arts Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context Edited by Takayuki Tatsumi Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Arts www.mdpi.com/journal/arts Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context Special Issue Editor Takayuki Tatsumi MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Takayuki Tatsumi Keio University Japan Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Arts (ISSN 2076-0752) from 2018 to 2019 (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special issues/cyberpunk) For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Article Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-03921-421-1 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03921–422-8 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of ni ka: ”Hikari” (Light). c 2019 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... vii Preface to ”Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context” .......................... ix Takayuki Tatsumi The Future of Cyberpunk Criticism: Introduction to Transpacific Cyberpunk Reprinted from: Arts 2019, 8, 40, doi:10.3390/arts8010040 ....................... 1 Mike Mosher Some Aspects of California Cyberpunk Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 54, doi:10.3390/arts7040054 ....................... 4 Frenchy Lunning Cyberpunk Redux: Derives´ in the Rich Sightof Post-Anthropocentric Visuality Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 38, doi:10.3390/arts7030038 ....................... 16 Lidia Mer´as European Cyberpunk Cinema Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 45, doi:10.3390/arts7030045 ....................... 29 Elana Gomel Recycled Dystopias: Cyberpunk and the End of History Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 31, doi:10.3390/arts7030031 ....................... 46 Martin de la Iglesia Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic? Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 32, doi:10.3390/arts7030032 ....................... 54 Denis Taillandier New Spaces for Old Motifs? The Virtual Worlds of Japanese Cyberpunk Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 60, doi:10.3390/arts7040060 ....................... 67 Janine Tobeck and Donald Jellerson Caring about the Past, Present, and Future in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Guerrilla Games’ Horizon: Zero Dawn Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 53, doi:10.3390/arts7040053 ....................... 82 Takayuki Tatsumi Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga Reprinted from: Arts 2018, 7, 9, doi:10.3390/arts7010009 ........................100 v About the Special Issue Editor Takayuki Tatsumi has taught American Literature and Critical Theory at Keio University, Tokyo, since 1989. He served as President of The American Literature Society of Japan (2014–2017) and of The Poe Society of Japan (2009–), and as Vice President of the Melville Society of Japan (2012–). He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of PARADOXA, Mark Twain Studies, and the Journal of Transnational American Studies. His book Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Duke UP, 2006) won the 2010 IAFA (International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) Distinguished Scholarship Award. Co-editor of the “New Japanese Fiction” issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 2002), Robot Ghosts, Wired Dreams (U of Minnesota P, 2007), the special “Three Asias—Japan, S. Korea, China” issue of PARADOXA (No. 22, 2010) and The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (Routledge, 2019), he has also published a variety of essays in PMLA, Critique, Extrapolation, American Book Review, Mechademia, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, and elsewhere on subjects ranging from the American Renaissance to post-cyberpunk fiction and film. His recent collaborations include The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (2016) and The Liverpool Companion to World Science Fiction Film (2014). His recent monographs include: Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Sairyusha, 2018). vii Preface to ”Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context” Since the inception of cyberpunk in the early 1980s, which coincided with the dawn of the Internet and the rise of computer hackers, the movement, with William Gibson as super star and Bruce Sterling as theoretical chairman, has consistently created a tremendous impact on today’s literature and culture, ranging from manga and anime to cinema. William Gibson’s 1980s Cyberspace Trilogy (Neuromancer [1984], Count Zero [1986], and Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]), which explored the frontier of cyberspace—another name for the Internet coined by the same author—was followed by his 1990s “Bridge Trilogy” (Virtual Light [1993], Idoru [1996], and All Tomorrow’s Parties [1999]) featuring a virtual idol Rei Toei, without whom no AI Beauty (such as Hatsune Miku) could have been created. However, here we should reconsider the extraterritorial status of Gibson, who immigrated from South Carolina to Toronto, Canada, to evade the draft. Being a typical outsider, Gibson put special emphasis on the Lo-Tek spirit of a countercultural tribe in the post-apocalyptic near-future, and replace the keyword “steampunk” with “post-apocalypse”. This was to be shared by the punk kids that Otomo describes in Akira and the human weapons distinguished director Shinya Tsukamoto represents in his TETSUO trilogy (1989–2010), one of the major inheritors of the Japanese Apache created by Komatsu Sakyo, a founding father of Japanese science fiction, in his first novel Nippon Apacchi-zoku (The Japanese Apache [1964]) as I detailed in Full Metal Apache (Duke UP, 2006). A further descendant of cyberpunk could well be easily noticed in Neil Blomkamp’s South African post-cyberpunk film, District 9 (2009), in which the natives of Johannesburg and the miserable aliens lost in space turn out to have the Lo-Tek spirit in common. Yes, cyberpunk is a literary and (sub-)cultural subgenre not so much celebrating the growth of high-technology as the neo-extraterritorial spirit of Lo-Tek tribes born out of postmodern streets. What matters now is that, in this context, cyberpunk has started gaining new significance, not only in today’s arts of representation, but also in international/transnational politics. The present collection of essays showcases a diversity of cyberpunk possibilities ranging from Cool Japan, Dystopian narrative down to the postmodern extraterritorial and Anthropocene. Takayuki Tatsumi Special Issue Editor ix arts Editorial The Future of Cyberpunk Criticism: Introduction to Transpacific Cyberpunk Takayuki Tatsumi Department of English, Keio University, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan; [email protected] Received: 19 March 2019; Accepted: 21 March 2019; Published: 25 March 2019 The genesis of cyberpunk criticism could well be dated to March 1987, when Stephen P. Brown inaugurated the first cyberpunk journal Science Fiction Eye together with his friend Daniel J. Steffan, with Paul DiFilippo, Elizabeth Hand, and myself as contributing editors. Of course, it is the impact of William Gibson’s multiple-award-winning Neuromancer in 1984, featuring the anti-hero Case’s adventures in what Gibson himself called “cyberspace,” that aroused popular interest in the new style of speculative fiction. This surge of interest led Gibson’s friend, writer Bruce Sterling, the editor of the legendary critical fanzine Cheap Truth, to serve as unofficial chairman of the brand-new movement. Thus, on 31 August 1985, the first cyberpunk panel took place at NASFiC (The North American Science Fiction Convention) in Austin, Texas, featuring writers in Sterling’s circle: John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, Greg Bear, and Rudy Rucker. As I was studying American literature at the graduate school of Cornell University during the mid-1980s, I was fortunate enough to witness this historical moment. After the panel, Sterling said, “Our time has come!” Thus, from the spring of 1986, I decided to conduct a series of interviews with cyberpunk writers, part of which are now easily available in Patrick A. Smith’s edited Conversations with William Gibson (University Press of Mississippi 2014). However, without Brown’s plan in 1987 of publishing the new journal Science Fiction Eye focusing on cyberpunk criticism, my early interviews and articles could not have been published in their original form. It was in May 1986 at Disclave’86, the annual local science fiction convention held in the Washington D.C. area, that I could have my first interview with Gibson and come to know his close friend Steve Brown, who wanted me to get involved in his new project. Since then, Brown taught me everything he could about science fiction journalism. What is more, he provided me with whatever he found intriguing and necessary in this field. He sent me a copy of Jeanne Gomoll’s monumental symposium on “Women in Science Fiction”, featured in a fanzine called Khatru #3 and #4. It is true that the cyberpunk writer community is