Cyberpunk: Shattered Reflections of a Post-Modern Future
Part I: Cyberpunk is Spawned
The future isn’t what it used to be!
- Arthur C. Clarke
In the late 1970’s a new kind of music burst onto the scene which had a profound effect on western popular culture. *Punk Rock* comes out of the back streets of London, and its ferocity of tone and lyrics set it apart from previous music. Punk Rock groups, in general, preached Anarchy and individuality in violent and rebellious songs. Groups such as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Ruts, screamed their music to audiences who were tired of hearing how great the world is, when they could look around them and see the truth. These groups, wrote Griel Marcus:
made music so brutal, haphazard, or obscene that airplay was out of the question. Given that the normal channels of pop communication were irrelevant, all restrictions on what could go into a record or a performance, on what a record could sound like or what a performance could look like were forgotten.
These new musicians ignored all the conventions of pop music, and instead sang and played staccato lyrics and beats designed more to irritate rather than entertain. Coming quick and sharp they gave little time for digestion before another round would hit.
Many writers of the late 1970’s pick up this style and begin to write science fiction stories with the same jarring feeling that punk rock music gives. It is highly debatable as to whether these writers did this consciously or not, but the term cyberpunk is conceived to describe these new authors and their abrasive stories. In the introduction to his anthology Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Bruce Sterling, one of the innovators of the sub-genre, reflects on this term:
This movement was quickly recognized and given many labels: Radical Hard SF, the Outlaw Technologists, the Eighties Wave, the Neuromantics, the Mirrorshades Group.
But of all the labels pasted on and peeled throughout the early Eighties, one stuck: cyberpunk.
Thus, “cyberpunk” - a label none of them [cyberpunk authors] chose. But the term now seems a fait accompli, and there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of words that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.
This “overlapping” of ideas is crucial to the success of cyberpunk, as it shows that science fiction needs not be unrelated to our daily existence. The term then defines the sub-genre, and it is the rebelliousness that it represents against traditional science fiction that attracts a whole new generation of readers and writers to its flag, “The point of the cyberpunk argument,” argues one writer,” is that this old techno-future is a flabby, outmoded idea, one that makes for boring science fiction because it’s based on an old-fashioned dream of the future and therefore obscures our view of the burgeoning dystopia we’re inhabiting right now”. Cyberpunk can directly deal with our culture, and its immediate future. This sub-genre is a bringing together of the cyber, referring to the technology used to artificially augment the human body and human abilities, with the popular culture and social ideas found in punk rock and roll music.
No idea can come from only one source, and cyberpunk does not merely evolve directly from science-fiction. Instead, it derives its style from a verity of literary sources, and it seems that, almost surprisingly so, one of those chief sources would be the pulp detective novel genre, especially those written in the 1920’s. In an interview conducted by Larry McCaffery, William Gibson, considered the father of cyberpunk, comments on Dashiell Hammett, famous for his creation of the character Sam Spade in the novel The Maltese Falcon;
I remember being very excited about how he had pushed all this ordinary stuff until it was different - like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost surreal. You can see this in the beginning of The Maltese Falcon, where he describes all the things in Spade’s office. Hammett may have been the guy who turned me onto superspecificity.
Novels such as those by Hammett and his contemporaries, portray raw details, giving an almost hyper or paranoid awareness of what is happening in the story.
This “superficialness” is what writers like Gibson pick up on, and use. Dialogue is kept short and punchy, with incomplete sentences trying to capture more accurately normal human speech. In this selection from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon the reader is presented with a phone conversation between Sam Spade and an unknown caller. The reader does not know who is calling or why, and we are only privileged enough to hear Spade’s end of the conversation, “Hello... Yes, this is Spade... Yes, I got it, I’ve been waiting to hear from you... Who?... Mr. Gutman? Oh, yes, sure!... Now - the sooner the better... Twelve C... Right. Say fifteen minutes... Right.”. On the one hand, this dialogue sounds trite and meaningless, empty of deeper content, since, unlike the modernist writers, who also attempt to represent realistic human speech in writing, we never see the thoughts or conscience behind the words; but the problem is that in real human communication there often is not anything deeper than what is being said.
Writers like Hammett present the reader with an ultra real surface, with the events, nothing more than you would get than if you were actually standing in the room with the characters. Rather than attempting to analyze events and actions for the reader, the reader is left to puzzle through the characters motives just as in “real” life. Many cyberpunk writers also work at this surface level, allowing the reader a more active role in character development than in the modernist novels, since the reader judges the characters not upon their intentions, for which the reader has only the narrator to interpret, but upon their actions, which are left to the the reader to interpret.
NEXT TIME: The Fall of Western Civilization: The Cyberpunk Years →