Cyberpunk, in the popular consciousness, conjures a glut of dissociated images: Blade Runner’s slummy urban landscape, hackers in sunglasses, Japanese cyborgs, grubby tech, digital intoxication, Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic. But it began as an insanely niche subculture within science fiction, one which articulated young writerly distaste for the historically utopian optimism of the medium and, in turn, provided an aesthetic reference point for burgeoning hacker culture, before metastasizing into a full-on cultural trend.One of the movement’s chief ideologues, Bruce Sterling, wrote in the introduction to his seminal anthology Mirrorshades that technology in cyberpunk writing was “not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” In cyberpunk novels, technology isn’t controlled by white-coat boffins in a distant lab on the holy altar of Science, but in our homes, on our streets, in our bodies. Unlike their predecessors in science fiction, the cyberpunks didn’t evangelize gleaming rockets or futuristic weapons. Theirs was a world of technological jetsam, of bionic drugs, of machines in varying states of obsolescence, of cyclopean corporate greed, of subverted tools, of sprawl, error, and menace. With a “faintly hallucinatory sheen around the edges of its dirty chrome fittings,” as another of its major prophets, John Shirley, put it.Read the rest over at Motherboard. And be sure to check out ten sci-fi luminaries explain the fate of cyberpunk.
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