By Kendra Hibbert
August 22, 2003
For the final week of The Forest of Dead Trees Retro Science Fiction Summer Fun Fest 2003 I’ve decided to jump ahead to a more contemporary time in science fiction, to a movement which started when mohawks were still dangerously subversive haircuts and the forefathers to the modern computer hacker were using the whistles found in Captain Crunch boxes to weasel their way into the phone systems of major corporations. When the ideals and philosophies of these safety pin-wearing, whistle-blowing underground societies were brought together in the early-`80s, they formed a literary and cultural movement called Cyberpunk.
The definition of this literary movement according to the alt.cyberpunk FAQ (posted here) states that “Cyberpunk literature, in general, deals with marginalized people in technologically-enhanced cultural ‘systems’”. Loosely translated this group can be described simply as the culture of hackers, slackers, geeks, phreaks, post-human/cyborg wannabes with anarchistic ideals, a punk mentality and the love of all things technological. These are not the people who grow up to become the next Bill Gates - they’re the ones who spend years in their darkened parents’ basement trying to hack into Gates’ Super-empire.
The movement has seen its way into several popular (and unpopular) science fiction movies. The clearest definition of a Cyberpunk film exists in the THE MATRIX series. Visually BLADE RUNNER is often cited as an influence of (or an influence for depending on who you talk to) Cyberpunk. TRON is Cyberpunk as is GATTACA, FREEJACK, THE LAWNMOWER MAN, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and just about every Anime you can think of. MAD MAX is considered post-apocalyptic Cyberpunk - and of course there’s JOHNNY MNEMONIC the Keanu Reeves movie based on short story by the undisputed King of the literary Cyberpunk movement, William Gibson.
Gibson wrote the first ever Cyberpunk novel in 1984 called NEUROMANCER launching a literary movement science fiction is still feeling the effects of. He’s cited as being the one who coined the term cyberspace (the term cyberpunk is attributed to Gardner Dozois an editor of ISAAC ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE in the early `80s).
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The novel predicted virtual reality, (though lots of authors, including Ray Bradbury, had hinted at this technology previously) the internet and several other technological concepts that I’m sure will see the light of day in years to come.
NEUROMANCER follows a “console cowboy” named Case who is brought out of involuntary retirement by an influential big shot named Armitage looking for someone to hack into a difficult area in the matrix. Case has seen enough backstabbing and shady dealings to know there’s more to this job than meets the eye. Together with Molly his partner in cyberspace they do some digging around into Armitage’s past and come up with some suspect details involving illegal use of Artificial Intelligence and hidden agendas. Like all good punks (even the cyber kind) Gibson’s characters don’t much like being lied to. What follows is a noir chase through the world’s computer matrix and a mystery where the detectives are hackers enhanced with cybernetic hardware and the villains have access to cloned ninjas and artificial intelligent viruses they may just let loose on the world.
This, Gibson’s first novel, was the first science fiction book to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick award in 1985 (a feat almost duplicated a year later with Orson Scott Card’s ENDER’S GAME – although he failed to acquire the elusive Dick). But, more than the setting or the characters or the film noir approach to the material what set this novel apart from the many that came before it (or even after it) was Gibson’s writing style. Most science fiction (and there are of course exceptions to this rule) is more plot based than character based meaning rather than take the time to explain the smells and tastes and detailed sights of the world they are creating, a lot of science fiction writers tend to focus on plot – what happened rather than what it felt like. Gibson is not like that. In fact he takes almost the exact opposite approach. NEUROMANCER specifically has a plot that’s very difficult to follow. It’s not until the second or third read of the book do you really start to understand what’s going on. But his writing style is so rich with details that even if you don’t understand exactly what’s happening, after the first read you want to pick it up and read it again.
After this first novel, Gibson went on to write COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE set in the same universe. These novels and his short stories “Johnny Mnemonic”, “New Rose Hotel” and “Burning Chrome” are all commonly referred to as the Sprawl Series. Though bestselling novels, none of these books ever achieved the notoriety and cult status of NEUROMANCER. It’s perhaps overenthusiastic to claim that with this novel Gibson launched a cultural movement - the culture was already there in the disenfranchised youth of the time - but because it was so well written and so imaginatively realized it caught the attention of people outside these underground societies and thus for the outside world defined the movement and provided a focal point which cyberpunks everywhere could use as a reference to branch off from.
After NEUROMANCER several other authors began writing with similar ideals. Most notably Bruce Sterling who co-authored a book with Gibson called THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE which was dubbed ‘steampunk’ because it envisions an alternate history when the computer was invented during the Industrial Revolution using steam powered engines. Sterling has put out his own series of Cyberpunk influenced short stories called CRYSTAL EXPRESS, re-released with his novel SCHISMATRIX in the book SCHISMATRIX PLUS. These stories tend to be about ‘post-human’ societies or those in which everyone is cybernetically enhanced in one way or another.
Cyberpunk got a good kick in the pants in 1992 with Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH – the first to add humor to this genre which was starting to die out from too much seriousness. SNOW CRASH follows Stephenson’s hero protagonist named… Hiro Protagonist as he unravels the secrets behind the new drug called Snow Crash in a world where every city has a sponsor and every police force is rentable.
Though not as prominent as it was in the 80s the Cyberpunk genre is still at large. Most of the major authors have faded away or gone on to experiment with other genres (Gibson’s newest novel PATTERN RECOGNITION can’t really even be defined as science fiction) but there is evidence of the genre everywhere oozing into the pop-culture consciousness. If the popularity of THE MATRIX and Anime isn’t evidence enough for you just take a gander at the signs of this sub-culture on the internet from the cyber-revolutionaries who program Napster/Morpheus/Kazaa, to blog sites, to the ever evolving online version of the Anarchists Cookbook – like it or not Cyberpunk is here to stay.
Next Column: With the Retro Summer Sci-fi Extravaganza ove,r I’ll ease into the world of new novels with an author whose real life history is stranger than fiction. Former WWF (before it was WWE) superstar Mick Foley has written a dramatic coming-of-age novel called TIETAM BROWN. Come back in two weeks to see if it’s worth picking up this book written by a man who was once known for talking to a sock puppet and going by the name of Dude Love.
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