Cyberpunk Literature

10 Key excerpts on "Cyberpunk Literature"

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  Science Fiction Criticism

  An Anthology of Essential Writings

  • Rob Latham(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  When science fiction is enlisted by postmodernist fiction, 44 Science Fiction Criticism however, it becomes integrated into an esthetic and a world-view whose central tenets are an uncertainty and an indeterminacy which call into question the “causal interpreta-tion of the universe” and the reliance on a “rhetoric of believability” which virtually define it as a generic entity (Ebert 92). It is within this conflictual framework of realist literary conventions played out in the postmodernist field that I want to look at cyberpunk, a “movement” in science fiction in the 1980s which produced a wide range of fictions exploring the technological ramifica-tions of experience within late-capitalist, post-industrial, media-saturated Western society. “Let’s get back to the Cyberpunks,” Lucius Shepard recently proposed in the first issue of Journal Wired (1989), one of several non-academic periodicals devoted to contempor-ary issues in science fiction and related fields; “Defunct or not, they seem to be the only revolution we’ve got” (113). * * * Cyberpunk was a product of the commercial mass market of “hard” science fiction; concerned on the whole with near-future extrapolation and more or less conventional on the level of narrative technique, it was nevertheless at times brilliantly innovative in its explorations of technology as one of the “multiplicity of structures that intersect to produce that unstable constellation the liberal humanists call the ‘self’” (Moi 10). From this perspective, cyberpunk can be situated among a growing (although still relatively small) number of science-fiction projects which can be identified as “anti-humanist.” In its various deconstructions of the subject—carried out in terms of a cybernetic breakdown of the classic nature/culture opposition—cyberpunk can be read as one symptom of the postmodern condition of genre science fiction.

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  The State of the History of Economics

  Proceedings of the History of Economics Society

  • James P. Henderson(Author)
  • 1997(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This paper explores a body of literature from the 1980s referred to as “cyberpunk” that both draws heavily on modern economic ideas and deals with them in a way that is reminiscent of but distinctly different from the earlier humanistic commentary. This literature provides a dystopian vision of the future of a liberal free-market society to contrast with Rand’s utopias on the same theme, and to complement Orwell’s socialist dystopia.

  In the next section we explain what this literature contains, then we suggest what it signifies for the history of economics, and finally we ruminate about its impact on contemporary society.

  A NEW BRAND OF SCIENCE FICTION

  Who are the cyberpunk writers? The originals—Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and Bruce Sterling—were a small coterie of contributors to Cheap Truth, a freely distributed, uncopyrighted science-fiction magazine that ran from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. In 1984, William Gibson wrote the canonical work Neuromancer, which has become the manifesto of the movement. By the late 1980s, Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Shiner, and Shirley, along with Walter Jon Williams and Pat Cadigan, had become the cyberpunk core. Gibson’s novels and short stories still best illustrate the genre.2

  Cyberpunk is a science fiction category with certain well-defined characteristics, the most prominent of which is commitment to an exploration of and inquiry into the social consequences of information technologies.3 Bruce Sterling explains in his introduction to the 1986 cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades that cyberpunk authors are the first generation of science fiction writers to grow up in a science fictional world. Their concept of the future relies much more heavily on developing a projection from the present and on the world already around them than imaginative speculations of their “hard SF” predecessors (Sterling 1986, xi). Others, too, view cyberpunk as a reflection of the present. William Gibson has said in regard to his work Neuromancer,

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  Biopunk Dystopias : Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction

  • Lars Schmeink(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Liverpool University Press

    (Publisher)

  I agree with Graham Murphy and Sherryl Vint that cyberpunk offers diversity and relevance especially through ‘its transformations into a more generalized set of practices’ (xiii), proving its persistence in ‘our cultural imaginary’ (xvii). For me then, at the heart of cyberpunk fction is the radical breaking up of dichotomies and the destabilizing of boundaries: machine/human, nature/culture, male/female, high culture/ low culture, body/mind. Because of this, cyberpunk is believed by many critics to embody the postmodern, post-industrial, globalized, BIOPUNK DYSTOPIAS 22 and late-capitalist world at the end of the twentieth century (Luckhurst 196ff.; McHale 225ff.). Fredric Jameson sees in cyberpunk ‘the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’ ( Postmodernism 419), whereas Csicsery-Ronay argues that by 1990 sf and its topoi need to be understood not just as a ‘major symptom of the postmodern condition, but as a body of privileged allegories, the dream book of the age’ (‘Postmodernism’ 305). As such, cyberpunk sf is deeply ingrained in the ‘ideologically riven’ (Luckhurst 202) historical moment of the 1980s. Cyberpunk’s societies are fraught with inequality, exploitation, and insecurity. Its worlds are unstable and fragmented, its representation stressing the fuidity of its ontological aspects (McHale 247). Cyberpunk emphasizes the construction of a globalized society into class or caste systems, showing off the mobility of characters from the elite class and the rigidity of the lower classes. In addition, cyberpunk strikes a revolutionary, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist pose similar to its nominal relation ‘punk.’ To facilitate this critique, cyberpunk essentially orchestrates the evanescence of the human body initiated by ‘multinational capitalism’s desire for something better than the fallible human being’ (Csicsery-Ronay, ‘Cyberpunk’ 191).

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  Books and Beyond

  The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading [4 volumes]

  • Kenneth Womack(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990; Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007; Myers, B.R. A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose. New York: Melville House, 2002; Nicol, Bran. Postmodernism and the CONTEMPORARY MAINSTREAM AMERICAN FICTION 273 Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003; Peck, Dale. Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction. New York: New Press, 2005; Smiley, Jane. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. New York, Knopf, 2005. JAMES M. DECKER CYBERPUNK Definition. Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction and is characterized by two key features: the fictional portrayal of a computer-generated, alternate virtual world and the flaunting of a “punk” attitude toward society, technology, and the human body. This punk attitude is exhibited by the adolescent cyber-cowboys, eager to trade in life in the postapocalyptic urban zones for an adventure on the digital fron- tier envisaged behind the computer screen. Summarized by Bruce Sterling (1954–), the chief propagator of the genre, as a coinciding of “the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground,” cyberpunk combines two aspects treated as mutually exclusive by most science fiction writers before the rise of cyberpunk in the early 1980s (Sterling 1986, xi). Cyberpunk’s characteristic style derives from the juxtaposition of dystopian urban space and utopian computer-generated space, thus contributing a new pattern to the pool of science fiction motifs. Though already proclaimed dead in 1988, shortly after it began, related forms continue to thrive in other narrative media, notably television, cinema, and computer and role-playing games.

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  Language and Gender

  Interdisciplinary Perspectives

  • Sara Mills(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 and many of the narratives that have been produced have been strongly influenced by feminism, as is evidenced by the way in which gender and identity have been placed at the centre of such narratives. In this chapter I shall be discussing some key writing strategies used by feminist writers of science fiction to subvert the generic stability of science fiction, thereby creating an environment of uncertainty within which conventional constructions of sexual difference can be questioned. I am primarily concerned with the use of narrative structures and codes drawn from other genres in which the feminine is not marginalised, such as romance fiction, and with the rewriting of the dominant metaphors of science fiction to create a conceptual and linguistic space within which the feminine can be coded as hegemonic. The metaphor of the cyborg, and its positioning in relating to cyberpunk, provides the focus for my argument that these strategies have been profoundly disruptive for the genre as a whole because, in challenging the dominance of the masculine in discourses about technology, they challenge the constraints of both genre and gender.

  Although the term ‘cyberpunk’ is one that is now used to describe cultural productions across a range of media, particularly film, video and performance, it first emerged in the 1980s as a sub-genre of science fiction. Cyberpunk constitutes a major intervention into the genre, and the writer whose name remains most clearly identified with it is William Gibson, although other writers such as Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley were equally involved in promoting the idea that cyberpunk was a ‘movement’. Cyberpunk writing combines the language of information technology with the spatial and temporal dislocation that is characteristic of science fiction. The innovative syntax of cyberpunk draws on the rhetoric of postindustrial technology to present fictional landscapes that are ironic and playful, both in their simulation of surface reality and in their apparent effacement of the boundaries between inner and outer worlds. A notable feature of cyberpunk writing is its speed and dazzle, and in his introduction to the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades

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  A Companion to Science Fiction

  • David Seed(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Such hyperbole made Jameson’s suggestion that Cyberpunk represents “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (Jameson 1991: 419) seem understated. While George Slusser dubbed Cyberpunk “literary MTV” (McCaffery 1991: 334), Brian McHale treated it as emerging from feedback relationships between SF and a “postmodernist mainstream fiction which has already been ‘science-fictionalized’ to some degree” (McCaffery 1991: 315). Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. described Cyberpunk as “implosive” SF about hallucination and derangement which located “SF problemat-ics not in imperial adventures among the stars, but in the body-physical/body-social and a drastic ambivalence about the body’s traditional – and terrifyingly uncertain – integrity” (McCaffery 1991: 188). Veronica Hollinger contended that Cyberpunk’s Cyberpunk 229 cyborging posthumanism “radically decenters the human body, the sacred icon of the essential self, in the same way that the virtual reality of cyberspace works to decen-ter conventional humanist notions of an unproblematic ‘real’ ” (McCaffery 1991: 207). Joan Gordon found in Cyberpunk’s “motif of the journey to the underworld” the pos-sibility for a covert feminist SF to “acknowledge our full female identity” (McCaffery 1991: 200–1), whereas Nicola Nixon argued that Cyberpunk relegated SF’s political potential “to a form of scary feminized software,” creating “an alternative, attractive, but hallucinatory world which allows not only a reassertion of male mastery but a virtual celebration of a kind of primal masculinity” (Nixon 1992: 231).

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  Biopunk Worlds of Paolo Bacigalupi

  • Aleksandra Mochocka(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  That was the first time that I’d ever understood that there were actually really trend lines in science fiction as a genre, and slices of genre within science fiction. It is vital, however, to remember that the power of Bacigalupi’s creations lies in the formulas being appropriated and re-established, and it would be misleading to read his stories with the disregard of the fact. The point here is that already existing patterns are used by Bacigalupi not only to establish continuity, secure communication with the megatext-savvy readers, and facilitate the introduction of unfamiliar and cognitively demanding elements, but they are also creatively reshaped and twisted, and utilised to support a diametrically – at times – dif- ferent agendas. Generally speaking, in its classic form that flourished in the 1980s, cyber- punk could be characterised as a literature concerned with low life and high tech as the widely circulating slogan has it (Mochocka, 2016a, p. 128). It has been recognised as a postmodern form of writing (Broderick, 1995), one that foregrounds the provisional status of all definitions of value, rationality and truth in a radical rejection of the Enlightenment ethos. It amalgamates in often baffling ways the rational and the irrational, the new and the old, the mind and the body, by integrating the hyperefficient structures of high technology with the anarchy of street subcultures. (Cavallaro 2000, p. xi) Characteristically, authors classified nowadays as cyberpunk, such as Pat Cadigan with Synners (1991), Bruce Sterling with Schismatrix (1985), Greg Bear with Queen of Angels (1990), Rudy Rucker with Software (1982), Michael Swanwick with Vacuum Flowers (1987), or Walter Jon Williams with Hardwired (1986), “not necessarily think about themselves as cyberpunk writers”, as “it was not a monicker that they would use” (Frelik, 2012). The label has been attached in retrospect, by other people (ibid.).

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  Cyberpunk and Visual Culture

  • Graham Murphy, Lars Schmeink, Graham Murphy, Lars Schmeink(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  have suggested its politics are often more style than substance. There have thus always been hints in the cyberpunk tradition that—despite posturing about its outsider status and countercultural credentials—the subgenre speaks to and from a position of privilege. 1 While its heroes may not have been the industrialists at the center of the emerging information economy, they were those whose skills would continue to ensure their place in the changing global economy, even as the setting of cyberpunk fiction anticipated a predatory capitalist system in which all labor was precarious. While claims regarding the end of cyberpunk emerged almost as soon as the ink dried on the first printing of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the continued circulation of the term suggests that a more accurate assessment can be found in Thomas Foster’s claim that “cyberpunk didn’t so much die as experience a sea change into a more generalized cultural formation” (xiv). Foster positions cyberpunk within a longer history of posthumanist discourses within and beyond science fiction (sf) that conceptualize evolution beyond the current state of the human body and think about the possibilities for human survival beyond ecological collapse. Within this context it becomes easy to understand “how conservative political agendas can survive, even thrive, in technocultural contexts” (xiii), Foster argues as he explores how cyberpunk discourse fueled transhumanist fantasies of technological transcendence of both human embodiment and Earth’s ecosystems

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  Science Fiction

  • Brian Baker(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  (Bukatman, 1993, p. 244)  In the work of N. Katherine Hayles, particularly How We Became Posthuman (1999), cybernetics, rather than representations of the FEMINISM, SCIENCE FICTION AND CYBERPUNK 129 figure of the cyborg, is the centre of critical interrogation. Hayles, who has doctorates in both physics and literature, discusses SF texts such as Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) alongside discussions of the Macy con- ferences in cybernetics to trace a socio-political trajectory whereby the form of the Enlightenment subject – characterised by individuation, reason, ideals of ‘freedom’ and agency, and above all self-integration/ self-identity – becomes increasingly supplanted by an informatic sub- ject and human body, one defined by its place in a network of codes, processes and practices. At root, Hayles attempts to track the increas- ing technologisation of the body, and the mediation of subjectivity. Haraway, Bukatman and Hayles reflect a period in which the concep- tualisation of the subject, and its place in an increasingly complex and unprocessable socio-cultural and economic system, found expression in two terms that became hotly debated both within and without the genre of SF. These terms are ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Cyberpunk’, and it is to these that we will now turn. Cyberpunk SF Cyberpunk was a form of fiction that rose to prominence in the 1980s. Bruce Sterling, who along with William Gibson, was one of the cen- tral figures of this loose (and self-proclaimed) ‘movement’, was its chief promoter and, in the shape of the anthology Mirrorshades (1986/1990), shaper of its public profile. Sterling’s ‘Preface’ to Mirrorshades suggests the anthology ‘present[s] a full overview of the cyberpunk movement’ along with making ‘broad statements about cyberpunk and … estab- lish[ing] its identifying traits’ (Sterling, 1990, p. vii).

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  The History of Science Fiction

  • A. Roberts(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Her version of cyberpunk attends more closely to the interface between human and computer precisely in order to be able to articulate this dialectic. Synners (1991), probably her best book, articulates the problematic mostly in terms of disease (computer viruses that may be conscious and are implicated in certain human deaths). In Tea From an Empty Cup (1998) the dialectic is more clearly dramatised along cultural lines: the premise (a virtual reality that gives the user access to certain ecstatic sexual sensations) is viewed as a proper medium for spiritual revelation and cosmic mythological truth by a Japanese character in the novel, but as a non-magical purely materialist experience by a white character. Another American writer , John Shirley (b. 1953), superheated the conventions of cyberpunk to an even greater intensity , exaggerating both the hardcore material- ism and the Gnostic possibilities. His Eclipse trilogy (Eclipse, 1985; Eclipse Penumbra, 1988; and Eclipse Corona, 1990) is especially notable. Where a writer goes to the lengths of purging his/her cyberpunk fantasy of its buried mysticism, the result can be too overwhelmingly dark for some tastes: the British writer Richard Morgan’ s (b. 1965) sequence of novels, beginning with Altered Carbon (2002), has many of its characters’ minds reinserted into new bod- ies (‘resleeving’) on death; but this resurrection is a wholly quotidian, non-mystical experience, and the world of the novels is among the most claustrophobic, the darkest and grimmest in the genre. It may be that the dark chocolate pleasures of ultra-violent, dystopian cyberpunk only reflected the anxieties and excitements of the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s. The many such books published during that decade almost all read as painfully dated nowadays; not because our own age lacks anxi- ety or excitement, but because the nature of those emotions has shifted its cultural logic.

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