Of "Pop Cyberpunk": A Few Thoughts

In discussing cyberpunk it is well to acknowledge the ambiguities surrounding the term. Not chosen by those we think of as "cyberpunks" themselves, it denoted to them a postmodernist approach to hard science fiction, with the result apt to be more postmodernist than hard science fiction per se. (Hence William Gibson's virtual reality-based conception of the Internet--as compared with the more rigorously extrapolation-minded Murray Leinster succeeded in envisioning with astounding accuracy four decades earlier in John Campbell's . . . Astounding.) Yet we have tended to use the term to refer to a specific kind of future that, if not invented by the cyberpunks (we see quite a bit of it in '50s-era stuff like what Pohl and Kornbluth, and Bester, and Sheckley, published in Galaxy in its Horace Gold glory days, while an Arthur C. Clarke worked out many of the technical bits in The City and the Stars), was still characteristic of many of their best-known works--a thoroughly neoliberalized, globalized, privatized world where corporations straddling the Earth have marginalized the state, the old "middle class" life has largely vanished in an extremely unequal world of ultra-luxury and Third World poverty in even the former First World, and technological change is redefining what "it means to be human."

Still, if the term cyberpunk became associated with a particular near future milieu rather than postmodernist writing, there is no question that the canonical cyberpunks (Gibson, of course, in varying degrees also his colleagues Sterling, Shirley, Cadigan, Rucker, etc.) were prone to postmodernism, with Cult of the Sentence-committed prose rendering unconventional and frequently acid trip-like narratives. Reading Gibson's Neuromancer myself for the first time, for example, the comparison I thought of was with reading Ezra Pound in neon lights, an experience I found brain-melting-- which I think, limited the popular reach of these authors. Still, alongside the Gibsons it seems possible to speak of cyberpunk fiction which presented the "cyberpunk world" most people think of when they hear the term in a more accessible, easy-to-read way. Certainly what we call "post-cyberpunk" did not always present hardcore postmodernist writing, with the most famous such work, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a comparatively straightforward read, while in such works as William Shatner's TekWar novels I think it possible even to speak of the existence of "pop cyberpunk"--fiction giving us a cyberpunkish future, but with the sharper edges knocked off (Shatner's world isn't the Sprawl), rendered in plain prose emphasizing fast-paced action-adventure, with a big dollop of humor added in to make it go over with a wider audience.

Still, it would seem that pop cyberpunk never became a major category of commercial fiction the way space opera did (especially by way of tie-ins with Star Trek and Star Wars that sold well for a good long while), or the kind of post-apocalyptic survivalist adventure that took off in such a big way after Mad Max, as with William Johnstone's long-running Ashes saga or James Axler's Deathlands novels. It may well be that pop cyberpunk simply lacked the makings of a genre with such popular appeal. I personally don't think the darkness to which cyberpunk tended is the issue--this being nowhere near so bleak as the post-apocalyptic stuff. Rather I would guess the conceptual density of even Shatner-like watered-down cyberpunk, which still requires the reader to cope with a flurry of invented technical and cultural developments, to have been the real barrier to wider popular appeal. Someone who happily reads Gibson and Sterling and company's "crammed prose" will take Shatner quite in stride, but as hardcore readers of the genre too easily forget this is not so simple for that more general audience that had to be won over if this new subgenre was supposed to take off commercially. It likely didn't help that in audiovisual media cyberpunk successes have been cult-like rather than of the mass audience type--a Blade Runner rather than a Star Wars, a Max Headroom rather than a Star Trek, with all that meant for getting a wider audience interested in an era in which popular success in print has tended to follow after rather than lead such success in film and television.

However, it also seems to me that timing may have been the biggest factor of all, pop cyberpunk coming as it did when the action-adventure fiction market collapsed, in the 1990s--not least, I think, because action-adventure in other media was so much more available than before, and for many, more satisfying in those media. (When it comes to "big action" and spectacle generally books can scarcely compete with blockbuster films and video games, and books suffered accordingly.) Amid all that pop cyberpunk fiction did not have the chance to gain any traction, all as the more devoted readers of science fiction, ever fewer in number to begin with, simply moved on.