CYBERPUNK:
The Future is Now
By Norbert Brown
Back in the early 60s, when I was a child small enough to fall asleep in the back seat of the car, my family visited the “Carousel of Progress” exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. There, dioramas with animatronic characters narrated the story of where we’d been, where we were, and where we were going in the rest of the 20th century. I was wowed by the exhibit’s vision of the 1970s. We would live in split-level houses, watch color TVs, and talk to family members over household intercoms.
My first experience reading a cyberpunk novel was very much like my sense at the World’s Fair of a near future both familiar and exotic. “Cyberpunk” was a new brand of science fiction then, peopled with misfits and outsiders, and set in a post-modern time rife with paranoia and dark hidden corners.
The book was William Gibson’s
Neuromancer, a sci-fi triple prize winner in 1984. Gibson took me to places I never expected to go, and yet it seemed they might not be all that far away. It was in this novel that Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” which, while it was much richer and more tactile, was clearly recognizable by my 1980s self as someplace near where America Online took me after the modem finished making that annoying scratchy noise.
But while the World’s Fair had shown me a future where the décor was cool earth tones with buttons to push, Neuromancer was showing me a future of living on the edge—a life where I could alter my body in any number of grotesque ways and there was always a danger that someone else might alter my brain just as grotesquely. Life in Neuromancer had the metallic post-apocalyptic tang of Blade Runner, the grittiness of a Star Wars bar, and the velvety noir texture of a Raymond Chandler novel. All this—and wrapped around it a can’t-quite-catch-your-breath pace and a jargon-laced vocabulary that work together to keep you always on your toes, afraid that if your mind wanders for even a second you might miss something important. Which is exactly how we felt about technology back then.
Within a couple of years, Gibson was all over the press and cyberpunk—which got its name from the title of a 1980 Bruce Bethke short story—was the cool stuff to read. The style, imagery and sensibility of cyberpunk was bleeding over into movies, television and even fashion—it wasn’t just a sci fi thing, it was starting to feel like a popular culture movement.
Although Gibson remains the name most commonly associated with the genre, there are other significant authors whose work has been labeled cyberpunk, whether they like it or not. Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Richard K. Morgan, Pat Cadigan, Tad Williams—these are just a few of the science fiction writers in this category.
So what exactly is cyberpunk?
Defining cyberpunk, in spite of many sincere attempts, remains slippery. In a 1991 essay called “Cyberpunk in the Nineties,” Sterling calls cyberpunk a “movement”’ rather than a “genre,” and provides some compelling insights into the context in which cyberpunk was born:
“Cyberpunk,” before it acquired its handy label and its sinister rep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and anarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-band ’70s punk music.
Like punk music, the early cyberpunk movement seems to have been an everybody-welcome, no-experience-necessary brand of science fiction. It was the early 80s; technology was moving fast, and the objective of the movement was to try to move just a little faster. Cyberpunk’s early practitioners set out to paint a picture of life not as it was but as it was becoming: a glance into the next few years, when cutting-edge technology will be old-hat and when the social forces the writers saw around them will have effected a kind of cultural evolution.
While Sterling may have been able to characterize the movement itself as “generous” and “open-handed,” the cyberpunk vision of the future was anything but optimistic. Cyberpunk heroes are marginalized, hackers or petty criminals who operate on the fringes of a society and often are more acutely aware of its rampant corruption than those on the inside. Technology, of course, is at the center of every cyberpunk work—that’s what makes it science fiction. But cyberpunk technology has its own character; it’s not the breakthrough invention of Wells’s The Time Machine, nor is it the human ambition run amok of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Or rather, it’s a little of both: cyberpunk technology is an advanced and essentially amoral tool that breaks down the limits of the physical world and expands the capabilities of humankind. And that means the capabilities to do evil as well as those to do good. Drugs often play a role in cyberpunk fiction (just a subset of technology, really), and the idea of networking—usually in a context that is bigger and more experiential than what we currently know as the Internet—is another staple of the movement.
That evolved internet becomes the stage on which massive, earth-shaking dramas play out. This is where Neuromancer’s hero Case—an “interface cowboy” capable of hijacking data and stealing encoded secrets for the highest bidder—gets on the wrong side of the wrong people, and ends up blocked from “jacking in” to the world of cyberspace, trapped in the “meat” of his body. Desperate, he makes a Faustian deal with those who have an unquenchable need for his talents, as well as the formidable resources to buy his way back into cyberspace. It is where a pizza delivery boy in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash transforms into an online warrior whose mission is to save the world from a pathogen that is no less deadly because it is only a computer virus. That character’s name, Hiro Protagonist, provides a rather heavy-handed clue to his destiny.
The network comes alive
Engineering and biology blend and merge in these novels; spirits live in the machines and consciousness can be transferred from an old body to a new one. Similarly, governments and corporations intermingle: the power does not belong to those who are rightfully elected, but to those who can amass the largest stockpile of valuable data. Information is the hard currency of the cyberpunk universe. Knowledge is power there in a way that Sir Francis Bacon surely never envisioned. An example is Neal Stephenson’s brilliant 1995 novel The Diamond Age, which some purists may call a post-cyberpunk work, but I think that’s quibbling.
Stephenson’s story takes place further into the future than most cyberpunk novels, in a time when an advanced diamond-based nanotechnology has enabled mankind to develop powerful computers the size of microbes. Stephenson’s vivid picture of the implications of this invention is unforgettable, especially in the central story of stolen technology falling into the most innocent of hands. A one-of-a-kind interactive book, “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer,” is commissioned by one of the richest men in the world. The engineer he hires to create it secretly makes a copy for his own young daughter, and when that copy is stolen it falls into the hands of Nell, the nine-year-old sister of the young thug who steals it. The course of Nell’s life is utterly altered by the primer, and, in the hyper-networked reality of a cyberpunk future, Nell’s transformation sends seismic ripples throughout the world. Stephenson is a fine writer, and this is an intricate and thought-provoking novel I’d recommend even to those who don’t usually read science fiction.
The aesthetics of cyberpunk, its sense of life on the fringe of a society out of control, of flawed heroes living a paranoid existence where somebody really may be out to get you, has found its way into the vocabulary of current mainstream science fiction. After all, what is the Matrix series if not a tricked-up cyberpunk story, with a hidden, malevolent network threatening each individual in ways they don’t fully understand? And with reports that a miniseries of The Diamond Age is under development by the Sci-Fi Channel, with mega-star George Clooney as one of the producers, there’s no doubt that the movement’s gone mainstream.
How relevant is cyberpunk as a movement more than 20 years after Neuromancer? The latest novel by Gibson suggests an interesting answer. Spook Country, published in the second half of 2007 to generally positive reviews, shares many of the features of cyberpunk with Gibson’s earlier novels—alienated heroes, powerful but invisible corporations, technology that keeps you under constant surveillance—but this book, together with Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, differs in one very significant way. His earlier novels took place in a not-too-distant future; Spook Country takes place in the present. The implication is clear: if Neuromancer was a picture of the world as it was becoming, Spook Country is a picture of the world as it has become. It really is possible for someone with the proper resources to pinpoint my location anytime. There really could be large multi-national corporations I’ve never heard of able to do just that.
In the 1980s, when we were still marveling at the ways technology could make our lives easier, the cyberpunk movement was there to provide us with cautionary tales about how these technical mutations could shape our future as a society. Now, when technology has ceased to dazzle us—when was the last time you were actually surprised by the latest thing a cell phone could do?—cyberpunk is here to warn us about how we already may have evolved.
If that’s not relevant, I don’t know what is.
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