How Cyberpunk Went From Cutting Edge to Retro

The meaning of the term "cyberpunk" is more variable, if not contested, than most people realize. To those steeped in the history of science fiction, and especially science fiction as literature, it denotes a postmodernist turn in the treatment of hard science fiction, along with David Pringle and Colin Greenland's "radical hard sf" and Rudy Rucker's "Trans-Realist" fiction contemporaneous with it. Hallmarks of this are that fiction's combination of fixation on the self with skepticism about the salience of the concept of a stable "self" to begin with, an anti-historical sensibility suspicious of objectivity, comprehensibility, coherence and progress, and an attraction to the devices of Modernism that endured after the hope that those devices would "enable the traumatized survivors of a broken world to make sense of life again" the way its proponents claimed would be the case--such that first picking up William Gibson's Neuromancer I felt like I was reading Ezra Pound in neon lights. Yet for most people it refers to a particular set of images and themes, by no means unprecedented before the '80s (many will point out that you can see a lot of this in stuff going back to the '50s, especially the work of people like Alfred Bester), and not even evident across all of the work gathered together in the more prominent collections of the stuff (as a read of Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades anthology shows), but at least identifiable with the works of some of the core of the "club" (like Gibson and Sterling, along with others like Rudy Rucker and John Shirley and Pat Cadigan)--a near-future world where the neoliberals realized their utopian (for others, dystopian) project of privatizing and deregulating everything, corporate power is supreme and the nation-state has lost its relevance, and technologists' focus is on the microchip and the genome and the marriage of the two, and the story apt to be told from the perspective of those inhabiting the dark underbelly of this future to the point that that future can seem to be all dark underbelly.

A distinct tendency in the '80s by its end the field broadly assimilated many of its elements--hence "post-cyberpunk," which kept much of what it offered, but was prone to be less unreadably postmodernist, and less dark underbelly. And eventually it went from being assimilated into science fiction generally to looking and sounding and feeling like something out of science fiction's past, especially insofar as the near-future came and, if in some ways looking like what it had described, in others looking very different indeed, enough to make it seem like the imagining of people in another place and time, just as had been the case with prior waves, prior movements, in science fiction's history--with the techno-economic model of the day seeming to me particular relevant. The "inventor's fiction" of the "Gernsback era," the fiction of the Golden Age, were the imagining of the future in people living in the "Fordist" era, reflecting its understanding of the present and the expectation of the future they had on that basis. Cyberpunk reflected the expectations of a world that people were told was moving into the information age by figures like Alvin Toffler (whose writing was, indeed, acknowledged by Sterling himself as an important influence on them).

The fact that Gernsbackian/Golden Age science fiction was fiction written by people actually in a particular era, and that cyberpunk was written by people who were led to believe they were moving into a particular new era, is an important difference between them that, I think, made a difference in the fullness of the vision, and its staying power. Fordism, in the sense of the productivity revolution of the electrified factory churning out the materials of "auto-subtopia" and its associated consumer culture, actually happened, and, however much academics of wearisomely contrarian mind nitpick the usefulness of the concept of Fordism, changed the world profoundly in ways that remain with us still--and our imaginings with them. The flying car and the robot servant so famously associated with the science fiction of that time were an adaptation of the automobiles and electrified household appliances so central to Fordist production--which in spite of the far from innocent sneers of some broadly remain part of what people expect of tomorrowland. By contrast the information age's failure ever to appear (yes, you are reading this online, but the information age as a Toffler described it meant much, much more than the existence of the Interweb) meant much less potential to imagine what a further development of it might look like, which would seem to have much to do with the narrowness and fragmentariness of the conception that left us wondering just what all the people who weren't hackers and information brokers and others of their ilk do with their lives as we read those stories.