Cyberpunk Mark Bould

14 Cyberpunk Mark Bould Reflections on “Cyberpunk” The word “Cyberpunk” was coined by Bruce Bethke for the title of a story published in Amazing in 1983, but it came to prominence when Gardner Dozois appropriated it in his 1984 Washington Post article “SF in the Eighties” to describe fiction by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear. The self- identified core Cyberpunk group consisted of Gibson, Sterling, Shiner, John Shirley, and Rudy Rucker. They were also dubbed the Movement, the “mirrorshades group” and the “outlaw technologists”; their fiction was sometimes called radical hard SF. As “Cyberpunk” circulated more widely following the success of Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer (1984), it accreted fresh meanings and applications. To paraphrase Gibson’s famous dictum about human relationships with technology, the street (and the culture industries) found its own uses for “Cyberpunk.” It became an ever-expand- ing term for any slightly edgy artistic or cultural practice concerned with computers and/or the relationships between technology and the body, a synonym for “computer hacker,” the name of a role-playing game and even the title of a Billy Idol album. Although usually considered to refer to a movement, subgenre or an idiom, “Cyber- punk” was also an undeniably commercial label, attracting a lot of attention from readers, writers, journalists, critics, and marketing people. It spawned numerous derivative terms, including “cowpunk,” which described a revitalized western fiction (and had already been applied to the music of the Meat Puppets, whose name Gibson borrowed to describe prostitutes with neural blocks); “elfpunk,” which described post- Tolkien fantasy with attitude; and “ciderpunk,” a variety of pub rock from England’s West Country. The more significant derivatives were “steampunk,” a kind of techno- logical fantasy set in Victorian Britain, exemplified by Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter as well as Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990) and Rucker’s The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia (1990); “splatterpunk,” extremely gory horror fiction written by Clive Barker, Joe Lansdale 218 Mark Bould and sometimes Shirley; and “ribofunk,” Paul Di Filippo’s term for his own biotech- nology fictions. In the 1990s, “technogoth” was (perhaps jokingly) announced as a rival to Cyberpunk, although the fiction was undistinguished and indistinguishable, and “bad grrrl Cyberpunk,” a term echoing riot grrrl punk, grouped together Cyber- punk by female writers, including Misha, Lisa Mason, and Melissa Scott – by which time, “sci-fiberpunk” was already circulating as a derogatory catch-all for poor Gibson imitations. Bethke said that he intended to “invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposi- tion of punk attitudes and high technology” and so “took a handful of roots – cyber, techno, et al – mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out various combinations until one just plain sounded right” (Bethke). “Cyber” was taken from cybernetics (the Greek root of which means “to steer”), a term coined in 1948 by Norbert Wiener to describe a new science devoted to the study of communication and control systems in animals and machines. It was usually taken to signify the computer networks and cyborging technologies which constituted the essential furniture of Cyberpunk futures. Typical of Cyberpunk’s vaguely countercul- tural and romantically antiauthoritarian politics, control was generally envisioned not in cybernetic’s neutral descriptive sense but in terms of inherently repressive social structures and institutions, of the “mechanized control of social life, of the body itself” and “the hardening and exteriorization of certain vital forms of knowledge, the crys- tallization of the Cartesian spirit into material objects and commodities” (McCaffery 1991: 185–6). This was not inappropriate: the French “cybernetique” was coined in 1834 to describe the art of governance. “Punk” came from punk rock, although earlier usages concerned with worthless- ness, marginality, youthfulness, hooliganism, criminality, and homosexual prostitu- tion resonated with Cyberpunk’s socially excluded, often criminal, characters living in the ruins and in the shadow of multinational capital. Punk can be seen as urban political disaffection expressed through incoherent outbursts against accepted author- ity, whether musical, social, or political. It has been interpreted as a stylization of revolt, a perspective that has in turn resulted in a frequently naïve celebration of inci- dents of resistance as an alternative to revolutionary praxis. Sterling suggested that Cyberpunk was returning SF to its roots, divesting all its excrescences and accretions just as punk “stripped rock and roll of the symphonic elegances of Seventies ‘pro- gressive’ rock” (Sterling 1988: viii). Whether or not Sterling’s comparison holds, Cyberpunk did celebrate punk’s DIY aesthetics. Shirley was a member of various punk bands, including The Panther Moderns. Sterling, under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas, produced and circulated the ‘zine Cheap Truth (1983–6), in which he launched frequently ad hominem attacks on the state of current SF and formulated the manifesto for a revolution in the genre; Shiner contributed pseudonymously as Sue Denim. Rucker used information theory to define both punk and Cyberpunk in terms of their complexity and logical depth before describing a bricoleur’s “Garage Music notion of SF,” in which he would “start with some fairly standard SF notions – robots, weird drugs, space colonies – Cyberpunk 219 and...then think and think about these notions until the final product is very highly exfoliated” and “keep going back to the beat old clichés, back to the robots and the braineaters and the starships, and...reinvent the field from that, by thinking harder and harder about what it can do” (Rucker 1991: 462). Sterling’s “Green Days in Brunei” (1985) and Shiner’s Slam (1990) celebrate the opportunities that First World garbage provides for the bricoleur. Gibson repeatedly depicted forms of bricolage: Neuromancer refers to dub music, Cornell boxes have an important role in Count Zero (1986), and the performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories appears thinly disguised as Rubin in “The Winter Market” (1986) and as Slick Henry in Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). And Gibson’s fiction is that of a bricoleur. In The Dif- ference Engine, “[v]irtually all of the interior descriptions, the descriptions of furnish- ings, are simply descriptive sections lifted from Victorian literature” and “sort of air-brushed...with the word-processor” (Fischlin 1992: 9), while Neuromancer’s traces of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, Robert Stone, Howard Hawks, and John Carpenter are sugges- tive of postmodernism’s “random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion” (Jameson 1991: 18). Moreover, Neuromancer’s Molly is clearly cobbled together out of Wolverine and Cyclops from Marvel Comics’ X-Men as well as many of the strong and sexy women with a taste for S&M fetishism found in popular culture, including SF characters in Fritz Leiber’s “Coming Attraction” (1950), The Avengers (1961–9), Eleanor Arnason’s “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moon” (1974), and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975). Bethke’s coinage of “Cyberpunk” itself depended upon a mechanistic form of bricolage. He recombined word-fragments to produce a new word which was sufficiently different from existing words to be distinguishable yet, in uniting unanticipated para- digms (cybernetics and rock), sufficiently familiar to be comprehensible. While Bethke’s “until one just sounded right” appears to be a human decision alone, it was dependent upon pre-existing linguistic systems and cultural codes for its construc- tion and acceptance. Lacking the more comprehensively randomizing element of William Burroughs’s cut-up method of prose collage, Bethke’s coining technique is arguably typical of Cyberpunk. Despite resemblances to Burroughsian collage, Cyber- punk was always concerned with “sounding right”; with reconciling such techniques with the demands of conventional narrative; with disciplining, controlling and incor- porating these punkish outbursts; with “airbrushing” over the cracks. Major Authors and Texts At the centre of Cyberpunk, both as it developed and in retrospect, is the fiction of William Gibson. He was born in 1948 and emigrated to Canada in 1968. His first story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” was published in Unearth in 1977; another early story, “Hippie Hat Brain Parasite,” was published in Modern Stories, a semi- prozine edited by Shiner. Gibson’s early stories, most of which are collected in Burning 220 Mark Bould Chrome (1986), hothoused key Cyberpunk images and ideas as well as his distinctive prose style. “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) reduces politics to style and replaces critique with semiotic analysis, mingling modernist architecture and moderne stylization with cable TV and porn movies so as to depict an America composed of the ruins of previous Utopian dreams, suggesting that at least our contemporary dystopia avoids the totalitarianism implied in H.G. Wells’ Utopias and Frank R Paul’s illus- trations. Two other stories sketched the future Gibson would develop in Neuromancer and its sequels. “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) – Gibson later wrote the screenplay for Robert Longo’s 1995 film adaptation

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