Chapter Two
2. The Emergence of Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Elaboration on the Idea of Genre
In Bruce Sterling’s preface to Mirrorshades – an anthology of cyberpunk texts – emphasis is placed on the relationship between cyberpunk science fiction and the traditional science fiction genre: “Cyberpunk is a product of the Eighties milieu – in some sense, [...] a definite product. But its roots are deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modern popular culture science fiction” (1988b: x). In the preface to William Gibson’s Burning Chrome: And Other Stories (1986), Sterling comments upon the novelty of cyberpunk form, revealing an underlying paradox within the cyberpunk science fiction discourse:
Roused from its hibernation, science fiction is lurching from its cave into the bright sunlight of the modern zeitgeist. [...] From now on things are going to be different. [...] Gibson, along with a broad wave of inventive, ambitious new writers, has prodded the genre awake. (in Gibson 1995c: 9, 12)
The acclaimed originality of cyberpunk science fiction style, embodying a new perspective on science and technology, and the alliance of cyberpunk to science fiction, reveals not only the science fiction literary origins of cyberfiction, but also its determination to rebel against the existing literary science fiction forms. Gibson in an interview with Takayuki Tatsumi states: “I’ve always liked the little corners of things more than the way the whole thing looks. Looking at the whole edifice of science fiction...I try to avoid that. But sometimes the corners really fascinate me. I’ve always felt like exploring the corners” (1986: 7). What does this imply in terms of the relationship between science fiction and cyberpunk science fiction? According to Gibson’s testimony, it could be
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suggested that cyberpunk science fiction not only constitutes an offshoot of science fiction writing, but it could also be interpreted as an experimental literary form, seeking to explore new writing styles and narrative techniques within the subject matter of the science fiction genre. Unable to distinguish what differentiates one from the other, it is difficult for readers to tell whether science fiction and cyberpunk science fiction could be set apart or else viewed as a unified literary whole. This scepticism leads to a number of questions: In which critical context can cyberpunk science fiction best be examined and assessed? What does this reveal in terms of mainstream science fiction and genre? Is cyberpunk science fiction to be considered an independent literary school or can it be read as a mode of traditional science fiction? Brian McHale’s analysis of ‘POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM’ aesthetics claims that “cyberpunk science fiction can thus be seen [...] as science fiction which derives certain of its elements from postmodernist mainstream fiction which itself has, in its turn, already been ‘science-fictionized’ to some greater or lesser degree” (1992a: 229). Such a “convergence” of genres is claimed to be a 1980s literary phenomenon, since the availability of precedent literary styles enables contemporary writers to make their own selections and combinations, leading to different forms of literary “innovations”. The experimentation of writers with existing literary narratives produces polymorphous kinds of literary discourse relying on the intermingling of previous styles rather than the introduction of new ones. If one looks at the early stages of modern science fiction – from the 1920s till the 1940s – one sees that science fiction and mainstream fiction developed in isolation from one another due to the noncanonical or ‘low art’ status of science fiction, according to characterisations coming from writers in the field.1 Raymond Federman on the opening page of The Twofold Vibration launches into a critique of the futuristic topos and science fictional gadgetry celebrated in science fiction texts as characteristic of the literary
1 “The postmodernists have not always been gracious in acknowledging their borrowings from their sister-genre, presumably because of the “low art” stigma that still attaches to science fiction” (McHale 1987: 65).
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