Cyberpunk and You:
A five minute argument for a vitally important genre.
I believe Cyberpunk is the most entrancing sub-genre within the nebulous reaches of science fiction. Few fictitious genres can offer the reader what science fiction can, but until thirty years ago scifi writers busied themselves with what was impossible in their life times. For all the skilled projection of great (but rather patriarchal) artists like Clark, Asimov, and Heinlein, they were preoccupied with worlds that did not exist — with space ships, blaster pistols, alien empires — and so relegated themselves to that strange second tier that was reserved for purely imaginative artists. Only when an author’s adroit futurism was so blatantly referring to the present day could a work achieve access into the canon of English literature, and in doing so redefine by degrees what it meant to be a work of science fiction (Huxley, Orwell).
But science fiction, thankfully, is diverse in its perversions. Now readers do not need to remain so faithfully in the space ship, so to speak. Nor do they need to be led (as most readers are led) down the same prescribed path of the valleys and craters of Mars or the moon. Cyberpunk has changed this. It is a genre of the future, for today.
Every author, imaginative or otherwise, draws on experience for inspiration. Devices from another author’s work, encounters in the “real world,” the personalized myth of dreams, all can influence even the most arcane of fantasy. That said, Cyberpunk is of course an imaginative genre, but it does not simply draw on the present so much as it implicitly relies on it. This relationship makes it a wellspring for social criticism. Urbanization. Megacities. Diaspora. Technology. Corruption. So called “high tech, low life.” If a reader finds such parallels with our world in literature, they are likely to think that the author is speculating. But isn’t skilled prediction an exercise in extrapolation?
In this way, Cyberpunk is a sixty year old Chinese man living on the ground floor of a concrete apartment block, soldering custom SIM cards into cheap plastic phones.
Cyber- refers to technology. This not a motif that requires much explanation. One of the Big Three of science fiction, Arthur C. Clark, has already exposed one of its essential qualities in his laws of Prediction. He writes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus writers and readers alike can use this thoroughly modern prefix as a lens to create a quasi-mythological world, one in which parts of everyday experience build fanciful abilities, characters, beliefs and worlds. The genre will have, but not explicitly identify, sorcerers, saints, devils, and prophets.
In this way, Cyberpunk mimics older modes of literatures that portray an individual in combat with forces outside their understanding,
like the sorcery of a soldier who has taken sophisticated government weaponry and stolen into the mountains, invisible and alone.
-punk has a variety of meanings, but here the most important refers to characterization. We all know the word, and although much of the meaning of the word is connotative and not denotative, the word conjures up similar images whenever it is evoked. Counter culture, alienation, social or political exile and rebellion. A rock bound stubbornly to the riverbed and fighting the main current. These are the ideas that allow the author to choose his characters. Global machinery dominates the world, and no individual has complete power of their life. People have segmented into different societies, different classes, different modes of living. In fact the impressive stature of current social, economic, and political institutions virtually guarantees that everyone on the planet feels some sort of anger. These angers that are latent but self-representative. Do not mistake this for some doomsday pronouncement, but this idea does allow, almost necessitate, for a work of fiction to capture these feelings, to put them under the microscope so to speak, and use them as a foundation for characters that are unreal, but strangely realistic.
In this way, Cyberpunk is the insidious apathy of a cult of long-haired gamers, their tattooed fingers, their sinewed malnourishment, their pathetic detachment from their lives.
These two parts converge and form the portmanteau word, followed by the idea of man and machine in disturbing integration. It may even be true that this motif limits the lifespan of the genre. It is possible that in a decade or two people’s acceptance of technology will be so absolute that the topic will be too passé, two clichéd to make reading about it interesting. This could be. But technology is not a new idea, it is simply better than it was — this does not place us on the edge of some ever increasing universe, only in the middle, in medias res. This is the issue that needs addressing, the goal being to make those of us who are integrating aware of what we’re doing and how quickly we’re doing it. Incredible results are here and more are on the horizon, but each gain is a loss. Cyberpunk is a genre of opposites: gain and loss, high-rise and hovel, water and champagne, computer and abacus, bicycle and bullet train, high tech and low life.
In this way, Cyberpunk is a beautiful woman who wears high heels with her prosthetic calves.
So what does it matter? Even after establishing that Cyberpunk is not simply some esoteric and rarified subgenre of scifi, the question still remains. Personal answers are often the most influential, but I do believe that the genre has objective worth in its ability to raise questions that so clearly relate to the present. And, because of its more fantastical devices, it provides few concrete answers to these questions, leaving them up to the reader to reform their opinion. An untrue but fundamentally accurate story can place the thinker in a state in between what they already know and what they are reading. It is a clearly Postmodern genre in that every implied question comes with a destabilizing of prior judgment that can lead to new ideas, for the reader and hopefully the writer too.
If literature, as complex a party as it is, has one goal, might that be it?
