Cyberpunk: Shattered Reflections of a Post-Modern Future
INTRODUCTION: Once upon a time when we were modern…...
Once upon a time there was a society that did not know itself.
It had known itself once.
When it had been modern.
When everything had fit.
When everybody agreed on everything.
All was in harmony.
The Future was assured.
(or so it had seemed)
But slowly the unified society realized its homogeneity was an illusion. What had been one culture fractured into a multitude of sub-cultures, all seemingly at odds with one another. There were so many different sub-cultures that no one could seem to agree on anything, and the people became very confused.
So they looked to the past.
They cut it up, rearranged it, deconstructed it, and reworked it.
They took the modern and created the postmodern.
INTRODUCTION: ONCE UPON A TIME WE WERE MODERN...
Postmodernism is now a well established and documented cultural fact that has been argued over for at least the past two decades, and should be of keen interest to the literary critic today. Defining such a term and how it relates to literature, though, is at best difficult and at worst totally useless due to the anarchistic nature of postmodernism. Postmodernism, on the surface, encompasses many different and often contradictory ideas. In no other genre of fiction are the postmodernist ideals for literature expressed better than in the sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk. This relatively recent offshoot of science fiction, has come into its own with its recognition as a form of postmodernist writing.
Yet cyberpunk is as difficult to define as postmodernism, because like postmodernism, cyberpunk has many different individuals contributing to an un-centralized and un-manifested concept. One must, then, look not for simple one line definitions of the term, but instead try to gain an understanding of it through thorough examination and exploration of the concept. By looking at the fiction, interviews and essays by the leading authors in this genre, and tying this into the postmodern context, one can more accurately and substantially comprehend the term cyberpunk and hopefully come to a better understanding of postmodernism.
NEXT TIME: CYBERPUNK IS SPAWNED →