Cyberpunk

The literary genre called cyberpunk, which is most closely aligned with science fiction, arose in the early 1980s. It was popularized by what remains its defining work, William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, although it was also given a visual reference point in the 1985 film Blade Runner, which in turn influenced the genre's novelists. The word also has come to be associated with a “hacker/phreak” subculture whose participants related their own lives to those of the literary genre's characters, and who appropriated its trappings and anarcho-tech attitude. But the term remains most closely associated with the literary form.

Cyberpunk's name contains the germ of its definition. The “cyber-” prefix derives from cybernetics, the science of communication and control in animal and machine, and reveals the literary movement's permeating technological underpinnings. The “-punk” suffix— [Page 110]borrowed from the radical, do-it-yourself rock-music movement of the late 1970s—describes the anarchistic alienation of most of the genre's main characters, usually outcasts populating a decadent, technology-dominated society.

However, unlike the characters of previous works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984, or even Arthur C. Clarke's more tech-tolerant 2001: A Space Odyssey, cyberpunk characterizations do not involve cautionary tales to illuminate the modern reader. In the near future of cyberpunk, a world of virtual sex and smart drugs and the bodiless “matrix,” it's simply too late to moralize; permeating technology has already been accepted permanently as part of everyday life, even if it's often a dreadful part of it. Cyberpunk characters accept the technology on its own terms, and are simply “going along for the ride,” as one author put it. To use Gibson's famous phrase, “The street has its own uses for technology.”

Gibson, while providing the genre's foundation in Neuromancer, was not its founder. The term cyberpunk was actually coined by writer Bruce Bethke, who used it as the title of a short story that appeared in the pulp publication Amazing Science Fiction Stories in November 1983. The story itself dealt with a group of teen-age hacker-crackers (as would a 1991 non-fiction work titled Cyberpunk by Katie Hafner and John Markoff). Bethke says he coined the term in the spring of 1980 to describe the “bizarre, hard-edged, high-tech” science fiction that was emerging in the early 1980s.

William Gibson was one of the first writers of that kind of new fiction. In 1981, three years before Neuromancer, he published a seminal short story called “The Gernsback Continuum.” It ridicules the utopian visions of much past science fiction, and incites future writers to begin addressing the ambivalent feelings of a society where technology is both intimate and invasive, where the haves and have-nots must battle for control of a new, digital world. Even more than Neuromancer, some critics consider this short story to be the real blueprint for cyberpunk to come.

Meanwhile, in Houston, Texas, writer Bruce Sterling began publishing a one-page fanzine called Cheap Truth, published between 1983 and 1986. In essence, it was the voice of the cyberpunk critic—although, tellingly, the word cyberpunk rarely appears in its pages, and even when it did, it was usually an insult; some of its critics denied cyberpunk even existed. According to a cyberpunk history by author Tom Maddox (himself a former Cheap Truth contributor), all the fanzine's articles were written under pseudonyms; in the aggregate, he wrote, they all “amounted to guerilla raids” on standard science fiction. The publication, which intentionally was never copyrighted, also served to make cyberpunk's writers aware of one another and of each other's works, thus helping to congeal a community of cyberpunk authors. Neuromancer appeared a year after the first issue of the fanzine.

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