Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (483 page)

⌠, or “steersman,” via Norbert Weiner’s coinage “cybernetics,” combined with “punk,” as in Punk Rock. The two elements thus combined are computer technology and the hard-edged youthful rebellion characterizing that particular style in popular music, and these two elements can be seen threaded through much of the literature. The sources of the aesthetic lie in much of the earlier science fiction, and Sterling, in the Preface to his 1986
Mirrorshades
, the first cyberpunk anthology, lists such influences as Olaf Stapledon, Robert Heinlein, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, and Poul Anderson.

However, two films released in 1982—
Blade Runner
and
Tron
—either influenced or anticipated major aspects of that aesthetic.
Blade Runner,
based on but parting significantly from Philip K. Dick’s novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
, focuses on the near-future relations between humans and androids who have illegally returned to Earth to live posing as humans, and uses a very complexly textured surface style, blending antique, futuristic, and trashy exteriors for the Los Angeles in which it is set. William Gibson recounted walking out of a showing of
Blade Runner
, because the look—the complex mix of eclectic architectures and decay, the street people scavenging among the garbage, the giant holographic images of geishas advertising cigarettes—was so much like what was running through his mind in composing
Neuromancer
, which is what he was writing at the time. Years later, he and director Ridley Scott found that both of them had been visually influenced by the work of French comics artist Moebius (Jean Giraud), which had appeared in Métal Hurlant, the French original of Heavy Metal magazine. Blade Runner was a failure both among critics and in the box office after its initial release, but it influenced cyberpunk writers greatly and soon became a cult film. Tron, although initially set in a human reality, has most of its action unfold in the virtual reality within a video game, where one of the characters has been actually transformed into one of the programmed players racing around in what would soon come to be called “cyberspace.” Tron owes more, perhaps, visually to the 1926 German film Metropolis, and its programs or players racing around inside cyberspace—prefiguring the motorcycle race through the Metaverse in Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash—are dressed like 1920s Art Deco spacemen. While Blade Runner would influence the look of many video games, Tron was a film explicitly set in a game, and the Tron game was released soon after the film.

William Gibson is credited with inventing the term “cyberspace,” allegedly because he hated to write transition scenes, and jacking into cyberspace is an instantaneous jump into another reality. The only appearance of the word “cyberspace” itself in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” is as part of a nickname for a computer setup: “your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the ‘Cyberspace Seven’” (168). Throughout the story, the narrator, Automatic Jack, reminds us repeatedly of both how the physical setup of equipment looks “out here” and how the hacker experiences it “in there.” This dualism will run through many of the cyberpunk works, from Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer, in which the hacker Case alternates between an embodied existence in actual reality, a “disembodied” existence floating—or flying—through cyberspace, and a “trans-embodied” state where he feels the kinesthetic experience of a woman who is wired for “simstim,” or simulated stimulus. Other levels of consciousness in the novel include various different types of computer awareness and the downloaded consciousness of another hacker, since deceased, stored as a ROM construct. What is happening in this novel and its two sequels is an exploration of the definition and boundaries of consciousness itself insofar as artificial intelligence and embodiment are concerned.

Variations on these themes will be found in other cyberpunk works, particularly those of Pat Cadigan, whose novel
Mindplayers
(1987) features a future in which “mind on mind” contacts are possible through a computer interface; the protagonist, Deadpan Allie, specializes in a therapeutic form of mindplay as a “pathosfinder,” or someone who enters a shared imagined space with another person to identify the source of the individual’s particular psychopathology. Other types of mindplay in the novel include dreamfeeding and neurosis peddling, and at one point Allie is hired to go mind-on-mind with the preserved brain of a deceased character. One of Allie’s instructors is an artificial intelligence, although nothing in particular is made of that circumstance in the way that Gibson’s emerging A.I.s set off alarms in Neuromancer.

Pat Murphy’s 1987 story “Rachel in Love” shares the “projected consciousness” motif with some cyberpunk authors, in that Rachel’s scientist father has discovered how to copy the electronic pattern constituting a person’s mind, and then projects his daughter’s mental configuration onto the brain of a chimpanzee when his wife and daughter are killed in a car crash; however, Murphy is not usually classified as “cyberpunk,” quite possibly because her story lacks the defiantly assertive and rebellious qualities going with the “punk” aspect of the movement, and the setting of the story lacks all of the gritty eclecticism of Movement settings. In post-cyberpunk fiction, Cory Doctorow will explore variations on such (dis)embodiments of consciousness in “I, Row-Boat” (2006).

Greg Bear’s 1983 short story “Blood Music” was expanded into novel form,
Blood Music
(1985), and presents another theme frequently used by cyberpunk authors, that of the implications of genetic engineering. Sterling pairs that theme with the theme of cyborgization, or the grafting of cybernetic and robotic parts into a human body, ostensibly to replace or enhance damaged or inadequate biological parts, in his Schismatrix stories, published between 1982 and 1984, followed by the novel
Schismatrix
in 1985. In the Schismatrix universe, two branches of Posthumans, known as the Shapers and the Mechanists, represent these two possible paths of future human development, the genetic and the biomechanical. Both Bear and Sterling explore the implications of research and technological developments that they see as possible in their near futures, or as extensions of research already under way in the present. In this, they, along with Gibson, Cadigan, and others, are more interested in near-future realities than in the Golden Age science fiction fascination with deep-space far-future settings.

Sterling’s abovementioned anthology
Mirrorshades
(1986) presents ten cyberpunk authors in twelve stories, with two of the stories being co-authored by two writers each. These authors are: Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, Bear, Rudy Rucker, Tom Maddox, Marc Laidlaw, James Patrick Kelly, and Lewis Shiner. Sterling’s “Preface” acts as a manifesto for the movement, listing sources, publications, and principles, with the caveat that the writers all resist such categorization, even in the interest of presenting a common front to whatever literary and societal rigidities they are writing against. Two years after
Mirrorshades
appeared, a double issue of the
Mississippi Review 47–48
(1988) devoted to Cyberpunk was published, containing mostly new stories by the
Mirrorshades
authors and others, and also essays and criticism; this has since been enlarged and reprinted as
Storming the Reality Studio
(McCaffery 1991). Two of the writers from
Mirrorshades
, Sterling and Maddox, contributed essays to an anthology on library science entitled
Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk Librarians
(Miller 1992), showing how quickly cyberpunk started to infiltrate the culture at large.

Cyberpunk was a movement involving a dozen or score of authors, depending on who is counting and what criteria are being used for inclusion. One instance of the sharing among members of the original group is the invention of ICE, an acronym for “Intrusions Countermeasures Electronics,” referring to protective software designed to block unauthorized access to databanks; these are now referred to as “firewalls.” Maddox used the term in a story that he never completed; Gibson told him that he’d have to steal it. Maddox said fine, the story’s not going anywhere anyway. Gibson acknowledges the provenance of the term in
Neuromancer
(273). Michael Swanwick, who was not among the authors in
Mirrorshades
, nonetheless co-authored the story “Dogfight” (1985) with William Gibson, and his 1987 novel
Vacuum Flowers
is numbered among the outstanding cyberpunk novels.

Many of the original group of writers have branched off into other realms—Sterling, for example, the historian and theorist of the movement, has written a novel,
The Zenith Angle
(2004) with a contemporary setting and contemporary computer technologies—while Gibson and Sterling together have written a Steampunk novel,
The Difference Engine
(1990), set in an alternate Victorian England. Cadigan’s output has diminished in recent years, as her energies have been devoted to caring for her aging mother, but her most recent novels—
Tea from an Empty Cup
(1998) and
Dervish Is Digital
(2001)—have many cyberpunk hallmarks familiar to readers of her earlier works: The boundaries between “AR” or Artificial Reality and the physical world “out here” are breaking down in certain respects, so that special officers of the police are called in to solve murders that apparently occurred in AR but have resulted in deaths “out here”; these are in essence tightly plotted detective novels set in cyberspace. Kelly, as mentioned above, has joined with a non-cyberpunk contemporary, John Kessell, to edit the “Post-Cyberpunk Anthology” Rewired. Cory Doctorow is a post-cyberpunk author whose experience working as a sysadmin, or systems administrator in a computer network’s infrastructure, has so informed some of his work that, were it not set in the present and apparently theoretically possible, it would read as futuristic science fiction. Which, perhaps, estranged from most readers by its richly complex techie lingo, it still is. Meanwhile, in England, Charles Stross, with degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, writes in a number of genres, including a neo-cyberpunk where the electronically connected lifestyle is in tension with the old-fashioned, fleshly biological layer of being. Finally, Bear has joined with Neal Stephenson and others to create The Mongoliad, a series of stories advertised, as of this writing, as an experiment in interactive “post-book” literature. So, the Movement has experienced the fractal evolutions described in Chaos Theory, and has moved into various other realms, but retained elements of its original nature and drive.

Works Cited

Bear, Greg.
Blood Music
. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Cadigan, Pat.
Dervish Is Digital
. New York: Tor, 2000.

——.
Mindplayers
. New York: Spectra, 1987.

——.
Tea from an Empty Cup
. New York: Tor, 1998.

Doctorow, Cory.
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2007.

Gibson, William.
Burning Chrome
. New York: Ace, 1986.

——.
Neuromancer
. New York: Ace, 1984.

Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling.
The Difference Engine
. New York: Bantam, 1991.

Gibson, William and Michael Swanwick. “Dogfight.”
Omni,
July, 1985.

Kelley, James Patrick, and John Kessell, eds.
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology
. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2007.

McCaffery, Larry, ed.
Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Miller, R. Bruce and Milton T. Wolf, eds.
Thinking Robots, an Aware Internet, and Cyberpunk
Librarians: The 1992 LITA President’s Program.
Chicago: Library and Information Technology Association, 1992.

Stephenson, Neal.
Snow Crash
. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992.

Sterling, Bruce.
Mirrorshades
. New York: Ace, 1986.

——.
Schismatrix Plus
. New York: Ace, 1996.

——.
The Zenith Angle
. New York: Del Ray, 2004.

Swanwick, Michael.
Vacuum Flowers
. New York: Ace, 1987.

* * * *

Don Riggs
teaches in the English and Philosophy Department of Drexel University, where he regularly offers a science fiction course. His publications on Cyberpunk authors include a biocritical essay on Pat Cadigan in Bleiler’s
Supernatural Fiction Writers
, 2nd. edition; another essay on Cadigan, “Dreamfeeder” in
YLEM Journal
12.26 (Nov/Dec 2006); and “Postmodern Neoprimitivism: Metamorphosis and Horror Vacui in Count Zero” in
The cultural influences of William Gibson, the “father” of cyberpunk science fiction
(2007).