Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk (a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk) is a subgenre 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 megacorps, tending to be set within a near-future dystopian Earth, rather than the "outer space" locales prevalent at the time of cyberpunk's inception. Primary exponents of the field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker.

Style

The hacker as hero: Lain from Serial Experiments Lain 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.

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—any clear borderline between the real and the virtual becomes blurred. A typical (though not universal) feature of the genre is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems.

Cyberpunk's world is a sinister, dark place with networked computers that dominate every aspect of life. Giant multinational corporations have replaced governments as centers of power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction; in conventional science fiction, those systems tended to be sterile, ordered, and state controlled. In sharp contrast, cyberpunk shows the seamy underbelly of corporatocracy, and the Sisyphean battle against their power by disillusioned renegades.

Protagonists in cyberpunk literature usually include computer hackers, who are often patterned on the idea of the lone hero fighting injustice: Western gunslingers, samurai (especially ronin), ninja, etc. Protagonists are distinguished from others by their foul language, fighting skills, and roguish charm—knaves, not nobles. The protagonists are usually ordinary, often disenfranchised people in extraordinary situations as opposed to the usual brilliant scientist or eager adventurer who is confident and ready to confront the situations that they face. Cyberpunk characters typically represent the underdog. Because they are nobody special, they are not typically smarter, braver, or more charismatic than the next person. They are often manipulated as opposed to calling the shots, and although they might see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead than they previously were. This is in direct contrast to the archetypal Campbellian "Hero's Journey" epitomized by Star Wars or Homer's Odyssey.

Cyberpunk literature tends to be strongly dystopian and pessimistic. It is often a metaphor for the present day, reflecting worries about large corporations, corruption in governments, and alienation. Some cyberpunk authors also intend their works to act as warnings of possible futures that may follow from current trends. 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. To quote Nicola Nixon in the July 1992 Science Fiction Studies,

For all its stylish allusions to popular culture—to punk rock, to designer drugs, to cult cinema, to street slang and computer-hacker (counter?) culture—cyberpunk fiction is, in the end, not radical at all. Its slickness and apparent subversiveness conceal a complicity with '80s conservatism which is perhaps confirmed by the astonishing acceptance of the genre by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and by the ease with which it can be accommodated and applauded in the glossy pages of such American mainstream (boys') magazines as Omni. Sterling argues in Mirrorshades that the cyberpunk movement "is not an invasion but a modern reform" . "Reforming" what, we might well ask? Certainly not SF's gender politics.

See also the references therein, and the Jargon File's viewpoint discussed below.

Some social theorists see cyberpunk stories as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of the Internet often appears in cyberpunk under various names, including "cyberspace", the Wired (from Serial Experiments Lain), the Metaverse (as seen in Snow Crash), the Matrix (originally from Doctor Who, later in Neuromancer, and further popularized by the role-playing game Shadowrun and later by the movie The Matrix).

History

The science fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as being the person who popularized the term "cyberpunk" as a genre of literature. Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term originally 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.)

Early observers hailed cyberpunk as a radical departure from SF standards and a new manifestation of vitality. Shortly thereafter, however, as Paul Brians of Washington State University notes,

Cyberpunk's status as the revolutionary vanguard was almost immediately challenged. Its narrative techniques, many critics pointed out, were positively reactionary compared to the experimentalism of mid-60s "new wave" SF. One of the main sources of its vision was William S. Burroughs' quasi-SF novels like Nova Express (1964), and the voice of (William) Gibson's narrator sounded oddly like a slightly updated version of old Raymond Chandler novels like The Big Sleep (1939). Others pointed out that almost all of cyberpunk's characteristics could be found in the works of older writers such as J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, or Samuel R. Delany. Most damning of all, it didn't seem to have been claimed by the generation it claimed to represent. Real punks did little reading, and the vast majority of young SF readers preferred to stick with traditional storytellers such as Larry Niven, Anne McCaffrey, and even Robert Heinlein. Gibson's prose was too dense and tangled for casual readers, so it is not surprising that he gained more of a following among academics than among the sort of people it depicted. Heavy Metal comics and Max Headroom brought more of the cyberpunk vision to a young audience than did the fiction.

SF writer David Brin describes cyberpunk as "probably 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 moreover it provided the sort of "Movement" which postmodern literary critics found alluring. Cyberpunk made SF more attractive to academia, argues Brin; in addition, it made SF more bankable in Hollywood and in the visual arts generally. Although the genre patriots' "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?"

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.

In the essay quoted here, Person 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 this essay to 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.

An unusual sub-subgenre 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.

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.

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 twentieth 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.

Cyberpunk writers and works

William Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy" of novelsWilliam 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.

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.

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.

Cyberpunk films

The world of 2019 Los Angeles as Blade Runner imagines.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. 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.

The short-lived television series Max Headroom also introduced many viewers to the genre.

The anime movie Ghost in the Shell is often hailed as a cyberpunk classic. It explores the boundaries between man and machine in a futuristic Japan. The television series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex carries over the characters from Ghost in the Shell 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 and its sequels/spin-offs—including The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and Animatrix—took and utilized certain elements of cyberpunk, such as the concept of a virtual reality so realistic as to be indistinguishable from the real world and the idea of direct brain-to-computer connections.

Cyberpunk 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. Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that calls itself ‘cyberpunk', associated especially with the rave/techno subculture. Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black leather who have substituted enthusiastic blathering about technology for actually learning and doing it. Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly respectful of hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers. 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 word 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."

Cyberpunk games

Cyberpunk 2020 Second EditionComputer 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 cyberpunk 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 and computers are even more present than today. Netrunner is a collectible card game introduced in 1996, based on the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game.

Another cyberpunk RPG of note is the (out of print) game Cyberspace, released by Iron Crown Enterprises.

2004 brought the publication of a number of new cyberpunk role-playing games, 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.

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.)

Shadowrun Third EditionRole-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.