Beyond Cyberpunk Culture

Abstract

354 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) REVIEW-ESSAY Chad Andrews Beyond Cyberpunk Culture Anna McFarlane, Lars Schmeink, and Graham J. Murphy, eds. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. Routledge, 2020. xx+454 pp. $200 hc, $42.36 ebk. Almost thirty years ago, John Fekete opened his review of the early cyberpunk anthology Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991) by surveying early 1990s technological innovations that had penetrated into daily existence. “We see though eyeglasses and contacts,” he wrote, “we eat with dentures. We remove cataracts and replace the lenses. We insert video cameras inside our bodies to aid in ‘keyhole’ surgery; we remove our gall bladders and throw them away” (395). Acknowledging that these are “just the medical interventions,” he goes on to conjure novel experiences in entertainment and communication: “We also time-shift our simulation programming on television, put disembodied interlocutors on hold on our telephones, and post messages in electronic space through computer modems. We jog through our cities acoustically jacked into our Walkmans” (395). Of course, today a Walkman is about as cutting-edge as a toaster oven, and Fekete’s survey is a reminder that our technoscape, to use Arjun Appadurai’s term, has taken enormous and unexpected leaps. We still see through eyeglasses and contacts, but we also reshape and transplant corneas, and in certain cases of genetic blindness we use retinal implants to create artificial vision, or gene therapy to alter problematic strands of DNA. We continue to watch television, but it is usually streamed into our homes, gigabyte after gigabyte, as part of a relentless torrent of personalized data. Our phones are part of this network too, and are now advanced computers that we carry in our pockets, closer to the personalized quantum computers, or “qubes,” from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012) than to the “dumb,” corded fixtures of old. We even speak to them, though the conversations fall short of Turing’s high standards. So, technology and technique—in the sense that Jacques Ellul used the term—have transformed dramatically over the last three decades, which is really no surprise. Bob Dylan, himself a kind of early punk, told us over fifty years ago that the times are a-changin’, and our technological society certainly has—in ways both large and small, terrifying and promising, obscure and transparent. And cyberpunk literature changed as well. Storming the Reality Studio was the first anthology to grapple with the subgenre’s emergence as a nascent form of postmodern literature, and although Fekete finds its editorial framing problematic, relying on “rusty sociographic theories” (397) to position 355 BEYOND CYBERPUNK CULTURE cyberpunk as a mimesis of “the truth,” the anthology’s essays were some of the first to consider cyberpunk in relation to wider trends in literature, media, technoculture, and other areas. In some ways, this current collection picks up that particular torch, now with four decades of material and developments to analyze. The editors read cyberpunk as not only postmodern literature, but as a broader and pervasive cultural and discursive formation, one they label “cyberpunk culture.” That thesis, that cyberpunk has continued on as a widespread cultural phenomenon, recalls Fekete’s own suggestion that cyberpunk “signals only the early stages of a thoroughgoing literary interest in whatever may be conceivable for a technological imaginary, and especially for its still only embryonic post-liberal varieties” (402). For Fekete in the early 1990s, then, cyberpunk exhibited a stylized and attractive portrayal of the “technological interface in SF,” one that promised a future of similar explorations, though for him the future of that writing “lies beyond that collocation” (402). This particular Routledge Companion explores the very future that Fekete could only guess at, but the editors are committed, it seems, to an overarching trajectory defined by and oriented around cyberpunk specifically—hence the term “cyberpunk culture”—as opposed to the vague and open-ended “beyond” that Fekete gestures towards in his review. In other words, according to the editors of this collection, cyberpunk did not go anywhere. Quite the opposite, in fact: “Cyberpunk is everywhere,” they insist, “even if its earliest practitioners have moved into other conceptual territories” (1). They...