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Cyberpunk Future

Published at July 14, 2006 in cyberpunk. 0 Comments

Cyberpunk is an open idea. It is a term that has been in dispute since it’s inception with every work dedicated to it taking up the burden of attempting to explain it. I think as a genre it is a highly consensual term. That is, what is determined as being firmly cyberpunk or barely cyberpunk depends on the consensus of the people who use the term. This is what gives the word it’s open and complex nature.

However complexity & integrity are two different things. It is naïve of me or anyone else to think that any message that people want to hear won’t be appropriated by mainstream channels and fanatics bemoan the days when their music or whatever was ‘sold out’

I don’t even think it is sensible to talk of a genre ‘selling out’ because how can you control artists who choose that form to express themselves? I’m not sure there even ever was a time when Cyberpunk wasn’t in some sense sold-out with ambivalence not just to technology but the market machine that creates the technology.

Cyberpunk is complex because it has elements that can exist completely independent of one another. A film may be cyberpunk purely because of its aesthetics, another for its philosophy and another because of its political point of view.

Science Fiction in general is a neutral genre, its focus is on connections between the present on the future, usually technologically related. It is ripe with political oriented fiction because in analyzing the present to create the future authors have to decide on the eventualities of current political ideologies.

Cyberpunk as a sub genre of science fiction can hardly be described as politically neutral and I believe never should be. I think integrity is important because cyberpunk has its roots in focusing on the alienated and the disenfranchised, the people on the fringes of society and the dystopias created by imbalances in wealth & power. To have integrity then fiction that is described as having cyberpunk politics should be representing this point of view. I don’t think we should consent to the use of the term in describing fiction that abandon’s this view, regardless of whether a film has a giant add for Converse shoes in it or not (ala ‘I, Robot’.)

However, I could imagine that in order to accommodate the complexity of the term one might want to distinguish between say, cyberpunk politics, cyberpunk philosophy and cyberpunk aesthetics etc. So that a narrative that focus on the question of humanity through technological change is not denied the label just because it ignores aesthetics and politics. Though, this might just further confuse things.

Under this view cyberpunk is not too open but perhaps too specific. Requiring too many disparate elements. Why not retrospectively label George Orwell’s ‘1984’ as cyberpunk even though there is no internet, hackers, cyborgs or corporatocracies to speak of? Is it perhaps because of the specific commonalties of early cyberpunk (eg. similar depictions of the social fragmentation caused by the use of the internet/virtual reality etc.) that some regard the genre as outdated and irrelevant?

I think I was probably mistaken in asking how cyberpunk can regain it’s political rebelliousness as I’m not sure it’s ever had it (in terms of having more than ambivalence toward late capitalism). But I think it should have it, as I have my own political point of view and agenda of course but I regard it as one of the best genres to express this point of view.

‘Cyberpunk’ is an open term; it is complex however if we consent to its use on works of fiction too disparate, too thinly related it becomes so open that it is meaningless. Thus it depends on the integrity of its fans, authors and critics as to what they regard as the future of cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk Narrative

Published at May 8, 2006 in cyberpunk. 0 Comments

Various critics have touted Cyberpunk Science Fiction as a post-modern genre. Whether or not this is an attempt to keep the genre relevant or elevate it from the low-brow associations of Science Fiction generally is unclear.

“As an exploration of human experience within the context of media-dominated, postindustrial, late capitalist society, cyberpunk is in many ways quintessentially postmodern.”

Sponsler, Claire “Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson”, Contemporary Literature 33 (1992) p.626-7

However a common rebuke from literary critics is the narrative of the majority of Cyberpunk is hopelessly non-postmodern. That in fact the postmodern aesthetic has been grafted onto a tired romantic adventure story structure. The cowboy/samurai loner battling against the forces of evil, colonizing a new unexplored territory.

“Clearly the difficulty Gibson faces is one of finding a way of treating plot and agency so as to mesh with the implications of his post-modern aesthetic. While the surface world of his novels convincingly simulates or replicates the technological and cultural changes whose impact he wishes to explore, the plots and protagonists do not. Gibson tries to insert what we might think of as three-dimensional characters and cause-and-effect actions onto a flat plane populated by free-floating, random, and decentered objects and people. This conflict between the scene and the agents who are made to move meaningfully through it toward a resolution marks the impasse Gibson has reached.

In his novels, first human agents, then machines and finally cyberspace itself are invested with a heroic and romantic power that ultimately undermines the resolutely unromantic surface world he has set up. What Gibson has not been able to do, making his novels after Neuromancer increasingly unsatisfactory, is derive from his postmodern, two-dimensional scene a similarly two-dimensional agency that can be manifested not merely through realistic cause-and-effect, diachronic action but through something Gibson has not yet found.

Gibson’s predicament in the end is paradigmatic of the problem all cyberpunk faces: it seems doomed to play out old plots people by old characters within a scene that calls for a radically different formulation of human agency and action.”

Sponsler, Claire “Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson”, Contemporary Literature 33 (1992) p.639-40

Whilst I agree there are structures that are hackneyed I am not sure if I would go as far as Sponsler in criticizing the ‘old’ stories. I don’t profess to by overly familiar with post-modern narratives but using non-realistic, non cause and effect devices aim to confuse and provoke the reader. Whilst this would seem to go hand in hand with science fiction as the genre of ‘cognitive estrangement’ it also risks making the story impenetrably strange. Important philosophical and political questions are likely to get lost in the narrative games played by the author. With the story devices already aimed at bending and testing the reality of the reader, what hope would we have in reading the text when the narrative devices are doing the same?

Sponsler does not focus on narrative exclusively however and goes on to make very salient points about the poverty of imagination in Science Fiction in crafting stories that merely tweak the already familiar, specifically the failure to “narrate an antihumanist , nontranscendent future.”

It is safe to say that the genre of Cyberpunk has its roots in the late-capitalism excesses of 80’s America. The technology of personal computers and cyberspace could only have come about through this process, it is unsurprising to me then that this genre would be so inept at criticizing its precursor.

However, we are no longer in the 80’s and films like ‘One Point O’ demonstrate that cyberpunk fiction is only limited by the imaginations of it’s authors. The film not only does away with the romantic-hero structure it also is a critique of capitalist forces doing away with the ambivalence of the old literature.

I agree though that Cyberpunk still relies far to heavily on the credibility of the narrator. Whilst utilizing themes pioneered by Phillip K. Dick et al. in questioning reality and our ability to know what is real, why would authors choose such a realist prose so that we are never in much doubt ourselves in terms of the story?

I can only hope that as I understand more clearly just what postmodern literature is supposed to be, I can understand how cyberpunk can do away with old clichés and remain fresh in a world that hasn’t answered any of the questions it has been raising for the last twenty years.

Post-Cyberpunk

Published at March 24, 2006 in cyberpunk. 3 Comments

Over at cyberpunkreview.com there is a great article on the perhaps fallacious distinction of ‘post-cyberpunk’ :
Post-Cyberpunk? Why not Cyberpunk 2.0!

Genre definitions are only settled retrospectively, we may wait a hundred years before critics proclaim that they have post-modernism and it’s successor all worked out. Perhaps one of the problems with living in a so-called post-modern age is the utter resistance of clear genre boundaries and categories.

I think the term post-cyberpunk may be meaningless but it has been important in drawing attention to the evolution of the genre. Almost the entirety of 50’s Sci-Fi failed to predict the internet and the CP of the late 70’s & 80’s was revolutionary in re-imagining a vision of the future based on present trends.

But of course, as the present trends change so do the imaginings. The problem with being so close to the decade of emergent CP is that we are desperate to move beyond it’s highly stylized 80’s imagery, even the term ‘cyberpunk’ somehow sounds outdated. But in doing so we risk destroying the very distinction this genre affords.

The future didn’t turn out as bleak as we thought? Maybe. Alienation and isolation are gone, heroes are those who uphold the status-quo? No bloody way. I think the world is just a little more complex than the perhaps simplistic imagery of CP. It is cleaner and more efficient at hiding the horror.

I think those critics who want to dismiss the dystopian themes of CP as hackneyed and clichéd are the one’s unwilling or incapable of seeing the darker trends of current society, they believe the hype about living in some 50’s style golden age of technological endeavor.

I think the challenge for the genre is to tackle it’s themes in a way that engages a new generation that is dismissive of the cold-war dystopia / post-apocalyptic scenarios. It needs to accumulate credibility in its vision of the future as being one extrapolated from ‘present’ society not yester-year.

It is a dangerous task, by the mere fact that we are not all drug-addicts existing in a meaningless consensual hallucination, present existence seems like paradise by comparison. But a victory over the worst-case scenario is hardly a victory at all.