Some elements of the lecture were familiar: I encountered William Gibson’s work, for example, in the same popular media course mentioned above. Perhaps best known beyond literary and science fiction circles for coining the term ‘cyberspace’ in Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), Gibson is one familiar name set atop a list of cyberpunk pioneers. Bruce Sterling, who appears himself on the list, refers to these figures – his peers - as the ‘most fearsome gurus’ of the cyberpunk movement (Sterling, 1998). Sterling’s use of the term ‘guru’ here is slightly sardonic, however, as it implies that cyberpunk is a strict literary genre (or a sub-genre of science fiction) with a replicable formula. Below I will suggest why this connotation is not one desired by the pioneers of cyberpunk.
Adam suggested that we read Sterling’s article Cyberpunk in the Nineties to clarify the key themes of this lecture. I have to say that, more than any other academic work or cyberpunk film I have come across (admittedly, there have been few); more than any debate about whether or not the Matrix is ‘genuine cyberpunk’, this article about cyberpunk by a cyberpunk has contributed to dispelling my mystification and scepticism of the movement. From all appearances, the article seems to be a candid, somewhat brutal take on what cyberpunk is and what it isn’t - without gilding the lily. Throughout my studies I have found that most articles of this nature are inherently biased. What most surprised me about this article, then, was the absence of genre-snobbery in its blunt treatment of the birth, life, and alleged death of cyberpunk – not as a kind of sacred genre institution, but as an anarchic cult form that has run its course.
If someone other than myself had written this blog, and I had read the last line at this time yesterday, I would have been thoroughly confused: how is that cyberpunk is a ‘cult form’ and yet not a literary genre? From the Week 9 lecture content, Sterling’s 1998 article, and my recent reading of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), I have distilled a general understanding of the difference between a movement and genre, as well as a basic ‘feel’ for the cult of cyberpunk. Basically, cyberpunk evolved as a reaction against the lack of readability, irrelevance and imitative nature of traditional science fiction – a genre more suited to the ‘exhilaration’ and mildly ‘disquieting’ technological progress of the 1950s (Sterling, 1998). Cyberpunk, on the other hand, was a vehicle for communicating the more extreme private and societal outlook cultivated by the exponential development of high technology from the 1980s onwards. The resulting ‘genre’ gained notoriety for its darkly foreboding projection of dystopian futures where technology is as ‘invisible’ as it is ascendant; as valuable as it is dangerous.
The very anarchic ethos of cyberpunk rejects the use of a strict literary formula, yet Sterling asserts that a cyberpunk pseudo-genre did result eventually, and ended by killing the original cyberpunk movement with “...dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci-fiberpunk drag” (1998, no page numbers). They’re strong words, but Sterling has by no means abandoned cyberpunk to the history books (or should I say ‘to Wikipedia’?): the author suggests that cyberpunk lives on as the “voice of bohemia” (Sterling, 1998) in the authors that were there from the beginning.
Reference List
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. The Berkley Publishing Group: New York.
Sterling, B. (1998). Cyberpunk in the Nineties [Electronic version]. Retrieved October 2, 2010, from
http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html
http://www.streettech.com/bcp/BCPtext/Manifestos/CPInThe90s.html
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