It is Nguyen’s only childhood memory from Vietnam, and he isn’t sure if it really happened or if it came from something he read in a history book. To him, whether he personally witnessed the shooting doesn’t matter.
“I have a memory that I can’t rely on, but all the historical information points to the fact that all this stuff happened, if not to us, then to other people,” he said in a video interview earlier this month.
Many histories of cyberpunk emphasize its literary precursors — its borrowings from hard-boiled detective fiction, for example, or the proto-cyberpunk elements in the science fiction of writers such as Alfred Bester, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree Jr., and others. In addition to these literary influences, however, comic books also played a significant (and often unexamined) role in cyberpunk’s flowering into a recognizable literary and cultural phenomenon during the 1980s. On one hand, Japanese comics (manga) and animated cartoons (anime) such as Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) unquestionably helped shape (and were in turn shaped by) cyberpunk sensibilities. At the same time, however, European and American comics also served as a vital resource for cyberpunk aesthetics.
A personal connection of the author to a story seems to give a novel even more life on the pages. Such is the case of Janet Skeslien Charles’ “The Paris Library.” I seem to have chosen a wonderful assortment of World War II fiction lately, this being the most recent. Charles actually worked at the American Library of Paris, a unique library in France providing books in English and other languages to the residents of the city. This book is based on the story of the heroic librarians who struggled to keep the library open during the German Occupation.
You may not have heard of Robin Dunbar. But you will, perhaps, know of his work. Dunbar, now emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, is the man who first suggested that there may be a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom you can comfortably maintain stable social relationships – or, as Stephen Fry put it on the TV show QI, the number of people “you would not hesitate to go and sit with if you happened to see them at 3am in the departure lounge at Hong Kong airport”. Human beings, Dunbar found when he conducted his research in the 1990s, typically have 150 friends in general (people who know us on sight, and with whom we have a history), of whom just five can usually be described as intimate.
The first wave whirs around in one
long enormous pipe; greens, blues,