Misha Nogha (1955– ) is a US writer of fiction and poetry often associated with the cyberpunk movement and best known for her neo-cyberpunk novel Red Spider White Web (1990), which was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and won the 1990 ReaderCon Award. However, the focus of her work is often broader.
Of mixed Native American (Metis-Cree) and Norse ancestry, Nogha began publishing with the fantasy prose-poetry collection Prayers of Steel (1988). Her second collection, Ke-Qua-Hawk-As (1994), includes poems intermixed with stories based on Native American material. Her most recent collection is Magpies and Tigers (2007). The performed story “Tsuki Mangetsu” won the 1989 Prix d’Italia.
Nogha’s short fiction (and poetry) appeared in some of the best independent magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, including Back Brain Recluse, Factsheet Five, and Ice River. Her brilliant story “Stone Badger” was showcased in the Looking Glass Anthology of Native American Writers, while “Chippoke Na Gomi” appeared in the Witness Anthology of Experimental Fiction (1989) and The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010). Her nonfiction appeared in the iconic (and New Wave–influenced) Science Fiction Eye magazine and she served as a fiction editor for the influential speculative magazine New Pathways.
Red Spider White Web, excerpted here, describes a dystopian future congested, cyberpunkish America, dominated by Japan and afflicted by climate change, where artists try to avoid sanctuaries called “Mickey-Sans,” which shelter their inhabitants from the excremental waste and pollution outside but also sanitize creativity. Into this milieu steps a dedicated Native American artist who has been gengineered into a being half human and half wolverine, and on her mission falls afoul of surreal figures and dangers. The style is often phantasmagorical and full of dark menace, but the darkness is balanced by the main character Kumo’s pursuit of her hologram art.
The 1999 Wordcraft of Oregon edition of the novel acknowledges Nogha as having been a sui generis example of and influence on cyberpunk. It features an impressive triumvirate of advocates, with an introduction by John Shirley, a foreword by Brian Aldiss, and a postscript by James P. Blaylock. Shirley, who made Time’s list of the “seminal cyberpunk writers,” avows that Nogha transcends the subgenre, also citing the example of slipstream fiction published in literary magazines. Shirley calls Nogha’s novel “the radical convergence of metaphysical, psychological, tribal and techno-logical.” Aldiss points to the “hard, dirty, challenging” aspects of Red Spider White Web.
Blaylock, meanwhile, zeroes in on the climate-change aspects and offers up an anecdote of an apocalyptic vision he had while driving, of a blasted landscape and food made out of plastic. Unlike much cyberpunk fiction, which seems to fetishize or render beautiful artificial landscapes—to, in effect, celebrate the disconnection of modern technology—Nogha, much more in sympathy with Philip K. Dick, mourns the loss of the real or natural world and interrogates our disconnection. Her depictions of the “underground real” conjure up sympathetic echoes of the work of Cordwainer Smith.
In this excerpt, “Death Is Static Death Is Movement,” the artist Kumo is on the move after a disconcerting conversation with her friend JuJube. Dern Motler, a fellow artist turned enemy (and turned violent), is after her, and Kumo is unsure whom to trust. The excerpt features an encounter with Tommy, a potentially dangerous friend who is worshipped as a god in the Mickey-San. The “Pinkies,” or “Pink Flies,” mentioned are misogynistic neo-Nazis: rich male teenagers (“scrubbed clean”) who go slumming and with whom Kumo has had run-ins.