I have known Brendan Byrne for some year. We first encountered each other in digital mode on an obsolete platform*, but soon became friends IRL. His first two books had a select readership among whom I am lucky to count myself. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points to some of the topics in his work. He has a new collection of short fiction, Another World Isn’t Possible, just out from Wanton Sun and available from bookshop.org or Barnes & Noble.
Henry Wessells : From a taxonomic point of view, your birthdate places you right at the edge of the digital abyss. Can recall a moment when you became aware of the changes occurring around you ?
Brendan C. Byrne : My microgeneration (born in the early 1980s, just missed being Gen X, didn’t know we were millennials until we were well into our 30s) is a bridge. As Joanne McNeil [author of Lurking and Wrong Way] has discussed, we can remember before the internet was available to consumers, but we came of age with it. I wasn’t too aware of technological change until I was 10 or so, which would make it 1992, but after that it seemed constant and at an unvarying speed. The internet seemed less an aberration than part of a natural progression, and I assumed that’s how things had always worked. Even cellphones didn’t seem like such a big leap, partially because they weren’t really all that useful at first. Most of my attention was focused after 2001 on the political situation, which seemed changing at a far more exponential rate than I ever could have imagined. I was also a college drop-out with very little money, so I was on the blunt edge of the technological curve, barely using the internet. At some point, I walked into my grandparents’ living room and saw my cousin watching a movie on a laptop, which deeply disturbed me. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible, and I didn’t understand why you would want it to be. Mid-summer 2007 sealed the deal, when I met a friend at the Blind Tiger in the West Village, and she’d just purchased the first iPhone. Again, I wondered why someone would want that. It took me just over a decade to finally acquiesce and purchase a smartphone, and I still don’t know the answer to that question.
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— — —*For the record, on that obsolete platform Brendan first expressed the useful summer observation, The hammock always wins. [HWW]