Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, Lars Schmeink, Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, Lars Schmeink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367549176
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000578614
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Social Sciences

A collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures in cyberpunk culture, this outstanding guide charts the rich and varied landscape of cyberpunk from the 1970s to present day.

The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro ?tomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of 'Honorable Mentions' to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk.

This accessible guide will be of interest to students and scholars of cultural studies, film studies, literature, media studies, as well as anyone with an interest in cyberpunk culture and science fiction.

FIFTY KEY FIGURES IN CYBERPUNK CULTURE

J.G. Ballard (1930–2009)

British author.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091189-3

J. G. Ballard was the author of nineteen novels and over a hundred short stories. A key figure of science fiction’s (sf) New Wave of the 1960s, he wrote in a variety of genres, including natural disaster sf (The Drowned World [1962], The Crystal World [1966]), cultural disaster allegories (The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], Crash [1973]), fictional (auto)biographies (Empire of the Sun [1984]), and contemporary novels (Cocaine Nights [1996], Super-Cannes [2000]) that were written “from the stance that everything had become science fiction” (Wilson). The distinct literary quality of Ballard’s fiction has led to the emergence of the adjective “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

Ballard’s deep influence on cyberpunk has been openly declared by many of the movement’s main representatives, most notably by its chief impresario Bruce Sterling, who, in his Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), listed Ballard as “an idolized role model to many cyberpunks” (xiv). In another key anthology, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991), editor Larry McCaffery and author Richard Kadrey included Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash in their “list of the cultural artifacts that helped to shape cyberpunks ideology and aesthetics” (17).

Aside from these accolades, Ballard’s thematic and aesthetic influence on cyberpunk is inescapable in a myriad of ways. First, his depiction of contemporary reality in (especially) The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash as completely synthetic, thoroughly mediated, inescapably hyperreal, absolutely urban, and technologically saturated strongly foreshadows the ways that reality was extrapolated to the future by cyberpunk. All these qualities, in idiosyncratic form, are now perceived as quintessentially cyberpunk. For example, focusing on a community that has an intense and inescapable sexual fetish for car crashes, Crash works as an allegory that systematically and persistently explores the sinister and uncanny intrusion of technology into the body. In cyberpunk, the explicitly negative overtones and the allegoric warning of such intrusions have been reduced, and the thorough technologization of bodies has become a common fact of its fictional worlds. Nevertheless, cyberpunk’s treatment of the relationship between the natural and the artificial—embodied in the manifold prosthetic implants, supplements, and enhancements typical of its protagonists’ bodies—owe a lot to the way Ballard initially staged the contemporary collision between technology and the body.

Ballard also took a frequent aesthetic and analytic interest in modern technological environments: the characters of Crash inhabit a seemingly endless web of suburban highways; the protagonist of Concrete Island (1974) finds himself stranded in a large area of derelict land created by several intersecting motorways; and High Rise (1975) follows the gradual disintegration of a micro-society in a self-sustaining 40-storey building from where no-one thinks of leaving. These were undoubtedly an inspiration to the various urban spaces and infinite cityscapes of cyberpunk, most notably The Sprawl of William Gibson’s first trilogy, and The Bridge of his second. Ballard’s frequent focus on confined and totalized, endless or inescapable, urban spaces prefigure the fact that in cyberpunk we rarely—if ever—get out of them as well.

Ballard’s interest in modern technological environments also extends to the inherently mediated nature of his techno-cultural present as well as society’s increasing obsession with media celebrities and events at the time. The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s experimental and surreal collection of ‘condensed novels,’ explores the subversive impact of the mass media landscape on the private mind of the individual. Its protagonist tries to make sense of the status and meaning of the media-events happening around him—the death of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor’s tracheotomy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and so on—and restages them as a personalized form of psychotherapy. The protagonist’s name changes with each segment (Talbert, Traven, Travis, Talbot), symbolically indicating the effortless and/or schizophrenic mutability of mediatized subjectivity. This mutability prefigures the technological mutability of so many of cyberpunk’s characters. Rob Latham, writing about New Wave sf’s influence on cyberpunk, has noted that “[t]he fabrication and exploitation of synthetic celebrities, a key theme in cyberpunk texts ranging from Pat Cadigan’s ‘Pretty Boy Crossover’ (1986) to Gibson’s Idoru (1996) to Richard Calder’s Cythera (1998)” can be traced back, among other works, to the “media-based obsessions of Ballard” (8), and specifically to The Atrocity Exhibition (10). Nevertheless, Ballard’s schizo-analytic approach has been replaced with a more playful one in cyberpunk.

The influence of Ballard’s poetics upon cyberpunk cannot be understated. Brian McHale has argued that with such works as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, “Ballard developed a new style—dense, disjointed, and bristling with technical vocabularies,” thus contributing to “shaping the poetics of […] the cyberpunks” (24). Minute and microscopic attention to detail, scientific vocabulary instead of verbal slang, tonally flat accounts rather than emotional descriptions, showing rather than telling, and occasional but powerful metaphors that blur the borders between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the technic (see Tomberg, “Morality”)—all of these added up to “a verbal equivalent of photographic hyperrealism” (Luckhurst 123) that is also deeply characteristic of cyberpunk, and “an unblinking, almost clinical objectivity” that Sterling explicitly related to Ballard as a generic precursor (xiv).

Ballard’s influence on cyberpunk is thus evident even on the syntactic level where “science fiction’s world-building processes” are folded “into the very texture of sentences, making implication (and its counterpart, active interference on the reader’s part) do the work that exposition would do in more traditional types of science fiction” (McHale 88). While Istvan Csicsery-Ronay is a bit harsh when he says, pointing to Gibson, that “most of the literary cyberpunks bask in the glory of the one major writer who is original and gifted enough to make the whole movement seem original and gifted” (185), it might be true that there is ultimately no uniform poetics of cyberpunk common to all its authors,¹ and that the prevalent preconception of this poetics is based on the idiosyncratic sentences of Gibson. Nevertheless, many of the aforementioned Ballardian features, and especially the “rich thesaurus of metaphors linking the organic and the electronic” (Csicsery-Ronay 190), are definitely on show in the works of Sterling, Cadigan, Neal Stephenson, Alexander Besher, and others.

Ballard’s prominent New Wave insistence upon inner space as the proper focus of sf found a not-too-distant descendant in cyberpunk’s own most famous coinage and characteristic locus: cyberspace. In a manifesto-essay “Which Way to Inner Space?,” originally published for New Worlds in 1962, Ballard suggested that “[t]he biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth” (197). With his statement, Ballard “wanted to marshal [science fiction] in a new direction; instead of pointing it at the stars, he would point it at the human psyche and our intricate, uncanny technologies of desire” (Wilson). Following the publication of “Which Way to Inner Space?,” “the very notion of inner space has gone through a series of transformations, including visual mapping, internal microscopic imagery, and of course cyberspace” (Seed 25). Arguably, “the 1960s obsession with ‘inner space’ is echoed in Gibson’s famous evocation of cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’” (Latham 14); this impression is confirmed by cyberspace inhabiting “the nonspace of the mind” (Gibson 67). According to Csicsery-Ronay, New Wave sf (including Ballard) had even started to treat “hallucination as an object in the world,” so that it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between “mystical truths and machine dreams” (190). By the time of cyberpunk, “reality ha[d] become a case of nerves—that is, the interfusion of the nervous system and computer-matrix, sensation and information” (Csicsery-Ronay 190). In this vein, cyberspace is the thoroughly technological materialization and modulation of the initially abstract, psychoanalytic, and surreal concept of inner space, of which Ballard was the chief proponent.

Finally, Ballard was the first writer who admittedly gave up writing sf because the technologically saturated reality around him had itself become science-fictional. After The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard felt that “science fiction had expired; the futures it once envisioned had been ingested by the present” (Wilson). With Crash, Ballard started to map a present whose ceaseless functionality of technology, embodied in the automobile, the motorway systems, and the constant traffic, themselves felt futuristic. Crash emanates the same specific kind of technologically infused cognitive estrangement that sf usually does. Poetically, Crash inhabits a liminal space between realism and sf, establishing a space where these two generic tendencies converge. Almost three decades later, William Gibson’s oeuvre took a similar (“realist”) turn when he forfeited his usual future-oriented cyberpunk extrapolations with his Blue Ant trilogy² and started writing contemporary novels that were situated in the immediate present but nevertheless continued to read like science fiction. Gibson’s reasoning was also similar: the present was over-accelerated, leaving no “place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future” (Nissley). The Blue Ant trilogy was an epitome of cyberpunk experiencing “a sea change into a more generalized cultural formation” (Foster xiv), of technological development catching up with cyberpunk and leading to the emergence of non-sf cyberpunk.³ Crash was a distant generic precursor to these developments and, as Wilson correctly remarks, Ballard had “signaled the assimilation of the future by the present long before Gibson published his first science fiction story” (Wilson). Ballard’s literary influence thus extends beyond the point where cyberpunk itself had started to transform into something else.

• See also: Pat Cadigan, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling

Notes

• Research for this chapter was supported by Estonian Research Council grant PRG 636.

1. Sterling did remark in his Preface to Mirrorshades that “the ‘typical cyberpunk writer’ does not exist; this person is only a Platonic fiction. For the rest of us, our label is an uneasy bed of Procrustes, where fiendish critics wait to lop and stretch us to fit” (ix), at least before Sterling lopped and stretched his retinue of authors to fit the Mirrorshades anthology.
2. Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010).
3. For details about non-sf cyberpunk, see Tomberg (“Non-SF”); Hollinger; McFarlane.

Works Cited

1. Ballard, J.G. “Which Way to Inner Space?” A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews. Flamingo, 1997, pp. 195–98.
2. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.” Storming the Reality Studio, edited by Larry McCaffery, Duke UP, 1991, pp. 182–93.
3. Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. U of Minnesota P, 2005. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace, 1984.
4. Hollinger, Veronica. “Stories About the Future: From Recognizing Patterns to Pattern Recognition.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 452–72.
5. Kadrey, Richard and Larry McCaffery. “Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming the Reality Studio.” Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, edited by Larry McCaffery, Duke UP, 1991, pp. 17–32.
6. Latham, Rob. “Literary Precursors.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2020, pp. 7–14.
7. Luckhurst, Roger. “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Liverpool UP, 1997.
8. McFarlane, Anna. “Cyberpunk and ‘Science Fiction Realism’ in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and Zero Dark Thirty.” Cyberpunk and Visual Culture, edited by Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2018, pp. 235–52.
9. McHale, Brian. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. Cambridge UP, 2015.
10. Nissley, Tom. “‘Across the Border to Spook Country’: An Interview with William Gibson.” Amazon.com, 2007, amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-William-Gibson-ebook/dp/B000UVBSYQ.
11. Seed, David. Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011.
12. Sterling, Bruce. Preface. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling, Ace, 1988, pp. ix–xvi.
13. Tomberg, Jaak. “Morality and Amorality in Ba(udri)llard’s Crash: A Poetic Perspective.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2020, pp. 47–72.
14. Tomberg, Jaak. “Non-SF Cyberpunk.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2020, pp. 81–90.
15. Wilson, D. Harlan. J. G. Ballard. U of Illinois P, 2017. (eBook)

Jaak Tomberg

Steven Barnes(1952–)

US author.

Steven Barnes’s career has spanned forty years and he has written everything from novels and short stories to comic books and television scripts, covering science fiction, fantasy, and mystery. However, his contribution to cyberpunk culture has gone largely overlooked, in part because of the mode’s monochromatism. While one of the critiques often leveled against cyberpunk, particularly its 1980s-era print version, is its almost total absence of women from the roster—the first wave of print cyberpunk was lar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Alphabetical list of contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture
• Index