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I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get a good update from work. I've been working on other stuff when I'm home and by the time I get in, I'm hamstrung by actually having to, well, work. Alternately, there's been some difficulty in translating what I'm actually up to into something that can be reasonable posted. The other week, I went to the library a few times. By the time I was done, I'd walked out with about eight or nine books; some of these I've already read and others are brand new tacks on a subject I felt I was well grounded in. I felt that my premise was too narrow - can cyberpunk still exist as a living genre? Initially I thought that it couldn't, but after some reading and thinking, I realized that it can and does - it simply looks different then it used to.
It's an argument that can be convincingly made in five pages, but it lacks breadth and depth. Cyberpunk is nomenclature that was accidentally but convincingly assigned. It's appropriate, in that like 'gothic', it was never intentional but spread memetically.*
In any case, looking too hard at the name of the genre can be misleading. As early as 1985, Bruce Stirling was comfortable with publishing an anthology of cyberpunk work in Mirrorshades, and when you're doing that, you're usually able to put your finger on distinct themes that are present in a literary movement but the borders of any literary group are fuzzy at best. Despite that warning, the name does give a clue as to how the movement started - the 1980's were a time of strong anti-government sentiment in the US, even within the government. The connections, for example, between the radical conservative anti-government sentiments and the direction the Republican party was making at the time have been demonstrated by others recently. David Sirota also lays out a case for the same from the voices of our popular culture in Back to Our Future.
If popular culture was a hotbed of anti-government (if strangely pro-military) sentiment, then the counter-culture eschewed respect for the military but retained its anti-government bent, while adding a certain amount of disdain for the culture at large. The direction towards willing privatization, the Gorden Gecko 'greed is good' mantra, and a growing conservative bent plus militarization lent a nihilistic air to counter-cultural groups like punks or goths. Meanwhile, research in computing was progressing at an astounding rate. This is pretty much the gestalt that a movement like cyberpunk requires, because much of the themes revolve around the volatile combination of technology that's cheap enough to reliably find its way to the streets while, simultaneously, featuring corporations as the most common symbol of authority.
Interestingly, while some writers undoubtedly moved in the direction of the intentional dystopia, other writers like William Gibson have gone on the record as saying they were never intentionally aiming in that direction.* (If it seems like one, well, a combination of future shock and characters who are basically hired thugs or live in slums... well, that'll tend to do it.) Many of the settings, intentional or not, infer a world that many readers would consider a dystopia.
That's the tack the 80's started to take. It took a disregard for the direction the established order was taking and smashed it up with a near future where electronics were cheap and not just in the hands of some of the West's poorest citizens, but required for daily life. A world where corporations are our chief authority and all but own the process of governing, and where our world footprint rests casually but firmly on the throat of the environment. A world, basically, that none of us could imagine happening today.
* Please bare with me. I do have a citation for that, but I'd have to find it, and I really don't want to at the moment.
It's an argument that can be convincingly made in five pages, but it lacks breadth and depth. Cyberpunk is nomenclature that was accidentally but convincingly assigned. It's appropriate, in that like 'gothic', it was never intentional but spread memetically.*
In any case, looking too hard at the name of the genre can be misleading. As early as 1985, Bruce Stirling was comfortable with publishing an anthology of cyberpunk work in Mirrorshades, and when you're doing that, you're usually able to put your finger on distinct themes that are present in a literary movement but the borders of any literary group are fuzzy at best. Despite that warning, the name does give a clue as to how the movement started - the 1980's were a time of strong anti-government sentiment in the US, even within the government. The connections, for example, between the radical conservative anti-government sentiments and the direction the Republican party was making at the time have been demonstrated by others recently. David Sirota also lays out a case for the same from the voices of our popular culture in Back to Our Future.
If popular culture was a hotbed of anti-government (if strangely pro-military) sentiment, then the counter-culture eschewed respect for the military but retained its anti-government bent, while adding a certain amount of disdain for the culture at large. The direction towards willing privatization, the Gorden Gecko 'greed is good' mantra, and a growing conservative bent plus militarization lent a nihilistic air to counter-cultural groups like punks or goths. Meanwhile, research in computing was progressing at an astounding rate. This is pretty much the gestalt that a movement like cyberpunk requires, because much of the themes revolve around the volatile combination of technology that's cheap enough to reliably find its way to the streets while, simultaneously, featuring corporations as the most common symbol of authority.
Interestingly, while some writers undoubtedly moved in the direction of the intentional dystopia, other writers like William Gibson have gone on the record as saying they were never intentionally aiming in that direction.* (If it seems like one, well, a combination of future shock and characters who are basically hired thugs or live in slums... well, that'll tend to do it.) Many of the settings, intentional or not, infer a world that many readers would consider a dystopia.
That's the tack the 80's started to take. It took a disregard for the direction the established order was taking and smashed it up with a near future where electronics were cheap and not just in the hands of some of the West's poorest citizens, but required for daily life. A world where corporations are our chief authority and all but own the process of governing, and where our world footprint rests casually but firmly on the throat of the environment. A world, basically, that none of us could imagine happening today.
* Please bare with me. I do have a citation for that, but I'd have to find it, and I really don't want to at the moment.
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