There once lived a man who was naked, raving, and could not be bound. According to the Gospel: “He tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet.” It turns out (spoiler) he was possessed. The demons were exorcised and cast out of the man. Lacking a human host, the demons possessed an entire herd of pigs (two thousand of them, says Mark!). They then ran straight into the ocean.
The man, liberated of foul influences, sat there “dressed and in his right mind.” The people around him were comforted. The day of demons was behind them. After a brief period of naked, raving chaos, order had been restored.
Or so they thought.
The biblical story of Legion is an iconic one, perhaps the most well-known exorcism in Western culture. It is also, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for cyberpunk. It is literature unchained, naked, and raving . . . but only briefly. Depending on which expert source you read, this day of demons lasted a decade or a few short years—or, according to some, it died even before it was born. The pigs went straight into the sea. Order restored.
There’s no question that cyberpunk had a shockingly brief existence as a cohesive entity. Born out of science fiction’s new wave, literary postmodernism, and a perfect storm of external factors (Reaganism, cheap transistors, networked computing, and MTV), the genre cohered as a tangible, fungible thing in the early 1980s, most famously exemplified by the aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the themes of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The term cyberpunk itself, as coined by Bruce Bethke, came into being in 1983. The neologism captured the zeitgeist: the potential of, and simultaneous disillusionment with, techno-capitalism on steroids.
Cyberpunk was born of the punk ethos. A genre that, in many ways, existed against a mainstream cultural and literary tradition, rather than for anything definable or substantive in its own right. This is, at least, an argument posited by those who believe the genre peaked—and died—with Bruce Sterling’s superb anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Accepted as the definitive presentation of cyberpunk, Sterling had pressed a Heisenbergian self-destruct button. Once it was a defined quality, cyberpunk could no longer continue in that form.
Although this is a romantic theory (and cyberpunk is a romantic pursuit, despite—or perhaps because of—the leather and chrome), it is not one to which I personally subscribe. While collecting for this volume, I found that the engine of the genre was still spinning away, producing inventive and disruptive interpretations of the core cyberpunk themes through to the start of the next decade. These include novels and collections such as Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), Misha’s Prayers of Steel (1988), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1988),
Lisa Mason’s Arachne (1990), and Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel (1992); as well as movies, television programs, and games such as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), the Max Headroom series (1985), FASA’s Shadowrun (1989), and Bullfrog’s Syndicate (1993). Meaningful social commentary was still being produced as well: Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, as well as the cypherpunks and even the first steampunks.
By the mid-1990s, however, the hogs had well and truly left for the ocean. The mundanity of the technocratic society had been firmly realized—as expressed, for example, in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (1995). And at the other extreme, the visual aesthetic had proved overwhelmingly popular, thriving independently of the ideas (or even the material) that spawned it. Johnny Mnemonic (1995) serves as a painful example of how the visual tropes of cyberpunk no longer bore any connection to its original themes. A bit like Frankenstein’s monster, the cyberpunk style had gone lumbering off on its own, inadvertently appropriating the name of its
creator. Cyberpunk slouched along in increasingly glossy and pastiche-ridden forms, but its frenetic glory days were now truly behind it. Cyberpunk qua cyberpunk had been pulled apart by the twin poles of banal reality and hyperactive fantasy.
Why would a Big Book be given over to something that lived, thrived, and died in such a short period of time? Because, in this case, the pigs took the long way round.
Cyberpunk’s manifestation in a single and singular form was indeed brief. But it left quite an impression. A lingering dissatisfaction that being well-dressed and well-behaved is a bit, well, dull. The realization that chains aren’t the nicest things to wear. A dawning awareness that there are a lot of extremely valid reasons to run around and scream (clothing optional). People understood that the world itself was not in its right mind, and maybe the demons had the right idea.
The legacy of cyberpunk remains not only relevant but ubiquitous. We now live our lives in a perplexing mix of the virtual and the real.
Even as the brief golden era of cyberpunk—the day of Legion—slips further into nostalgia, the legacy of cyberpunk remains not only relevant but ubiquitous. We now live our lives in a perplexing mix of the virtual and the real. At no time in human history have we ever been exposed to more messages, more frequently, from more and varied sources. Civilians using bootstrap technology are guiding drones in open warfare against marauding professional mercenaries. Protesters use umbrellas and spray paint to hide from facial recognition technology. Battles between corporations are fought in the streams of professional video game players. Algorithmically generated videos lead children down the rabbit hole of terrorist recruitment. The top touring musical act is a hologram. Your refrigerator is spying on you.
Perhaps the madman in the cave was not possessed but an oracle. Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come. It understood that the world itself was raving and undressed—irrational, unpredictable, and ill behaved. This is how we live, and Legion saw it coming.
WHAT IS CYBERPUNK?
It is impossible to collect The Big Book of Cyberpunk without actually defining cyberpunk. Unless we dare to name Legion, we can’t track the two thousand feral hogs and the spoor they left behind. Unsurprisingly, given cyberpunk’s robust academic and critical legacy, there are many definitions to draw upon. With a genre so nebulous and sprawling, it is possible for each editor, artist, author, academic, or game designer to find in it what they want. Cyberpunk is a land of definitional opportunity, but there are some rigid principles to uphold.
Cyberpunk has clear origins in both the “genre” and “literary” worlds. The division between these worlds is a false tension that has been remarked on, with their trademark directness, by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in their introduction to The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016). From its start, cyberpunk stories and cyberpunk authors were weaving and bobbing between both literary and genre outlets, as well as commercial and academic presses, traditional and experimental presses, and formal and informal modes of publishing. Cyberpunk has now been “claimed” by science fiction (or, more controversially, science fiction has been consumed by cyberpunk). But it would be a narrow and inaccurate view of the genre to see it as a wholly science-fictional endeavor.
Cyberpunk is inextricably linked with the real experience of technology. Technology in cyberpunk is not a hypothetical but a fundamental, tangible, and omnipresent inclusion in human life. Cyberpunk’s predecessors largely dealt with technology as an abstract possibility: a controlled progress in the hands of a scientific elite, with visionary, but entirely rational, outcomes. But the reality of the computing explosion is that irrationality reigned, science became decentralized and personalized, and utopian visions were subsumed by capitalism, politics, and individual whim. Technology outpaced not only its expectations but its limitations.
As a genre about technology, and not “science” more broadly, there are limits to cyberpunk’s scope. Technology, in this context, is manufactured. Cyberpunk is not science fiction that explores the ramifications of something inherent (such as the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin), innate (such as fiction that focuses on xenobiology, mutation, psychic powers, or other “flukes of biology” stories), or encountered (such as stories about discovering or exploring alien civilizations, lost worlds, or strange artifacts). By focusing on technology as a product, cyberpunk is about agency: it speaks about change that we are attempting to bring upon ourselves.
Cyberpunk exists in opposition to its predecessors. The –punk of cyberpunk is unavoidable: cyberpunk contains a fundamental sense of challenge. The man in the cave wasn’t raving blindly; he was raving against. Cyberpunk pushes boundaries; it is provocative. It tries to find and break conventions. This need to rebel is intrinsic to the genre, leading to experimentation with both theme and form. As noted previously, it also connects to the possible “death” of cyberpunk: once the genre was absorbed by the mainstream, it could no longer exist as a single cohesive rebellion, and fragmented.
Cyberpunk is neither static nor teleological. Cyberpunk is literature about change. That change can take the form of progress or regress; evolution or revolution; or even degradation. It is not epic in the sense of a grand and ultimate destination. There are no final and decisive conclusions, only, at most, incremental movement. Cyberpunk is often described as dystopian, but dystopia implies a final and established system. Even in its grimmest worlds, cyberpunk presents the possibility of dynamism and of change. (And, similarly, even when set in the most scintillating futures, cyberpunk seeds the potential for regression or disruption.)
This final principle also hints at the limitations of technology. Cyberpunk is not about technological supremacy. In fact, the reverse is true: cyberpunk is about the perseverance of humanity. Cyberpunk accepts that irrationality and personality cannot be subsumed. This recognition is for good and for ill: techno-utopian outcomes are impossible because of our core, intractable humanness. But nor should those outcomes even be desirable: our irrepressible need for individuality may keep us from paradise but is, ultimately, the most essential part of our nature. In theme, and often in form, cyberpunk embraces chaos and irrationality, perpetually defiant of sweeping solutions, absolutist worldviews, or fixed patterns.
Marshall McLuhan, one of the great scholars of technology and society, described the same dynamics that led to the development of cyberpunk. McLuhan suggested that, in order to study technology, we step away from admiring the technology itself and instead examine how it shapes or displaces society. This quasi-phenomenological approach finds meaning not in the thing itself, but in our response to it. McLuhan concludes that the “message” of any medium or technology is the scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. Applying this same concept to cyberpunk: it is not the fiction of technology but that of our reaction to it. The technology itself matters only in how it affects “human affairs.”
Cyberpunk fiction is therefore an attempt, through literature, to make sense of the unprecedented scale and pace of contemporary technology, and also of the brutal and realistic acknowledgment that there may be no sense to it at all. As a working definition, therefore, it means cyberpunk is speculative fiction about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs. Technology may accelerate, promote, delay, or even oppose these affairs, but humanity remains ultimately, unchangeably, human. It is the fiction of irrationality. Science fiction looks to the stars; cyberpunk stares into a mirror.
It seems tautological, but a definition is only as good as its ability to define. I crawled through almost two thousand works for this book, and, as Big™ as this book is, a mere hundred or so made it in. How did this definition work as a set of practical selection criteria? More importantly, what should you expect to find within the pages of The Big Book of Cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is fiction—a self-serving selection requirement, and a controversial one at that. There’s a wealth of cyberpunk-adjacent nonfiction that fully merits a Big Book of its own. From the reviews of Cheap Truth to the ads in the back of Mondo 2000, there are essays, travelogues, manifestos, articles, and memoirs that are immensely important to cyberpunk. But cyberpunk is speculative, not descriptive. The nonfiction inspires the genre, and is inspired by it, but is not the genre itself.
The protagonist needs to be recognizably human. As stated, cyberpunk is about human affairs. Protagonists that are aliens, robots, or artificial intelligence (AI) shift the focus from human social relationships to the relationship between humanity and the other. Human/other relationships can be an insightful way of exploring what makes us human (as seen in great science fiction ranging from Mary Doria Russell to Becky Chambers), but cyberpunk eschews that additional layer of metaphor. To be about human affairs, the story needs to be about humans.
The story is set in the present, the near present, or an easily intuited future. As we project further and further out, deciphering the scale, the pace, or the pattern requires more and more assumptions on the part of the author. Again, this is about the point of focus: the more speculation involved, and the less the manufactured technology is immediately recognizable, the more the story becomes about exploring the wondrous, rather than investigating the real. The “present,” of course, is relative. (Objectively speaking, most of cyberpunk is now, disturbingly, alternate history.)
Given the stagnant state of space exploration, this also excludes virtually all stories that take place off-planet or in deep space. (Again, exceptions could be made for films such as Alien, 1979, that take place in deep space, but with oddly minimal evidence of human scientific or social progress.) Similarly, there are very few examples of cyberpunk in secondary worlds or of cyberpunk with magic. As the fantastical becomes more and more necessary to the story, the focus shifts away from human affairs and toward the story’s imaginative underpinnings.
Technology is mediative, not transformative. This is a deeply subjective divide but one critical to what makes cyberpunk a distinct genre or subgenre of science fiction. A story in which technology fundamentally transforms, replaces, or subsumes human relationships is exciting, intriguing, and wildly imaginative . . . but not cyberpunk. A cyberpunk story is one that examines the way technology changes the way humans relate to other humans but still leaves that relationship fundamentally intact. The underlying resilience of human social relationships, for better or for worse, remains the key theme—not the transformative potential of technology.
In the spirit of cyberpunk, it is fair to note that these rules are in no way consistently consistent. There are notable exceptions to each contained within this book, including AI protagonists, alien encounters, and even the overt use of magic.
The eagle-eyed will also note that I’ve tried to avoid the vocabulary that normally surrounds cyberpunk. As mentioned above, cyberpunk needs not be dystopian, for example. In fact, because of its focus on the resilience of human relationships, cyberpunk is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but brutally realistic. If that realism is often read as dystopic, that is more a commentary on the nature of humanity.
Nor does cyberpunk have to be set in a city, or under neon lights, or wearing sunglasses, or in the rain, or (god forbid) in a trench coat. These tropes demonstrate the lingering appeal of the aesthetic that stemmed from cyberpunk but have little to do with its underpinning themes. Indeed, some of the most spectacularly non-cyberpunk works can masquerade as cyberpunk. The presence of a parsley garnish does not mean there’s a steak beneath.
The last word commonly applied to cyberpunk is noir, and there is much merit to it. Unfortunately, in noir, we find a genre that is somehow even more commonly misinterpreted, misapplied, and confused with an aesthetic than cyberpunk itself. Noir is, like cyberpunk, about human relationships, whether the protagonist’s troubled relationship with their own identity (Dark Passage, 1947) or their conflict with a claustrophobic broader society (Chinatown, 1974). There is even a McLuhan-esque technological change at the center of most noir stories: the modern industrial city and its resultant impact on the pace, the scale, and the pattern of human affairs. Cyberpunk as science fiction noir can be a fairly apt description, but only when used in the thematic sense. It is, however, too often applied in the sense of “two genres that both feature rain and trench coats,” which is why I have strenuously avoided “noir” here.
Since cyberpunk is posited in this collection as the speculative examination of technology on human affairs, The Big Book of Cyberpunk is structured to examine the genre along the dimensions upon which those affairs exist: self, society, culture, and challenge. These sections also nod to McLuhan’s concept of the “global village”—a world in which media and technology has made the pace and the scale of human affairs instantaneous and global. This global village, for better or for worse, is a world that McLuhan envisioned, that cyberpunk speculated upon, and in which we now live.
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