Cyberpunk literature

Science-fiction subgenre dealing with computer-dominated future societies

Cyberpunk responded to the development of computer networks by imagining worlds in which they were pervasive and defined human relationships. Works in the genre anticipated the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and virtual-reality gaming.

The principal texts that gave rise to and exemplified cyberpunk literature were a series of stories by William Gibson begun with “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) and culminating with the novel Neuromancer (1984); the earlier stories were collected in Burning Chrome (1986). The characters in Gibson’s stories are able to project themselves into the virtual “cyberspace” contained in a worldwide computer network by “jacking in” through their personal computers (PCs). The countercultural values and slick, picaresque story lines of Gibson’s work inspired a cyberpunk movement, named by Gardner R. Dozois, loudly advertised by Bruce Sterling’s fanzine Cheap Truth, and widely popularized by Sterling’s best-selling anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Other key texts of cyberpunk fiction included Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988) and his Shaper/Mechanist series, which was launched in 1982 and culminated in the novel Schismatrix (1985); Rudy Rucker’s Software (1982) and Wetware (1988); Gibson’s Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988); Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers (1987); and some of the short stories in John Shirley’s Heatseeker (1988) and Pat Cadigan’s Patterns (1989).

Virtual spaces contained within computers had previously been explored in a number of science fiction novels from the mid-1960s onward, and many aspects of Gibson’s scenario had been anticipated by Vernor Vinge’s True Names (1981), but Gibson’s notion of cyberspace acquired an iconic significance. (An alternative term used in Neuromancer but not original to it—“the matrix”—subsequently acquired a similar charisma by virtue of its use in cinema.) Neuromancer was published shortly after the National Science Foundation’s academically oriented network CSNET (founded in 1980) was connected to the Defense Department’s ARPANET with the aid of the Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and just before the establishment of the NSFNet in 1985 laid down the backbone of the Internet, which would become the host of all the sites forming the World Wide Web. Neuromancer’s timeliness enabled it to capture the imagination of the engineers and users developing such systems, who were already forming the nucleus of a new “cyberculture.” Many of the enterprising young hobbyists recruited by the companies blossoming in California’s Silicon Valley were enthusiastic to conceive of themselves as ultra-cool innovative nonconformists; cyberpunk literature gave them a label to apply to this ideal and a definitive set of hero myths—or, more accurately, antihero myths. In cyberpunk literature, cyberspace became a new frontier to replace the Wild West, one whose particular type of lawlessness would work to the advantage of nerds instead of gunslingers. Such fiction offered a new kind of escapist imagery in which the obsolete mythology of the seemingly abortive space age was replaced by a nascent mythology involving the use of technology to achieve a transcendent breakthrough to freedom from the burdens of the flesh.

The “uploading” of minds from the brain’s “wetware” to a much vaster and more durable silicon matrix quickly became the holy grail of a “posthumanist” or “transhumanist” movement founded in the late 1980s by such propagandists as F. M. Esfandiary (also known as FM-2030) and Max More (Max T. O’Connor). Meanwhile, cyberpunk fiction often described artificial intelligences (AIs) that were native to cyberspace and that strove with disembodied humans for control of the virtual universe. Gibson called cyberspace a “consensual hallucination,” but the notion acquired a greater authority as computer software became better able to produce visible models of three-dimensional space incorporating sophisticated “virtual realities.” The progress of this kind of software and the hardware for displaying its results was most conspicuously seen during the 1980s in the development of video games played on PCs and on coin-operated arcade machines.

As a manifest movement, cyberpunk did not outlast the 1980s—Bruce Sterling boasted that the term was “obsolete before it was coined”—but the label found continued life beyond its early enthusiasts. Books, movies, music, video games, and other media in the subgenre have continued to be produced into the twenty-first century, though less frequently and with less popularity than when the genre was at its height. Postmodernist critics adopted the term to discuss important trends in American culture, especially the burgeoning confusion of the meaning of the word “real.” Many have noted that the major speculative concerns of cyberpunk, including the influence of large corporations on politics and society, the security of information on the internet, and the widespread integration of computer technology into daily life, have become the mundane issues of twenty-first-century life.

Derivative Genres

The subgenre has inspired several other related subgenres. The foremost of these is steampunk, in which stories are often set in an alternate, technologically advanced version of Victorian England. Similar genres imagining past eras with more powerful technology include dieselpunk, covering the period from the end of World War I to the end of World War II, and atompunk, covering the Cold War era, particularly the 1950s and '60s. Another derivative is raygun gothic, a type of retrofuturism named by Gibson that draws heavily on mid-twentieth-century American conceptions of the future and space travel; it is distinguished from atompunk in that it generally takes place in the future. More futuristic derivatives include biopunk, which applies cyberpunk's concerns regarding the interactions between large corporations and technology to biotechnology rather than information technology, and nanopunk, which focuses on nanotechnology. Both genres, like cyberpunk, often feature protagonists whose bodies have been altered without their consent, but rather than cyberpunk's robotic prosthetics and implants, they often have been genetically manipulated or injected with nanites. Many of these genres have become particularly popular in video games, a medium that has also continued to see the creation of new cyberpunk narratives in the twenty-first century despite the decline in the genre's popularity in literature and film.

Impact

Cyberpunk’s iconic motifs were so closely pursued by actual developments in computer technology that they soon lost their capacity to inspire awe. However, the fantasy of a physically or spiritually accessible cyberspace, a virtual reality to which humans could travel, remained a powerful part of the cultural imaginary. While cyberpunk fiction was not solely responsible for this idea, it did shape the popular understanding of the atmosphere and nature of cyberspace worlds. Thus, even as it became outdated, cyberpunk continued to influence the development of both science fiction and popular ideas about technology, especially about interactions between technology and humans.

Bibliography

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