Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson

Abstract

n recent years science fiction has with some success struggled against its ghettoization as lowbrow genre fiction. Readers and critics have defended science fiction as having not only tradition of its own but also considerable overlap with modernist and postmodernist literature. Simultaneously, theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway have turned to as, in Annette Kuhn's words, a privileged cultural site for enactments of the postmodern condition (178). Indeed, for many cultural critics, has become the pre-eminent literary genre of the postmodern era, since it alone seems capable of understanding the rapid technological and cultural changes occurring in late capitalist, postindustrial society. In spite of this highbrow interest in science fiction, borders are still policed, and the ghetto endures. Even an apologist for like Darko Suvin can say dismissively that only 5 to 10 percent of SF is aesthetically in contrast to the ninety to ninetyfive percent that is strictly perishable stuff (vii). As Roger Luckhurst notes, in the postmodern discourse about SF, science fiction is seen as borrowing from the mainstream always belatedly, derivatively, and in degraded form (362). may have acquired new visibility outside its own coterie, especially among theorists, but old value hierarchies still work to keep books out of the hands of highand middlebrow readers. Hence, like the New Wave and ecofeminist of the 1960s and 1970s, cyberpunk, the most significant development in science fiction in the 1980s, is not widely known