RIP Cyberpunk: 1977-1994

Cyberpunk is dead. What replaced it?

I’ve been mixing up my reading lately, John LeCarré spy novels and Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies, interleaved with science fiction works. And as happens once or twice a year, I’ve wanted to get some new cyberpunk in my system.

The two books I’ve read recently were 2017’s Void Star by Zachary Mason, and the classic Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott, from 1994.

It’s quite a contrast.

Void Star is relatively new, but very much reminiscent of mid-period William Gibson – let’s say from Count Zero through the Bridge Trilogy – not just in its structure and themes, but in its deployment of an actual writing style that’s more than just pulp action scenes and character beats. And that’s interesting! How many authors actually picked up on the literary style of Gibson?

(Sadly, Mason is also one of those guys who insists he isn’t writing science fiction because “genre fiction isn’t very good.” The Emily St. John Mandel blurb on the cover of Void Star should have been a tip off. Sorry, Zachary, you write about memory implants and AIs, you’re down here in the mud with the rest of us nerds, them’s the rules!)

Mason may deny it, but his book has the entire 40-year history of cyberpunk at its back. More than that, he’s working with a knowledge of what it’s like to be alive, to have lived for decades, in a world where computers and their networks are a major part of life.

Trouble and Her Friends, 23 years older, is an animal of an entirely different order.

I’m a little less than halfway through Trouble, but I’m enjoying it. Scott’s book is one of the first major queer works of cyberpunk¹ – nearly all the key characters are gay – but more than that, it’s charting its own course stylistically. If you think of some of the other major cyberpunk writers of the 1980s and 1990s, there’s a lot of different literary stuff going on. Pat Cadigan aimed to gut you emotionally. Gibson was influenced by Burroughs and Samuel Delany and noir. Bruce Sterling writes as though he, and all his characters, are on a 72-hour caffeine jag. Neal Stephenson’s works are arch and effusive, and you can never quite pin down the boundary between the sincere and the satirical.

Scott writes in a mode that manages to be a little gritty, a little dystopian, but far from over the top – kitchen sink cyberpunk. Her world feels lived in and does expertly that mingling of the familiar and strange. It’s a place where you can imagine someone brushing their teeth and feeding the cat before jacking their brain into the internet.

Trouble and Her Friends

Speaking of the internet, I don’t think that word has appeared once so far in Trouble. I don’t think it will.

Trouble and Her Friends might actually be one of the last real cyberpunk books.

It was published in 1994, the same year that these newfangled “websites” first became available for use by the general public. Of course, it would be a couple of years, and about a billion AOL free trial disks shoved into your mailbox, before most people began to regularly use even email, much less visited websites regularly.

Before 1994, the shape of the web was uncertain. Usenet and BBSs and France’s Minitel were the most common public-facing aspects, as well as corporate and university email systems.

No one actually knew what the internet was going to be like.

So authors just made stuff up.

Cyberpunk novels from before 1994 have wildly varying ideas. Gibson’s Sprawl novels picture people immersing their whole sensoriums into cyberspace, where they’d find “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” Cadigan’s early stories imagined brain uploading, or the ability to delve into people’s dreams and subconscious, the internet less important than the ability to connect mind-to-mind. Sterling’s Heavy Weather, published the same year as Trouble, sees people using clunky VR headsets and gloves and carting around downloaded copies of the Library of Congress. Stephenson’s Snow Crash seems most prophetic, if only because there’ve been multiple attempts to instantiate ideas from it (Second Life, Google Earth, the "Metaverse”), but he also imagined VR and a digital world you navigate by actually moving around like a video game avatar.

They’re all wrong to different degrees, although “wrong” isn’t a really applicable term, because the job of science fiction writers isn’t to predict the future blah blah blah you know the drill.

Trouble and her Friends is no different. There are two kinds of brain-to-net interface, one of which provides full sensory immersion (and is illegal). But most fascinating is how, like a lot of these early works, Scott imagines the internet being a place that’s still a sort of distant tool, clunky and technical, a limited resource. Sure, there are artists and office workers who use it (and she’s perceptive in imagining how specialized printers would connect to the digital world) but for the most part, her view of the internet is still a sort of outlaw place, haunted by petty crooks and tech nerds, with the authorities coming in for heavy-handed crackdowns on the new digital “frontier.”

Given its publication date, Trouble was most likely written in 1992 or 1993. Within two years of its publication, it already would have looked out of date and peculiar.

Which I think makes it a good candidate for one of the last cyberpunk books ever written.

If you have to mark a divide in the history of cyberpunk, the advent of the world wide web is a good one. Before this, writers had to scrape up impressions from BBSs, early chat groups, and video arcades, and project forward. After 1994, after the web, they were building on a solid existing foundation. They weren’t trying to hallucinate the future, they were living in it.

There are other comparable divisions in SFF history – space fiction written before and after Sputnik, Gagarin, and the moon landing in particular – but the rise of the web-based internet, followed by smartphones, are the most recent.

So… if the rise of the web marks the death of cyberpunk (as I’d argue) what has everyone been writing since then? What the heck are the stories I’ve been writing that I’ve described as cyberpunk?²

A zombie genre?

I’ve spent a lot of time (probably more than is healthy) thinking about how genres and subgenres are born and how they die. But what makes a subgenre, anyway?

Well, in a lot of ways, it’s just accidents and marketing.

With cyberpunk, it had a snazzy name, courtesy of author Bruce Bethke and popularized by the late, great editor Gardner Dozois.

It also has a real origin (late 1970s/early 1980s, mostly in short stories, with heavy influence from previous SF authors ranging from James Tiptree Jr. to Samuel R. Delany to Alfred Bester) and a fake origin perpetrated by people who don’t know better (William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, written after he’d already firmed up his Sprawl universe in stories like Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome.).

And as I’ve argued (many, many times, I’m sorry if you’re sick of this) by the late 1980s/early 1990s, cyberpunk as a subgenre was already largely dead. It had been strip-mined for tropes and was being smothered under the weight of cheap, shoddy imitators who picked up on the most superficial details used by Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, and others.

Those original cyberpunk writers kept working and evolving, sometimes leaving the genre proper behind altogether, and there were others who pushed forward and picked up on what was actually interesting in those early books and stories, and headed out into new territory.

When I think of books that are the true descendants of what was once, briefly simply called The Movement, almost none of them would be recognizable as cyberpunk.

The nanopunk boom was driven by Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Queen of Angels, by Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz, and by Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. UK authors like Paul McAuley and Ian McDonald kept the wild, imaginative spirit of cyberpunk going while avoiding a lot of its most hackneyed tropes in books like Fairlyand and Terminal Café. Brain-machine interfaces and virtual worlds were taken to their logical conclusions in far-future interplanetary fiction by Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide) and Walter Jon Williams (Aristoi³).

So if nothing since 1994 has been “real” cyberpunk, what is all this stuff that claims its mantle?

Well, it’s science fiction.

Over at the Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan sometimes likes to aver that space opera is the core of science fiction.⁴ I'd disagree, respectfully. If space opera holds a key place in the genre, there is at least one other major challenger for for the core of science fiction, and that's near-future SF.

Vast swathes of the genre, from its inception to the present, are simply stories set somewhere within the next 100 years, featuring extrapolations from current technology, politics, and culture. It can be among the most subversive and strange science fiction, it ranges from pulp adventure to slice of life, from goofy humour to subtle tragedy. In includes multiple other genres and would-be genres, with most of cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, solarpunk, cli-fi, mundane and humanist science fiction falling within its orbit. It’s such a big category that, unlike space opera, it’s never been amenable to being pinned down by a catchy name.

The truth about cyberpunk is that it was a slice of near-future SF, one that focused on a particular imminent technological development (mostly computer networks) during a time when that change was looming and obvious (like the idea of a moon landing in 1957), but had not yet come to fruition.

Now that it has, what we call cyberpunk is either work that focuses on the development of computers and human-machine interfaces and networks, and how they might change our world further – Malka Older’s Infomocracy trilogy and Madeleine Ashby’s Company Town come to mind – or, on the other hand, stuff that continues to simply regurgitate the mirror-shades-and-neon-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy aesthetic derived from the Sprawl novels and stories. We keep calling this stuff cyberpunk, because “shitty derivative trash sci-fi” takes too long to say.⁵

I don’t expect “cyberpunk” as a name to actually die any time soon; it’s too embedded, and it remains a useful marketing tool to make a particular novel stand out, even if only a little bit.

It’s become a truism to say that we live in a cyberpunk present now, but we don’t. Cyberpunk was about that white-hot moment when sci-fi writers knew, with the certainty of a mad prophet, that computers and networks were about to change everything. That moment of possibility, when a near infinite number of cyberpunk futures could have flown up like sparks from the burning edge of the present, is over.

What we have now is no less a fruitful present for extrapolating into the near future. But it’s not the same. We have to write from the reality we know, now.

Obligatory self-promotion

Eh, still nothing. I’ve been submitting a fair number of short stories, and a couple of them don’t suck, so who knows, maybe I’ll be able to post something here later this year.

As someone who writes science fiction for fun and (alleged) profit, you can probably also hire me to write about science fiction for comically small sums of money! Email me at ouranosaurus [at] gmail.com if you want me to blather professionally.

Remember, never like or subscribe to this or any other newsletter! Don’t tell your friends! Monica from Kapuskasing told her friends about Unsettling Futures, and she was came down with a bad case of morgellons and her bichon frisé went bald!

1. There was a fairly steady, if not broad, stream of LGBTQ science fiction in the 1990s, with Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite (1992) and Slow River (1995) and Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996), and Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang (1992), and that’s just off the top of my head. It’s nothing compared to what’s published now, but it’s worth noting that the 1990s saw the first big expansion of queer SFF since the feminist wave of the 1970s.

2. Well, biopunk.

3. Aristoi is one of those books that does so many interesting and weird things that I’m shocked it’s not considered more of a classic. I suspect the double-column writing format in large parts of it put off too many readers. But you should check it out! (Also, the main character is bisexual, so add it to the list above.)

4. Who am I to deny anyone their genre hobbyhorses? I’ve been riding my own here all day.

5. As usual, TV Tropes is helpful.