A Very Short History of Cyberpunk

Marcus Janni Pivato

Many people seem to think that William Gibson invented
The cyberpunk genre in 1984, but in fact the cyberpunk
aesthetic was alive well before Neuromancer (1984). For
example, in my opinion, Ridley Scott's 1982 movie, Blade
Runner, captures the quintessence of the cyberpunk aesthetic:
a juxtaposition of high technology with social decay as a
troubling allegory of the relationship between humanity and
machines ---in particular, artificially intelligent machines. I
believe the aesthetic of the movie originates from Scott's own
vision, because I didn't really find it in the Philip K. Dick's
novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), upon
which the movie is (very loosely) based.

Neuromancer made a big splash not because it was the "first" cyberpunk novel,
but rather, because it perfectly captured the Zeitgeist of anxiety and wonder that
prevailed at the dawning of the present era of globalized economics, digital
telecommunications, and exponential technological progress --things which we now
take for granted but which, in the early 1980s were still new and frightening. For
example, Gibson's novels exhibit a fascination with the "Japanification" of Western
culture --then a major concern, but now a forgotten and laughable anxiety. This is
also visible in the futuristic Los Angeles of Scotts Blade Runner.

Another early cyberpunk author is K.W. Jeter, whose imaginative and disturbing
novels Dr. Adder (1984) and The Glass Hammer (1985) exemplify the dark
underside of the genre. Some people also identify Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling
as progenitors of cyberpunk. I beg to differ. Rudy Rucker is one of my favourite
authors, and he has written several clever novels around themes of robot intelligence
(for example, Software and Wetware , republished in a single volume as Live
Robots). However, Rucker is just too upbeat and fun-loving to be called cyberpunk;
his novels always come across as comedies, and lack the gritty, dystopian, noir
quality that characterizes most cyberpunk. Rucker isn't cyberpunk... maybe
"cyberhippy".

Bruce Sterling is talented and intelligent, but he has a huge ego and a tendency
towards self-promotion that makes Camille Paglia look positively self-effacing by
comparison. He claims to have basically "invented" cyberpunk, by editing the "first
cyberpunk anthology", Mirrorshades (1986). Obviously Bruce and I differ on the
definition of cyberpunk, because half the stuff in Mirrorshades doesn't seem very
"punk" to me, and most of Bruce's writing certainly isn't. Maybe my concept of the
genre is too restrictive, but it seems to me that, if Gibson is cyberPunk, and Rucker is
cyberhippy, then Jeter is cyberGoth, P.K. Dick is maybe cyber-Beat Poet, and
Sterling.... is cyberRock'n'Roll. Lots of flash and attitude, and a nice leather jacket,
but is it really the music of a revolution?

Of course, cyberpunk was not the first science fiction to seriously examine
philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence, the embodiment of human
minds in computers, and related issues. The first SF author to seriously consider the
ramifications of AI was probably Isaac Asimov, whose "Robot" stories of the 1940s
and 1950s revolve around troubling questions about the rights and moral status of
artificial minds. There is also a vast genre of philosophical literature and short
fiction devoted to these problems. An excellent anthology of essays, parables,
dialogues, and short stories on philosophical problems of mind and embodiment is
The Mind's Eye (1981), edited by Douglas Hoffstadter and Daniel Dennet.

Hoffstadter is a cognitive scientist who studies the problems --both practical and
philosophical --- of human and artificial intelligence. His 1979 book, Godel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , won the Pullitzer prize, and is a brain-bending
exploration of the paradoxical, recursive nature of consciousness.

Daniel Dennet is a philosopher; in my view, probably the smartest philosopher
currently thinking about issues of minds and machines. His 1991 book,
Consciousness Explained, while it falls short of its title, still contains some truly
brilliant and revolutionary ideas. In terms of moral questions about technology an
early tale is Mary Shellys Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818). In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, cyberpunk was "discovered" as an identifiable
"genre" by the SF community, and, like its earlier musical namesake, it became
instantly and thoroughly reified. Most of the "cyberpunk" novels written since then
are self-conscious genre novels, and therefore inevitably clich. One notable
exception, of course, is Neal Stephenson, whose brilliant 1992 novel Snowcrash
basically blew the genre apart.

Nowhere is the reification of cyberpunk more clear than in cinema. The low-
budget British film Max Headroom (1986) perfectly captured cyberpunk's
pessimistic social assessment of present economic and technological trends. The
political cynicism of the genre was exemplified by RoboCop (a 1987 film which is
much better than I think its creators themselves intended). However, in the 1990s,
Hollywood marketeers disovered the cyberpunk phenomena, and there followed a
string of forgettable high-budget "Netsploitation" movies (e.g. Hackers (1995), f2f,
The Net (1995), Virtuosity (1995), etc.).

The authors who have transcended this reification are those who do not identify
themselves as "genre" authors; those who simply write about what they find
philosophically interesting, and if it ends up sounding like "cyberpunk", it is only by
accident. In my mind by far the most interesting of these is Greg Egan, an
Australian author who has written some truly brilliant explorations of the
philosophical questions surrounding machine intelligence. His early writing is rather
weak from a purely "literary" point of view: clumsy narrative devices, stilted
dialogue and poor characterization are the weak points of books which are simply
overflowing with fascinating and original ideas. His more recent novels, Distress
(1995) and Diaspora (1998), and his anthology Luminous (1998), are even more
intellectually stimulating, however, and his skills as an author have now improved
considerably.

Another author who has written extensively on issues of machine intelligence and
mind embodiment is Vernor Vinge. His novel, A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), while
more "cyber-space opera" than "cyberpunk" is, in my opinion, one of the finest
pieces of science fiction ever written on these topics.

Marcus Janni Pivato, Toronto, 2000


Bibliography and Links

Study Guide for Blade Runner
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/brians/science_fiction/bladerunner.html

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

William Gibson and Post-Modern Science Fiction
http://www.georgetown.edu/irvinemj/technoculture/pomosf.html

Cyberpunk and the New Myth Michael Fiegel
http://www.iconoclast.org/~aeon/thesis/thesis2.html

Rudy Ruckers Home Page
http://www.iconoclast.org/~aeon/Welcome.html

Ridley Scott. Blade Runner. 1982

_____. Alien. 1979.

Sterling, Bruce. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Arbor
House, 1986.

Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop (1987).