The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture ed. by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture ed. by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink Mark Player (bio) Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. New York; Oxford: Routledge, 2020, 454 pp. $245 hardback. Since its emergence in the early to mid 1980s, cyberpunk has been a speculative realm in which our collected anxieties over rapid and widespread techno-cultural change, the omniscience of mega-corporations, the encroachment of virtual spaces and artificial intelligence, the advent of robotics and cybernetic augmentation, and the status of the human body in this brave new posthuman world have been explored in both cerebral and spectacular fashion. Taking its name from a short story about young computer hackers that was written by Bruce Bethke in 1980 (and published in the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories in 1983), the term "cyberpunk" was initially coined to define a rebellious subgenre of dystopian science fiction literature from North America that took cybernetic technologies and virtual networks within heaving, sometimes Orientalized, megalopolises as its focus. The term was then quickly used to characterize a range of other media and cultural expressions that explore similar ideas and iconography: from films to animation, comics, music, videogames, tabletop role-playing games, and even fashion. Since then, it has birthed a number of genre derivatives, with each using the "-punk" suffix and each building their fictional worlds upon a different technology. These include biopunk and nanopunk, as well as retro-futurist schisms such as steampunk and dieselpunk. Therefore, it can be argued that cyberpunk has outgrown its original use as a generic marker, especially now that we live in a world where artificial intelligence, increasingly advanced robotics, and a version of the cyberspace envisioned by William Gibson in his seminal debut novel Neuromancer (1984) (replete with virtual reality headset hardware—a classic piece of cyberpunk iconography) are now everyday science fact rather than science fiction. This argument is also made by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, the editors of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. In their concise introductory chapter, "Cyberpunk as Cultural Formation," they lay out the strategy that has informed this sizable and ambitious project. This includes avoiding "nearly all use of the words 'genre' or 'subgenre' to refer to cyberpunk, instead taking a cue from Foster and Rosemary Jackson in opting for the terminology of 'mode'" (3). Thinking of cyberpunk in terms of "modes" encourages an exploration of cyberpunk beyond its media representations to examine how it has integrated with broader intercultural flows and philosophical thought over the years. For the editors, the purpose of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture is "to emphasize the importance of cyberpunk as a cultural formation, a means of engaging with our 21st-century technocultural age" (3). Indeed, this "companion" is not so much a companion in the introductory sense—although it can serve as that to an extent—nor is it merely a collection of individual essays on cyberpunk at large. Instead, it strives to make an original, sustained contribution to the field by using these essays—or chapters—to construct an overarching thesis around the idea of cyberpunk as a "cultural formation" (as is reflected in the title of the editors' introduction). To achieve this, the editors have amassed a large roster of nearly 50 contributors (most of whom are from a humanities background), in addition to supplying their own chapters. Each contributor specializes in a particular topic that seeks to highlight "cyberpunk culture and cyberpunk as culture," to quote the publisher's blurb. However, the editors have gone to great lengths to provide some cohesion in approaching this large and potentially unwieldy subject in such an ambitious manner. This is addressed in their introduction in refreshingly transparent fashion: "we made editorial interventions into our contributors' papers to foster internal connections among the various chapters rather than allowing the chapters to simply exist as discrete entries" [End Page 395] (3). These "interventions" often take the form of judicious endnotes that point the reader to other chapters of interest, so as not to overly disrupt each chapter's flow or unnecessarily compromise the contributor's original train of...