Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk (a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk) is a genre of science fiction which focuses on computers or information technology, usually coupled with some degree of breakdown in social order. The plot of cyberpunk literature often revolves around the conflict between hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations, tending to be set within a near-future dystopian Earth, rather than the "outer space" locales prevalent at the time of cyberpunk's inception. Much of the genre's "atmosphere" echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. While this gritty, hard-bitten style was hailed as revolutionary during cyberpunk's early days, later observers concluded that, literarily speaking, most cyberpunk narrative techniques were less innovative than those of the New Wave, twenty years earlier. Primary exponents of the field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker. The term became widespread in the 1980s and remains current today.
During the early- and mid-1980s, cyberpunk became a fashionable topic in academic circles, where it began to be the subject of postmodernist investigation. During the same period, the genre penetrated Hollywood and helped propel cyberpunk as one of staples of science-fiction. Many popular, high-grossing films such as Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy can be seen as prominent developments of the genre's visual styles and themes. Computer games, board games and role playing games often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk literature and film. Beginning in the early 1990s, trends in fashion and music picked up the cyberpunk name.
As a wider variety of writers began to work with cyberpunk concepts, new sub-genres emerged such as steampunk, biopunk and cyberprep, each of which focuses on technology and its societal effects in a different way. In addition, some have argued that several recent works like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash define a postcyberpunk category, though whether this category is distinct may only be a matter of definition.
Style
Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, and postmodernist prose to describe the often nihilistic underground side of the digital society which started to evolve in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Cyberpunk's dystopian world has been called the antithesis of much of the mid-twentieth century's generally utopian visions of the future. Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling summarized the cyberpunk ethos in the following way:
- Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won't make it go away.
- That is cyberpunk.
In cyberpunk literature, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace making any clear borderline between the actual virtual reality blurred. A typical feature of the genre is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems through advanced technology. Cyberpunk's world is a sinister, dark place with networked computers that dominate every aspect of life. Giant multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economical and even military power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction and cyberpunk in particular, though in conventional science fiction the totalitarian systems tend to be sterile, ordered, and state controlled.
Protagonists in cyberpunk literature usually include computer hackers, who are often patterned on the idea of the lone hero fighting injustice: Western gunslingers, samurai (or ronin), ninja, etc. These individuals are often disenfranchised people placed in extraordinary situations, rather than brilliant scientists or starship captains intentionally seeking advance or adventure. One of the genre's prototype underdogs is the charactor Case from Gibson's Neuromancer; a brilliant hacker who has been physically robbed of his talent due to forces beyond his control. Like Case, many cyberpunk protagonists are the manipulated, and although they might see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead than they previously were. These anti-heroes — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" [1] — do not experience a Campbellian "hero's journey", like a protagonist of Homer or Alexandre Dumas. Instead, they call to mind the private eye of detective novels, who might solve the trickiest cases but never receive a just reward for their effors. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents — what Thomas Pynchon called the "preterite" and Frank Zappa the "left behinds of the Great Society" — is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literature is often used as a metaphor for the present day-worries about the downsides of corporate dominance, corruption in governments, alienation and surveillance technology. As such, cyberpunk is often written with the intention of disquieting readers and calling them to action.
A variety of commentators have taken the "canonical" cyberpunk works to task, pointing out dubious aspects of the genre. For example, many of the genre's heroines take after Neuromancer's Molly, becoming "razorgirls" who may have sex appeal for male science fiction readership but are hardly liberated or even well-developed characters. Feminist literary critics have found this tendency disturbing, particularly when compared to female protagonists in other dystopian SF (e.g., Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale). What's more, some of these critics have pointed out that cyberpunk's heroes often establish their masculinity by dominating a technology described with female metaphors — in essence, through metaphorical rape. These same heroes are often Americanized rogues, "cowboys" poised against the collectivist world of Japanese corporations or against European financial dynasties. Critics have noted that this reliance on the cowboy mythos meshes well with the images associated with Ronald Reagan, which is odd for a genre so strongly filled with punk rock and drug allusions. Nicola Nixon, assistant editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies, suggests this "complicity with '80s conservatism" in both economic and social respects implies "cyberpunk fiction is, in the end, not radical at all". [2]
Social theorists have sometimes analyzed cyberpunk stories as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of the Internet often appears under various names, including "cyberspace", the Wired, the Metaverse and the Matrix. In this context it is important to note that the earliest descriptions of a global communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, though not before social commentators like James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.
History
The science fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as the person who popularized the use of the term "cyberpunk" as a genre of literature. Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1980 for his short story "Cyberpunk", although the story was not actually published until November 1983, in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Volume 57, Number 4. The term was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Richard Kadrey, and others. (See also John Shirley's articles on Sterling and Rucker [3].)
Early observers hailed cyberpunk as a radical departure from science-fiction standards and a new manifestation of vitality. Shortly thereafter, however, many critics arose to challenge its status as a revolutionary movement. These observers pointed out that the SF "New Wave" of the 1960s was much more innovative as far as narrative techniques and styles were concerned. Furthermore, while Neuromancer's narrator may have had an unusual "voice" for science fiction, once one looked outside of the SF genre, one found much older parallels: Gibson's narrative voice resembles a moderately updated version of old Raymond Chandler novels, such as The Big Sleep (1939). In the same vein, other critics noted that almost all traits claimed to be uniquely cyberpunk could in fact be found in older writers' works — often citing J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany. Even more significantly, the generation which cyberpunk claimed to represent did not step forward to embrace it: the real punks of the 1980s read little, and most young SF readers of that era stayed with traditional storytellers like Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey, not to mention the literary giants Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. William Gibson's prose, too dense for novice or casual readers, was more appealing to academics. Television via Max Headroom and magazines like Heavy Metal did more to popularize the "cyberpunk vision" than did the original fiction. [4]
Science-fiction writer David Brin describes cyberpunk as "...the finest free promotion campaign ever waged on behalf of science fiction." It may not have attracted the "real punks", but it did ensnare many new readers, and provided the sort of movement which postmodern literary critics found alluring. (One illustration of this is Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto"; an attempt to build a "political myth" using SF cyborgs as metaphors for contemporary "social reality". [5]) Cyberpunk made SF more attractive to academics, argues Brin; in addition, it made SF more profitable to Hollywood and in the visual arts generally. Although the genre supporters' "self-important rhetoric and whines of persecution" were irritating at worst and humorous at best, Brin declares, "the CP rebels did shake things up. We owe them a debt. [...] But," he continues, "were they original?" [6]
As new writers and artists began to experiment with cyberpunk ideas, new varieties of fiction emerged, sometimes addressing the criticisms leveled at the original cyberpunk canon. Lawrence Person argues,
- Many writers who grew up reading in the 1980s are just now starting to have their stories and novels published. To them cyberpunk was not a revolution or alien philosophy invading SF, but rather just another flavor of SF. Like the writers of the 1970s and 80s who assimilated the New Wave's classics and stylistic techniques without necessarily knowing or even caring about the manifestos and ideologies that birthed them, today's new writers might very well have read Neuromancer back to back with Asimov's Foundation, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, and Larry Niven's Ringworld and seen not discontinuities but a continuum. [7]
Person also advocates the term "postcyberpunk" to label the new works produced by such writers. In this view, typical postcyberpunk stories continue the preoccupation with the effects of computers, but without the assumption of dystopia or the emphasis on cybernetic implants. Shortly after Person posted an essay where he elaborated his stance on the Internet forum Slashdot, readers observed that the term was possibly superfluous—one more piece of jargon invented to shore up false distinctions. Like practically all categories discerned within science fiction, the boundaries of postcyberpunk are likely to be fluid or ill defined.
Among the subgenres of cyberpunk is steampunk, which is set in an anachronistic Victorian environment, but with cyberpunk's bleak film noir worldview. The Difference Engine was probably the novel that helped bring this genre to the forefront. The early nineties saw the emergence of biopunk, a derivative subgenre building not on informational technology but on biology, the other dominating scientific field of the end of the 20th century. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation of their very chromosomes. Paul Di Filippo is seen as the most prominent biopunk writer, although Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist cycle is clearly a major influence.
Cyberprep is a term that reflects the flip side of cyberpunk. A cyberprep world assumes that all the technological advancements of cyberpunk speculation have taken place, but that life is happy rather than gritty and dangerous. Since society is leisure driven, uploading is more of an art form or a medium of entertainment while advanced body modifications are used for sports and pleasure.
- See also the list of notable precursors.
Literature
William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is likely the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, character development, and atmosphere over traditional science-fictional tropes, and Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. According to the Jargon File,
- Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating. [8]
Other famous cyberpunk writers include Bruce Sterling (who functioned as cyberpunk's chief ideologue with his fanzine Cheap Truth), Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, Jeff Noon, and Neal Stephenson. Stephenson, in particular, has also been characterized as postcyberpunk, though not all readers consider the distinction useful.
Raymond Chandler with his bleak, cynical worldview and staccato prose strongly influenced the creators of the genre. The world of cyberpunk is the dystopian, hopeless world of film noir, but this is pushed just a little bit into the future. Philip K. Dick also had a strong influence on the genre; his works contain recurring themes of social decay, artificial intelligence, paranoia, and blurred lines between reality and some kind of virtual reality. Dick's characters are also marginalized more often than not.
- See also the list of print media.
Film and television
The film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in a dystopian future in which manufactured beings called replicants are slaves used on space colonies and are legal prey on Earth to various bounty hunters who "retire" (kill) them. Although Blade Runner was not extravagantly successful in its first theatrical release, it found a wide viewership in the home video market. Since the movie omits the religious and mythical elements of Dick's original novel (e.g., empathy boxes and Wilbur Mercer), it falls more strictly within the cyberpunk genre than the novel does, and it can be credited with introducing many viewers to the genre's themes. As mentioned above, the short-lived television series Max Headroom also spread cyberpunk tropes, probably with more success than the genre's first written works.
The Robocop series has a more near-futuristic setting where at least one corporation, Omni Consumer Products, is an all-powerful presence in the city of Detroit. Johnny Mnemonic was not successful, but detailed William Gibson's world rather faithfully. Strange Days used many cyberpunk elements as well.
Anime has contained cyborgs and other plausibly "cyberpunk" elements since the early 1960s. Witness the series 8 Man (1963), about a human-turned-cyborg who fights an endless struggle against his lawless world. This series arose two decades before Gibson propelled the genre to celebrity, though as with many such questions in science fiction, the actual extent to which these early works influenced later ones is open to debate. (One can always aggrandize the cyberpunk genre by retroactively "claiming" earlier works to be members, or at least vital precursors; consider The Six Million Dollar Man or Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Indeed, one could even aggrandize postcyberpunk, by laying claim to optimistic fantasies like Tron.) The anime series Bubblegum Crisis (1985) was also an early animated form of cyberpunk, and in a more explicit manner: both the 2032 and the newer 2040 series serve as extended homages to Blade Runner. The anime movie Ghost in the Shell (1995), based on a 1991 manga and often hailed as a cyberpunk classic, explores the boundaries between man and machine in a futuristic Japan. The television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex carries over the movie's characters to explore the movie's world in more sociological depth. Indeed, this focus upon the social impact of network technology has led some commentators to feel that the television series leans more toward being a product of the postcyberpunk period.
The Matrix series, which began with 1999's The Matrix (and now also contains The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Animatrix) uses a wide variety of cyberpunk elements. The series's basic premise revolves around a virtual reality so realistic as to be indistinguishable from the real world; human brains are directly connected to this computer system. The Wachowski brothers, writers and directors behind the series, drew many of its elements from Japanese anime, and The Animatrix carried the idea exchange in the reverse direction. While the first movie was extremely successful, earning $456 million worldwide and beating Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for special-effects Oscars, viewers continue to debate the quality of the sequels. The franchise has also spawned three video games and a number of comic books.
- See also the list of films and list of TV series.
Music and fashion
The term "cyberpunk music" can refer to two rather overlapping categories. First, it may denote the varied range of musical works which cyberpunk films use as soundtrack material. These works occur in genres from classical music and jazz—used, in Blade Runner and elsewhere, to evoke a film noir ambiance—to "noize" and electronica. Typically, films draw upon electronica, electronic body music, industrial, noise, futurepop, alternative rock, goth rock, and intelligent dance music to create the proper "feel". Of course, while written works may not come with associated soundtracks as frequently as movies do, allusions to musical works are used for the same effect. For example, the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch (1992), a dark fantasy about a world of living toys, features a hard-bitten teddy bear detective with a sugar habit and a predilection for jazz.
"Cyberpunk music" also describes the works associated with the fashion trend which emerged from the SF developments. Starting around the year 1990, popular culture began to include a movement in both music and fashion which called itself "cyberpunk", and which became particularly associated with the rave and techno subcultures. The hacker subculture, documented in places like the Jargon File, regards this movement with mixed feelings, since self-proclaimed cyberpunks are often "trendoids" with an affection for black leather and chrome who speak enthusiastically about technology instead of learning about it or becoming involved with it. ("Attitude is no substitute for competence," quips the File.) However, these self-proclaimed cyberpunks are at least "excited about the right things" and typically respect the people who actually work with it — those with "the hacker nature". [9]
Certain music genres like drum'n'bass were directly influenced by cyberpunk, even generating a whole subgenre called neurofunk, where the bass lines, synths and beats try to give the listener the sensation of being inside a sprawl or crawling through cyberspace. Neurofunk was pioneered by artists like Ed Rush, Trace and Optical. In the words of the journalist Simon Reynold:
- Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding [...] The post-techstep style I call "neurofunk" (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of "cultural resistance": the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element. [10]
- See also the list of cyberpunk bands.
Games
Computer games have frequently used cyberpunk as a source of inspiration. The most prevalent of these are the System Shock series, the Deus Ex series, Shadowrun, and the Blade Runner video games.
1994 brought the release of GameTek's action/driving game Quarantine, in which the player takes the role of an armored-cab driver in the cyberpunk urban sprawl of Kemo City. Both the atmosphere of the game and the plot, which involves rebellion against a corrupt megacorp, are rooted in and derivative of the genre. A recent notable cyberpunk computer game is Uplink, created by Introversion Software in 2002, in which the player works as a freelance hacker in 2010.
At least two role-playing games called Cyberpunk exist: Cyberpunk 2020, by R. Talsorian Games, and GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games as a module of the GURPS family of role-playing games. Cyberpunk 2020 was designed with the settings of William Gibson's writings in mind, and to some extent with his approval, unlike the (perhaps more creative) approach taken by FASA in producing the Shadowrun game (see below). Both games are set in the near future, in a world where cybernetics are prominent. Netrunner is a collectible card game introduced in 1996, based on the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game. In addition, Iron Crown Enterprises released an RPG named Cyberspace, now out of print.
In 1990, in an odd reconvergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S. Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games's headquarters during Operation Sundevil and confiscated all their computers. This was—allegedly—because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public's impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety and given some to the book itself, as well. The tagline "The only RPG manual ever confiscated by the FBI!" has been used online as a sort of anti-endorsement. (See the GURPS Cyberpunk page.)
2004 brought the publication of a number of new cyberpunk RPGs, chief among which was Ex Machina, a more cinematic game including four complete settings and a focus on updating the gaming side of the genre to current themes among cyberpunk fiction. These tropes include a stronger political angle, conveying the alienation of the genre and even incorporating some transhuman themes.
Recently, the d20 Open Gaming Movement has brought several new entries into the arena, including Mongoose's d20 Cyberpunk and LRG's Digital Burn.
Role-playing games have also produced one of the more unique takes on the genre in the form of the 1989 game series Shadowrun. Here, the setting is still that of the dystopian near future; however, it also incorporates heavy elements of fantasy literature and games, such as magic, spirits, elves, and dragons. Shadowrun's cyberpunk facets were modeled in large part on William Gibson's writings, and the game's original publishers, FASA, have been accused by some as having directly ripped off Gibson's work without even a statement of influence. Gibson, meanwhile, has stated his dislike of the inclusion of elements of high fantasy within setting elements that he helped pioneer. Nevertheless, Shadowrun has introduced many to the genre, and still remains popular among gamers.
The trans-genre RPG Torg (published by West End Games) also included a variant cyberpunk setting (or "cosm") called the Cyberpapacy. This setting was originally a medieval religious dystopia which underwent a sudden Tech Surge. Instead of corporations or corrupt governments, the Cyberpapacy was dominated by the "False Papacy of Avignon". Instead of an Internet, hackers roamed the "GodNet", a computer network rife with overtly religious symbology, home to angels, demons, and other biblical figures.
Hideo Kojima's videogames also draw from cyberpunk culture, particularly his adventure game Snatcher and the first two Metal Gear Solid games, which are densely populated with spies who communicate via nanotechnology, computer hackers who design viruses to destroy malevolent programs and omniscient, omnipotent secret societies aiming to control the flow of information on the internet and manipulate human behavior through mind control.
- For more examples, see the list of computer and video games.
See also
References
- External links in the following were last verified 12 September 2005.
- Print media
- ^ Bruce Bethke, "Cyberpunk", first published in Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Vol. 57, No. 4 (November 1983).
- ^ Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), pp. 149-181. ISBN 0-415-90386-6.
- ^ Nicola Nixon, "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?", Science Fiction Studies vol. 19, part 2 (July 1992).
- ^ Lawrence Person, "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto", first published in Nova Express issue 16 (1998), later posted to Slashdot.
- ^ Simon Reynold. Energy Flash: Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Picador, 1998). ISBN 0-330-35056-0.
- Online
- ^ alt.cyberpunk usenet group FAQ file
- ^ "Two Cyberpunks: Stirling and Rucker", by John Shirley
- ^ Lecture notes by Paul Brians, Washington State University
- ^ Review of The Matrix by David Brin
- ^ Jargon File definition; see also "Cyberpunk" at the Jargon Wiki
Further reading
- External links in the following were last verified 12 September 2005.
- ^ The Cyberpunk Reading List that emerged from the usenet group
- ^ Cyberpunk R.I.P. - By Paul Saffo, Wired Magazine
- ^ GURPS Cyberpunk website
- ^ R. Talsorian series on cyberpunk film
- ^ Neometropolis Magazine
- ^ The Cyberpunk Project
- ^ Duke of Hell's Cyberpunk - Listing of cyberpunk-related media
- ^ Innervation - Resource + Portal site for Thinkers and Designers of the Future
Game websites
- West End Games official website
- Introversion Software official website
- Iconoclast - award-winning cyberpunk MUD
- Salroth - online cyberpunk game site
- Shadowrun MUSH Homepage
- Official Shadowrun RPG Homepage
- Dystopia - a Half-Life 2 modification with cyberpunk themes