes arising (and then degenerating) there.

Back then, from the other side of the genre barricade dealing with similar subject matter were Douglas Coupland (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, 1991; Microserfs, 1995), Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991) or David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1995), describing the reality of yuppies from Wall Street, cocaine-induced nights that relieve stressed out brokers, the first start-ups slowly rising, and of the marginalized people living on the fringes of this world of pretension and glitz, who are not able to fit into the reality, which before their very eyes became cyberpunk. Today, what’s left of this is mainly the aesthetics (the default scenography for similar texts: a gloomy city straight from Blade Runner).

Here: a ghost in the machine

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Stanisław Lem, 1961, photo: Lucjan Fogiel / East News

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And that being said, how to search for Polish equivalents of this genre? After all, a cursory glance at Poland’s national bibliography of the most popular texts from recent decades indicates that cyberpunk – unlike, for example, social science fiction, then religious, and finally alternative – has never really become a house speciality of Polish fantasts. The lack of appropriate technologies and the inspiration that comes from them could be the cause, but this answer seems too simple; Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter at a time when the global network, virtual reality and social media were just looming on the horizon.

Frederick James, the author of the fundamental Archaeologies of the Future, in which he also analyses the phenomenon of cyberpunk, indicates that something else could have been the key. In his view, the classic cyberpunk genre is a crazy literary journey through an increasingly globalized world – a laboratory experiment in which the geographical, political and cultural spectrum of the new world is recorded. While in the meantime, in the People's Republic of Poland, a trip to East Berlin for sweaters, washing powder and oranges was considered the pinnacle of dreams.

And yet, even on this side of the Iron Curtain, you could spot swallows that reacted to the same zeitgeist.

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Covers of ‘Golem XIV’ & ‘Summa Technologiae’ by Stanisław Lem, photo: Cyfrant promotional materials

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It is actually quite obvious: this time again, everything started with Stanisław Lem. If one of the main topics of cyberpunk is an in-depth reflection on the complicated relationships between man and digital technologies, the first Polish proto-cyberpunk text – as with Lem, also innovative in the international arena – is considered to be Summa Technologiae (1964), specifically its fourth and sixth chapters. In the chapter ‘Intelectronics’, Lem considers, inter alia, the phenomenon of information overload (the concept of the ‘megabyte bomb’ appears for the first time) or the issue of the ‘ghost in the machine’, i.e. the possibility artificial intelligence having awareness. On the other hand, ‘Phantomology’ for the first time and immediately on such a scale discusses the issue of the ‘perfect simulation’: virtual reality, based on technology or pharmaceuticals, which is indistinguishable from the real world.

If you enter into a similar solipsistic spiral of worlds implanted in worlds – Lem remarks sensibly – then you will never be sure that you awoke from it back into the ‘zero world’, so the base reality from which you started. Later, a similar concept found its way in global science fiction time and time again – with perhaps the most famous production being the film The Matrix (1999) – but it was fictionally adapted for the first time by Lem himself in Professor Corcoran's Boxes (1960), describing ‘conscious boxes’, which experience their dreamed life-simulations but they don't know they are just programmes – or, simulated conscious agents.

Golem XIV can also be considered a pre-cyberpunk text. The book was published in 1981 and is a record of selected lectures of the titled super-intelligent computer: artificial intelligence, which crossed the threshold of Singularity, acquired self-awareness and surpassed humanity in the intellectual race. In his own way, Lem develops the themes that later co-created the cyberpunk imaginarium. You could criticize and say that the book lacks a rebellious ‘punk’ attitude, but does it really though? It is enough to remember how the bitter story of the titled Golem and Honest Annie, a different supercomputer – who both decide to commit digital suicide or at best, a self-imposed exile beyond a world accessible to man – ends with the realisation that even here, too, Lem cocked a snook at the readers (and preceded his time).

The Polish People's Republic: life is a dream

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Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg, photo: Encyklopedia Fantastyki / Wikipedia.org; covers of ‘Według Łotra’ (According to the Thief), & ‘Anioł Przemocy’ (Angel of Violence) by Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg, photo: wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria & Info-Art

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Amongst the precursors of Polish cyberpunk, we can’t forget about Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg – the author obsessed with the vision of machine-people living in a false world whose true nature is hidden from them. A similar motif was already indicated in the book Robot (1973), Snerg’s most prominent novel, and then developed in According to the Thief (1978) and The Naked Target (1980).

Also, the heroine of the ‘The Angel of Violence’ – a short story from 1978 – wakes up on the beach from a nightmare simulation entitled ‘Angel of Violence’, in which she experienced dreadful horrors, believing that they were really happening to her. The relief of awakening, unfortunately, is interrupted by the explosion of an atomic bomb in the neighbouring archipelago. The shock wave, however, does not manage to reach the sweltering beach when the heroine wakes up again – this time, in a fluid-filled cuboid, which is very similar to the mechanical pods (in which Neo wakes up) used two decades later in The Matrix. Is this reality also just a dream?

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Janusz A. Zajdel, photo: superNOWA; cover of ‘Limes inferior’, photo: Wydawnictwo Iskry i superNOWA

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Amongst the first Polish sci-fi authors whose work is reminiscent of cyberpunk, Janusz A. Zajdel appears unexpectedly. Unexpectedly, because he is associated mainly with sociological fantasy (or soft sci-fi), in which he unmasked the communist establishment and the mechanisms of power of the Eastern Bloc subordinated to ‘brotherly help’. Meanwhile, looking to his most famous novel, Limes Inferior (1982), after more than three decades it unexpectedly reveals its unusual, disturbing structure. Under the communist regime, it was judged mainly through the prism of political allusions, but years later, astonishingly, you can find in it rather heavy criticism of predatory capitalism, on which classic cyberpunk was founded.

The society in Argoland, in which the story takes place, is divided into six classes. Every citizen, even those belonging to the lowest of them, has a guaranteed minimum income that ensures survival – but does not allow any luxuries. A low status in the social stratigraphy also does not allow one to take a sensible job, which in the long run causes a decrease in self-esteem and frustration amongst the inhabitants. Now let's think, is Zajdel describing the communist regime during martial law, or is it a completely different economic reality of the credit and precariat era? Anyway, the Pole's novel shares one more thread with cyberpunk – the central character of Limes Inferior, the lifter Sneer, is something like a classic hacker who, for points-money encoded on a key card, increases clients’ results by helping them cheat at their cyclical exams.

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Piotr Szulkin, photo: Jan Zamoyski / AG

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The undeclared by that time cyberpunk postulates were best fulfilled in this pioneer period by another artist, this time not connected with literature, but cinema. I am talking about the director Piotr Szulkin, who died in 2018. Both in Golem (1979), The War of the Worlds – Next Century (1981), as well as in Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1984) or O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1986) – the artist’s most famous dystopias – elements appear that later resound vehemently on cyberpunk banners: the corrupt reality of the near future falsified by modern media, human-puppets controlled by invisible forces of the market and politics, technology becoming a joke. And all this in an unusual way outweighed by the ‘Polish specificity’: communist coarseness, technological folksiness or the messianism of the romantics presented in a tragicomic perspective.

Apparently, despite different experiences, the same spirit was blowing concurrently on both sides of the ocean.

Changes: how the steel was tempered

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Still from ‘Golem’, directed by Piotr Szulkin, 1979, photo: Studio Filmowe Zebra / Filmoteka Narodowa / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

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Classical representatives of the genre did not appear in Poland until the 1990s. No wonder: it was a period of two simultaneous transformations. One took place on a political level, the other – cultural and technological – in the hearts and aesthetics of Poles. As more and more devices such as Atari, Commodore and VHS appeared on the market, more and more people were coming home with them. At flea markets, pirated copies of films and games were selling like hot cakes. Publishers were trying to keep up by frantically filling bookstore bookshelves with all the classics of Western SF, while satellite television became widely available, headed by MTV. And that's how the steel was tempered.

This wonderful new world also demanded a new language, new sensitivity and new conventions in Poland’s fiction. As one would expect, its eulogists were mainly young writers and editors, creating in opposition to Fantastyka (and then later Nowa Fantastyka) and its Polish prose editor, Maciej Parowski. Years later, Parowski himself admitted that it took him a while before he became convinced of and understood the new cyberpunk costume in which classic science fiction had been dressed.

The first issues of Fenix (The Phoenix) – a magazine rival of Nowa Fantastyka (New Fantasy) – devoted to cyberpunk were released at the beginning of the new decade. In issue 03/90, in which ‘Dog Fight’ by W. Gibson and M. Swanwick appeared, amongst others, and in issue 02/91 with ‘Video Star’ by W.J. Williams. When the Polish edition of ‘Neuromancer’ (1992), translated by Piotr W. Cholewa, hit the book shelves soon afterwards, the seed was sown.

Today, the first texts considered to be Polish cyberpunk include: ‘Hang-Glider’ by Tomasz Kołodziejczak (Voyager 02/92), ‘Manipulatrice’ by Grzegorz Wiśniewski (Nowa Fantastyka 11/94) or ‘Freefootball’ by Mieszko Zagańczyk (Nowa Fantastyka 08/96), and from a slightly later period – e.g. ‘Nurse’ by Piotr W. Lech (Nowa Fantastyka 07/99). Adam Mazurkiewicz gives a full list of this dozen or so of stories from this period in his monograph Problems of Cyberpunk (2014).

Janusz Cyran undoubtedly stood out amongst them, whose stories depict technologically advanced societies and virtual illusions of reality along with metaphysical themes and spiritual problems of mankind entangled in a quasi-cyberpunk future. The author later gathered the first texts in the collection Ciemne Lustra Wyszeptujące Sny (Dark Mirrors Whispering Dreams, 2006), and the next – in Theory of the Devil (2011), where the same leitmotivs appear. For example, in ‘Rome’, the author takes the reader to Jerusalem in the time of Christ, only that the reality resembles a strange melange of antique and advanced technologies, and the hero is Herod, who plans to assassinate Caesar.

Other authors engaging with cyberpunk, but at the same time leaving their unique fingerprint on it, include Piotr Górski, who last year returned to publishing with the grim fantasy Reguła Zakonu (Rule of the Convent). Meanwhile in the 1990s, as a young student of Polish Studies, he surprised with a very brutal dark future for those times, heavy with the mood of Mad Max – but cyberpunk motives were also present (the story ‘Czekając’ [Waiting] in Nowa Fantastyka 02/98). A young Jacek Dukaj also added his two cents here, but more on that below.

The wild East

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Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz, photo: Darek Golik / Forum; covers of ‘Pieprzony Los Kataryniarza’ (The Screwed-Up Fate of an Organ Grinder), ’Walc Stulecia’ (Waltz of the Century) by Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz, photo: superNOWA, Fabryka Słów

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Meanwhile, it’s 1995 and Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz – still writing SF, not yet a political journalist – writes The Screwed-Up Fate of an Organ-Grinder. The novel received the prime Polish award for SF literature, the Janusz A. Zajdel Award. So, the novel can officially be considered ‘authentic Polish cyberpunk’; enough to say that although the title organ-grinder is the classic equivalent of Gibson's cowboys in cyberspace, the main theme regards a transnational conspiracy hidden in the network, which aims at the next partition of the Polish Republic. Ziemkiewicz's next novel, Waltz of the Century, tells about the titled VR game, set in a fin de siècle reality; it also draws inspiration from the convention of props, while continuing to make political diagnoses for Poland and Europe entering the 21st century.

Ziemkiewicz's texts are fascinating because they don’t only refer to cyberpunk aesthetics and props – they are also adapted culturally, incorporating what he knows and where he is from. He makes original concepts that are so important for cyberpunk, such as ‘frontier’, ‘borderland’ or the ‘Wild West’, where everything is just beginning, being shaped, and therefore carries a huge load of freedom. Ziemkiewicz thus shapes the ‘Wild East’ – Kresy, or Ukrainian Wild Fields, which have their own historical and literary connotations. Also the role of politics and historical accounts plays a much greater role here than in the texts of Western writers who focus more on the transformation of man subjected to the pressures of technology rather than history.

Maciej Żerdziński and his Leaving Los Raques also seem separated from the classical background. Intoxicating, similar in spirit to Philip K. Dick’s works, it is a literary ride around Katowice in the not so distant future, in which a real alien ship crashes into Spodek (a multipurpose arena complex in Katowice). People begin to get high on the ship’s body, and through this most unusual communion, they acquire the power to infect reality with their fantasies. It sounds like a bit from Monty Python, but only seemingly; the author – today a world expert in the treatment of schizophrenia – plots a very bitter and disturbing story in which technologies focussed primarily on consumption, pervasive advertising and new media are just other ways of fooling the human soul.

The ‘cyberpunk-metaphysical’ motif also appears in Hotel Eternity by Wojciech Szyda, who talks about the residents of a virtual hotel, which ultimately turns out to be purgatory/the afterlife.

Prisoners of a virtual world

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Janusz Leon Wiśniewski, photo: Tomasz Wiech / AG; cover of ‘S@motność w Sieci’ (Loneliness Online) by Janusz L. Wiśniewski, photo: Prószyński & S-ka

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Antonina Liedtke – whose short story of that time was a hit and who was immediately awarded the Janusz A. Zajdel Award for the best text of 1999 – brings us back closer to the Earth and to the human race. CyberJoly Drim, foreshadowing the best-selling Loneliness On The Net by Janusz L. Wiśniewski, is a novel of manners – but describing interpersonal relationships changed by the Web, the culture of internet forums and chat rooms (anyone remember those?). However, since the scenography is not the main point of the convention and the content is also vital – all those implants, cyberspaces and virtual reality – the author’s creation passes the ‘true cyberpunk’ test without any problems.

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Jacek Dukaj, photo: Tomasz Kamiński / AG

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And here we return to the aforementioned Dukaj – the culmination of this ‘golden era’ would be the work of the ‘wunderkind of Polish science fiction’. I am talking particularly about his two texts which are the most representative of the young author’s cyberpunk fascinations. The first of these is Irrehare – a fiction novel written in 1993 and published in Nowa Fantastyka two years later. This alone should make an impression: while writing it, Dukaj was only 19 (!), Waldemar Pawlak became the Prime Minister in Poland and the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity played for the first time, the first graphic web browser was presented in the States, the video game Doom premiered as well as the first, classic part of Dune...

Meanwhile, long before The Matrix, Dukaj's story portrayed the participants of a mass VR game, imprisoned in the virtual world by Allah, a twisted AI programme responsible for creating this reality. Or rather ‘these realities’ – the heroes trying to break free from the digital snare traverse lands with different historical or pop-cultural aesthetics as well as the divergent physics and principles which prevail in them. The idea would be innovative even internationally – in Poland, it had to make a staggering impression, deeming it almost incomprehensible, especially amongst those readers who have not had much contact with computer games before.

Thumbnail — Okładka książki Jacka Dukaja "Czarne oceany", fot. Wydawnictwo Literackie

Cyberpunk motifs also appear in Black Oceans, a novel by Dukaj, which took several years to complete – the final version appeared in the Wydawnictwo Literackie publishing house in 2001. Brain-computer nanointerfaces appear in the text, common at least amongst technocrats of the near future who have financially, technologically and genetically surpassed the underdeveloped ‘plebs’. Reality can be expanded with virtual ‘overlays’ that modify human perception; artificial intelligences are conducting economic wars in secret, affecting the entire global civilization; and interpersonal human relationships are negotiated based on netiquette rules and codes (open flirts only exist on old filters, the rules of romances are determined by licensed matchmakers).

Meanwhile, almost in parallel, The Matrix appeared in cinemas – and Polish cyberpunk choked. But that doesn't mean it fell completely silent.

Realistic fiction

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Still from ‘Avalon’, directed by Mamoru Oshii, 2001, photo: Bandai Visual Company, Dentsu Productions Ltd.

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Mamoru Oshii's Avalon symbolically opened the new decade. For the film of the legendary director, the creator of the classic cyberpunk Ghost in the Shell from 1995, to be considered a Polish film may be a bit of an exaggeration, but since the picture was shot in, amongst others, Wrocław and Nowa Huta, and there were a lot of Poles in the cast, with Małgorzata Foremniak at the forefront, I think it is only a slight exaggeration. The sepia image – at least when the characters go inside the VR world – tells the story of players addicted to the title game, for whom it is a form of escape or therapy, helping them to cope with the world. But sometimes, it kills them – when they reach a level from which one cannot wake up.

And although in the new century, science fiction in Poland was also dominated by and incorporated posthumanism – and texts arose which were inspired by the works of Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan or the essayist Raymond Kurzweil or Hans Moravec – cyberpunk did not disappear completely.

This transition is evident especially in Gamedec, Marcin Przybyłek's epic series. In Reality Border (2004), together with the hero, the titular ‘game detective’, we solve classic criminal riddles from the border of two worlds – real and digital. But with the development of the action and evolution of the literary neverland, Przybyłek takes readers from Warsaw City of the 22nd century far beyond the aesthetics and subject matter of the works labelled as ‘silicon magic’, consistently ordering the protagonists to further cross the limits of humanity. Suffice it to say that in the last volume of the series – Obrazki z Imperium (Pictures of the Empire) – humanity has already taken control of distant planetary systems capable of multiplication and the immortal heroes match the power of ancient gods. Instead of cyberpunk, these books are closer to a futuristic utopia, cosmic manga or a sweeping space opera.

Meanwhile, the SF publishing market was dominated by epic fantasy and prose for young adults, and later, the whole wave of post-apocalyptic fantasy – but that doesn't mean that cyberpunk was completely eradicated.

Status 7: Breakoff (2001) and Status 7: Overload (2003) are two parts of a comic book by Tobiasz Piątkowski and Robert Adler, drawn in the 1990s, who present Warsaw’s near future and the problems plaguing it. Here, the Polish capital resembles all the similar metropolises of the cyberpunk future: death and corpses spread densely and an amount of technological gadgets to make your head spin, with protagonists who assume the roles of gangsters, policemen, and – of course – hackers. The only thing missing is the indispensable noir vibes – the story is distinguished by its comedic smartness and fast-paced action.

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Cezary Michalski, photo: Andrzej Rybczyński / PAP; cover of ‘Gorsze Światy’ (Lesser Worlds) by Cezary Michalski, photo: Fabryka Słów 2006

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Moreover, Allah 2.0 by Mieszko Zagańczyk (2005), playing on today’s Euro-sceptic fears, takes readers to the year 2072 and a Europe dominated by Islam, in which the virtual world mixes with the material world, nation-states have been dislodged by corporations, and the heroes, as in Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, can transfer consciousness between clones. The title’s Allah 2.0 is a rebellious artificial intelligence.

Similar political and ideological fears underlie Cezary Michalski's Worse Worlds (2006) – a collection of short stories wherein grotesque morality, political satire and cyberpunk fuse in different proportions. The reality described by the well-known writer is filled with omnipresent consumerism, the main role of the media is commercial advertising – products or ideas – and everything the citizens do is tracked by the lenses of ever-present cameras. Konrad T. Lewandowski (2009) draws a similar background in his Legendy Cyberkatakumb (Legends of the Cyber Catacombs), focussing, however, not on politics, but rather on the metaphysical consequences of playing with the human brain, consciousness as well as the limits of cognition.

If Michalski approaches the limits of exaggeration, often crossing it, then Celebration of the Revolution by Michał Protasiuk (2011) remains on the side of ‘realistic fiction’, although not without irony. But the reality the author describes has more to do with William Gibson's later books than with worldly reportage. Advanced technology, sinister corporations, multi-layered conspiracies, and a novel that predicts – or designs? – reality or a messiah born in Poznań's Dębiec neighbourhood are just some of the attractions of this ‘cyberpunk beyond props’. It takes place in contemporary Poland and a globalised Europe, wherein the former borders have ceased to exist, especially regarding information flow. Anticipating trends by a few years, Protasiuk wrote a book about post-truth and what life in the contemporary, post-modern world means. The author returns to a similar topic in Zetgeist, an audio series, in which the high-tech background is depicted through the prism of a corporat- thriller action plot.

Published two years later, Cezary Zbierzchowski's Holocaust F is much more classic in the sense that it operates in the recognizable scenery of an apocalyptic future, which literally falls apart under the influence of excess information. Through global Synergy, a deadly virus spreads, the people infected by it turn into bloodthirsty beasts or passive zombies that use swarm intelligence, businessmen are guarded by combat androids capable of defeating a small army, and the richest heads of corporations can change bodies as if they were the latest suit collection. And into this info-apocalypse, straight from the ‘megabyte bomb’ connected to Hollywood blockbusters, the author has thrown in a metaphysical context and the history of Plazmat – a mysterious energy that left humanity.

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Covers of ‘Łzy Mai’ (Tears of Mai) & ‘Spektrum’ (Spectrum) by Martyna Raduchowska, photo: Wydawnictwo Uroboros

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This summary of the latest Polish cyberpunk prose will end with Black Lights, for now a dylogy from Martyna Raduchowska, an author who for a moment was even involved in writing Cyberpunk 2077. The setting of Maia’s Tears (2015) and Spectrum (2018) is New Horizon – another colossal city taken straight from the dark visions of futurists and the dystopian vision of cyberpunks – and the main object of desire, reinforsin, allows androids to feel emotions and transforms people into geniuses, even if they have to pay a price for it. The story keeps up with action prose, but doesn’t avoid serious diagnoses and topics. The first volume of the series even won the Kwazar Prize, awarded for promoting scientific content in literature.

Neon sky

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Covers of ‘Status 7: Breakoff’, 2001 & ‘Status 7: Overload’, 2003, by Tobiasz Piątkowski & Robert Adler, photo: Egmont Polska

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I am aware that these are not all of the titles that could be collected in the history of Polish cyberpunk fiction. There are many other texts, although they are perhaps not as obvious or as loud as the ones mentioned above. Anyway, it's time to finally say it: I added to this bibliography by publishing the story ‘(¥ b 3 r p µ n |{!’ in 2013. In it, I tried to combine genre prose, fears of the end of the world (as we know it), moral stories of the near future and the main theses of postmodern philosophers, with Bauman and Castells at the forefront (end of commercial break).

Some were still writing similar things – for example, Bartek Biedrzycki, the author of the stories ‘Czarne Światło, Błękitny Lód’ (Black Light, Blue Ice) and ‘Kołysanka Stop’ (Lullaby Stop), which are contained in the collection of stories whose title is the same as second of these texts. Tomek Marchewka, whose fresh ‘Wandale’ (Vandals) from the January issue of Nowa Fantastyka (01/19) mixes the core themes of cyberpunk, graffiti culture and the reality of the Kraków housing developments from the 1970s, except it was set in a future that is a bit dirtier. There’s Michał R. Wiśniewski, whose We Are All Cyborgs is a para-reportage about the phenomenon of Poles at the turn of the century who experienced the transformational impact of the Internet. Or, as mentioned at the beginning, Jakub Nowak.

The excerpt at the beginning comes from his short story ‘Retro (Fantazja Alternatywna)’ (Retro [Alternative Fantasy]), which is part of the anthology Rok po Końcu Świata (One Year After the End of the World). Nowak pays tribute to cyberpunk classics in a daring way, at the same time rewriting it culturally to fit our familiar realities. ‘Retro’ is, however, something more than pastiche, even if the heroes live in an underground city built in the mines under the Silesian conurbation. Instead of cyberspace, they surf the Carbonatrix; they drink a vile carbonade and at night, dream of revolting against the General, while on the surface, the temperature of the Cold War reaches a boiling point. Would this be the most Polish of Polish cyberpunks if its fame in the 1980s surfaced on this side of the Iron Curtain?

Realities change, computer dashboards replace the familiar Unitra, Odra and Commodore. But the longing and terror are the same in people’s hearts clenched by technology, dreaming the same dream about the sky above the port, which always has the colour of a screen oriented to a non-existent channel.

Once again, Nowak:

Text

You raise your head and close your eyes immediately. You warm your face in the chemical glow of the neon sky (sky, sky – you repeat, you can’t think about the dome’s ceiling). A sky that hangs lower with each turn. Ever since they stopped turning off the neon lights, the Hole is constantly blossoming with their light, and they, awakened a long time ago, are expanding, writhing, swelling and thickening, joining over your head, mutating in bizarre buzzing configurations of colloquial symbols, trademarks and fonts. Pewex flirts with Marlboro, pulsing provocatively around the angularity of the other, together with Grundig pushing the smoking ban into the shadows, which buzzes more and more quietly, ashamed of its ineffectiveness from the very beginning. A dancing couple from Żywiec copulates with Johnnie Walker, Nescafé teases Wedel, the Radom-based Mesko or Predom under the communist era, Dacia and Polsport, as well as the awesome Atari, ironically pointing upwards, and Lot, slender, concrete, appearing in unexpected places and moments, arrogant and most unreachable, which pisses everyone here off almost to tears. Neon lights: the true morphology of this place, a living tissue, growing on all corners of the Hole, an attentive network of converging glass, gases and phosphors. You lift your head, close your eyes and with every pore of your face, you absorb its warm, bewildering beauty.