I wish I could just download directly into your brain an entire history of how the cyberpunk genre started in the 80’s and the slow procession into what its become. I have read an embarrassing amount of sci-fi novels over the course of my life so unfortunately I’ve got some Opinions about cyberpunk as a genre. With the release of cyberpunk 2077, it feels like the perfect moment to weigh in on one of the few subjects I actually feel qualified to comment on. [Almost like how every time there’s news about a Dune movie I feel duty bound to tell everyone who will listen that Frank Herbert was an enormous homophobe who disowned his own son for being gay.]
With cyberpunk being the hot topic lately, I see many people talking about it, and many people, in my opinion, getting some things wrong/confused. I am going to attempt to briefly (lol) describe the arc of the genre from 1980 to today, and then at the end I'm going to use my knowledge of the genre to make some blind predictions about 2077's story, a game I have not played. I am primarily going to be discussing books and short stories, not films or movies. Let us begin.
It speaks volumes and volumes that cyberpunk is seen by some as basically a generic setting these days (and they’re not wrong).
And I LIKE cyberpunk.
But what is and isnt cyberpunk?
How do you define it, and how has that definition changed over time?
How did it become “generic”, and how did it end up with the visual aesthetic it has today?
Why does it seem like it’s the only kind of dystopia people can imagine anymore, to the point where “cyberpunk” and “dystopia” seem almost synonymous?
Is cyberpunk better described as a genre or an aesthetic style?
Well, as is the case with Noir (something many cyberpunk stories borrow heavily from) I think the answer is that it’s complicated and highly arguable. Many times in this post I will ask you to consider if something is cyberpunk, this is mostly rhetorical, but feel free to reply if you want lol. I’m not sure if there’s any 100% correct answer (but I’m going to share with you MY answer).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir#Problems_of_definition
Personally, I will make the case that there was once a time where it existed as a literary genre, but that “cyberpunk”, as it is popularly understood today, is primarily an aesthetic.
But to talk about what cyberpunk IS, let's start with what cyberpunk WAS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
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The term cyberpunk first appeared as the title of a short story written by Bruce Bethke, written in 1980 and published in Amazing Stories in 1983.
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Bethke says he made two lists of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology. He described the idea thus:
>The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly “speaking computer.”
Two important things to note is that the term was coined before first, and then was applied to a body of work that came after it. This is not the case of a descriptive label being invented to apply to something that already existed in some form, the stories came after the word and not the other way around. As luck this label should not be taken to be a definitive description of the genre. Secondly, “punks” was chosen from a list of names for troublemakers. “Punks” was intended more in the sense of a thug or a hooligan than a explicit intended reference to the punk music genre,
The use of the term exploded in popularity by the mid 80’s following the release of Blade Runner and Neuromancer. Bethke argued that the wave of works following Neuromancer should instead be referred to as “Neuromantic” (this time, yes, a sly reference to the “New Romantic” music genre, funnily enough), as they were so heavily and singularly inspired by Neruomancer, but the term never caught on.
Over time, Neuromancer would become the archetype around which this nascent literary genre would come to be understood, and Bladerunner would define cyberpunk’s visual aesthetic in a way that is still immediately apparent today. Unfortunately, the corrosive effect of the pervasiveness of the derivatives of those two works would ultimately spell the doom of the genre. In this post I will be using the term “neuromantic” to differentiate between fiction highly derivative of those works, and the larger cyberpunk genre as a whole, which I will soon give my definition of.
But before I do, let's ponder the boundaries of the genre.
Is Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (1968) cyberpunk? Were it not the source material for Bladerunner, I’m not sure as many would make that claim. Yes, obviously this new “cyberpunk” trend was building on the shoulders of those who had come before, authors who were interested in telling unconventional stories about untraditional characters. But trying to backdate any of these works by calling them “cyberpunk” opens up a can of worms. That applies whether you're trying to backdate the 80’s definition to earlier works, or the modern definition to sci-fi from the 80’s.
Is A Scanner, Darkly (1977) cyberpunk? (100% YES, IMO)
But if that counts then what about some of the rest of PKDs works?
Is Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) cyberpunk?
Is Total Recall (1966) cyberpunk? (And if you say yes, are you just saying that because like Electric Sheep, it was adapted into a film during the time period for which nostalgia of has become inseparable with how we now view cyberpunk?)
Why or why not.
Show your work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej3Szj6WcCY
Is the 1985 film Brazil cyberpunk? (No, IMO, its just a dystopia, because if I say Brazil is cyberpunk then I kind of feel like I’d also have to say A Brave New World (1932) is cyberpunk, and at that point the term would lose all meaning or usefulness.)
Is god danged Metropolis (1927) cyberpunk? (No.)
Is Robocop (1987) cyberpunk? (Yes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yuaUCKFII
Lets discuss a 100% bonafide example of what else was considered cyberpunk in the mid 80’s, that might confound most people’s modern perception of the genre: Mozart In Mirrorshades (1985)
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Here is the full text for Mozart In Mirrorshades. I’m going to recommend you read it because I’ll be referencing it heavily throughout this post, since it is a prime example of something that is definitely classic cyberpunk, but of the non-neuromantic tradition. It’s a short story, so its not a very long read.
https://erenow.net/common/the-best-alternate-history-stories-of-the-20th-century/13.php
To save me the work of summarizing it, here is the wikipedia page, I am going to proceed assuming you've read at least the wikipedia synopsis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_in_Mirrorshades
The setting is an alternate history France circa 1775. There are no implant augmentations, nor any trace of transhumanism. There's no brutalist megalopolis. A man from the future fucks Marie Antoinette because he can. Marie Antoinette fucks a man from the future to try to get a green card that will let her escape her timeline. The future timeline is extracting material resources from the past, and simultaneously the presence of their technology/culture (most relevantly radios and modern music) is having its own effect on the past. A teenage Mozart starts writing modern rock music that becomes very popular in the “realtime” timeline. There are no computers. There is no cyberspace. There is no cyber anything.
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Soon, native relations with the future start to break down, and the company employees withdraw to their primary base and oil refinery, where they have their time portal. Someone realizes that Mozart has incited this unrest, and threatens to kill Mozart. A company propaganda officer immediately and casually kills them
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…explaining that he could not risk anything happening to Mozart, whose music has reached number five on the Billboard charts. Rice becomes angry and shouts at Mozart that he can not use people like that, and that Realtime will punish him when they find out what he did. Parker considers this amusing, saying “We're talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery.”
The story ends with them escaping into “realtime”, abandoning the past timeline due to its successful revolution against the company.
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There are parts of “Mozart in Mirrorshades that are intentionally silly. Coauthor Bruce Sterling described it as "aggressive political satire". But at its heart lies a very clear political message that it’s trying to convey. It abstracts a serious message about colonialism by inventing a self-knowingly ridiculous past where “Napoleon chews Double Bubble”. The satirical elements kind of defang the depiction of the serious issue of colonialism, but thats fine, at least a message is still in there.,
Someone reading this for the first time in 2020 may wonder, “How it this cyberpunk?”
What definition of cyberpunk could include both the very serious high-tech Neuromancer and this satirical time travel story about an alternate history France?
Here is the definition of cyberpunk that I would like to suggest, it contains only one criteria:
**Cyberpunk is science fiction that imagines “late capitalism”.**
(Important caveat: This definition does not map well onto Japanese cyberpunk. Japanese cyberpunk is its own thing. It developed basically independently and has its own legacy, traditions, and themes. Japanese cyberpunk is outside the scope of this post, but if someone else wants to try to explain the background there, I’d be interested in reading that.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cyberpunk
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Late capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, is a term first used in print by German economist Werner Sombart around the turn of the 20th century. Since 2016, the term has been used in the United States and Canada to refer to perceived absurdities, contradictions, crises, injustices, and inequality created by modern business development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism
So, for example, I would say that the reason the film Brazil is not cyberpunk is because while it is dystopic, that dystopia is not a capitalist one, but a bureaucratic one.
Cyberpunk contains a lot of exaggeration for effect. Much of the hypercapitalism you see depicted in it stems from concerns/observations of a rightward shift both America and the UK we’re experiencing in the 80’s. This kind of story (for some crazy reason) struck something that appealed to people at the time (and continues to appeal to people today). It was addressing something a lot of people were feeling, to the point where it ended up inspiring enough other writers/readers that we ended up with a full fledged genre on our hands.
I we will return to this subject later, but some would argue that sometimes (especially early on in the gerne) what might seem prescient in cyberpunk was just people imagining "What if things got so bad in the future that the stuff that used to only happen to poor people/racial minorities/third world countries started happening to everyone?".
I appreciate the satirical elements of “Mozart In Mirrorshades”, but that’s because it still undergirds a clear message. I believe the Achilles heel of cyberpunk may have been a form of irony poisoning, and if you've read Snow Crash (1992) you might already know where I’m headed with this, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Instead, let's talk about Max Headroom (1985).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZY-yQYVf38
(have you seen this? It’s interesting. Maybe check it out sometime.)
Max Headroom is the first example in this post of a story that was invented to sell something besides itself. It also is the first of a trend I’m going to mention of the world intentionally attempting to make itself more similar to cyberpunk.
Max Headroom (the character) is an AI based off the malfunctioning brain scan of a reporter that was trying to uncover a conspiracy about advertisements that killed their viewers (there are some Network (1976) vibes to its corporate television boardroom drama). Early in 20 Mintues into the Future “blipverts” cause an obese viewer to spontaneosly combust. The character is comedic and the origin story is also billed as a “satire”. This story was concocted to give a background to an “AI'' video DJ for BBC Channel 4, and his popularity and cultural relevance would soon far outshine his origin story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom:_20_Minutes_into_the_Future
Max was a hit, and would later go on to be a talk show host, and the spokesman for the “New Coke” advertising campaign. The former is an enjoyable cultural artifact worth checking out (sort of a proto-Space Ghost, they def make a lot of jokes I don't think you could get away with today, if you watch the whole season (Specifically, I’m recommending watching The Original Max Talking Headroom Show, The six-part american spin off that aired between July 1987 and October 1987, coinciding with the airing of the second season of the Max Headroom TV series. All six episodes are on youtube) you will see a lot of very young familiar faces) if you want to see where comedian Jim Carrey picked up a lot of his schtick, the latter gives me insane cognitive dissonance if I think about it too long. You know, since his character’s introduction was about lethal advertisements. And then he went on to shill coke. But I guess that's why they so clearly labeled his origin story as a “satire”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Max_Headroom_Show
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF9XGtPhWLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eALApoO4ikE
A Max Headroom For President movie was considered but never realized, and even in 20 Minutes Into The Future a character comments on how convenient it would be if you could run all your politicians on a box. You can find an echo of that idea in the Black Mirror episode “The Waldo Moment”, and (forgive me, let me have just this one) [the Biden campaign. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA8cxc37HN4)
https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-history-80s-cyberpunk-interview
And on that note we are again moving on.
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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Flanderization
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The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character. Most always, the trait/action becomes completely outlandish and it becomes their defining characteristic. Sitcoms and Sitcom characters are particularly susceptible to this, as are peripheral characters in shows with long runs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5pqJaIeCk
(when ya’ll kept saying “”cyberpunk far cry” in the other thread this is all I could think of)
By the early 90’s the elements of cyberpunk that had been heavily inspired by Neruomancer/Bladerunner had become so over cliche that it began to inspire satire of itself. Bethke (who, if you remember, coined the term cyberpunk in 1980, but suggested the alternative term “Neuromantic” to describe things heavily derivative of Neuromancer) wrote Headcrash (1995) as a scathing satirical (of course) takedown of the genre.
Headcrash stood on the shoulders of the much more well known Snow Crash (1992), which, if you haven't read it you may not be aware, stars a samurai sword wielding pizza delivery driver literally named “Hiro Protagonist” who saves the world. Hiro works for a mob operated pizza chain that will kill him if he doesn't make his deliveries on time. Snow Crash, like some of Stephenson’s work, is not as interested in having any sort of real political message, and is instead happy to use this cartoon version of cyberpunk as a setting for an action packed adventure that explores some specific technological and linguistic ideas. And that's fine!
But Headcrash. Please read this whole 1997 review. Which describes Headcrash as “the final nail in the coffin of cyberpunk” and makes it very apparent that to people Paying Attention And In The Know, what cyberpunk had become was already an embarrassment, over 20 years ago.
https://wc.arizona.edu/papers/91/32/13_1_m.html
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While the plot of Headcrash is engaging, the main joy is the digs that Bethke gets in at the now-tired cyberpunk genre. Perusing a hall of chat rooms dedicated to fans of liquid nitrogen (cryopunks), “wankers who are pathologically into code-breaking and math puzzles” (cipherpunks) and fruit-based-beverage brewers (ciderpunks), Jack comes upon a “place full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers‘ basements … They’re total wankers and losers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures. You know, cyberpunks.”
But the damage was done. And as our world continued to become more cyberpunk, “cyberpunk” only became more relevant, and even these attempts at satirizing itself were subsumed into the fabric of the gerne. Out of respect for the man who coined the term, I would like to suggest that 1995 was when cyberpunk died, consumed by the neuromantic sub-genre, which continues to walk around wearing its skin.
I’ve wondered if the introduction of humor/satire (as with Max Headroom) into cyberpunk was a way of undercutting the seriousness of these depictions of late capitalism, to signal to the reader than this all just a very funny joke, and not a problem in search of an answer. The genre over time became a format for many different kinds of tounge in cheekness, partly because the idea of a world ruled by corporations made it a great vehicle for satire of corporations. I don't entirely know what to say or convey about how this genre started from a place of dead seriousness and quickly became a magnet for humor, but I definitely want you to notice. Maybe because (unlike ex. space opera) cyberpunk is basically just an exaggeration of our world, But if you treat a real issue like a joke, you can avoid having to take the issue seriously. People don't wonder how to solve a joke. Or maybe if an author doesn't take the subject of late capitalism seriously, you might look at the exaggerations in cyberpunk, assume you’re looking in a funhouse mirror, and start making silly faces.
[I point to Ready Player One (2011) as an example of something doing completely sincerely what Snow Crash was doing sarcastically. I am entirely certain that Paul Verhoven’s Ready Player One would have been 100x better than Steven Speilberg’s. Perhaps a nightmare about a vision of 2040 where people are STILL obsessed with 80’s cultural bric-a-brac. Ready Player One was a hair's breadth away from being a decent satire OF ITSELF and thats partly what is so frustrating about it. ]
Shadowrun (first edition, 1989) is THE most fully fleshed out cyberpunk universe, and it’s also the setting that, to this day, [most loudly wears its leftist politics on its sleeve](http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/video-games/shadowrun-returns-dragonfall). I’m not convinced those two facts are unrelated. My favorite minute detail in the lore is that they specify the details of the [2001 supreme court case](https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Shiawase_Decision) that established “[corporate extraterritoriality](https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Extraterritoriality)”.
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It’s at this point I want to address something I’ve heard some people say about how “cyberpunk is inherently anti-capitalist/pro-transhumanist”. This might have been MORE true decades ago, but it is certainly not true of the way the genre has exited for the past few decades. Sure, there's a few stand-out examples but I wouldn't call it a defining genre feature, and assigning an ideological angle to what is now a broadly defined aesthetic seems like a bad idea. If cyberpunk can be defined as an imagining of late capitalism, you don’t have to be a leftist to imagine it, but it sure does fucking help your analysis.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department
While many writers in the 80’s chose to address this subject because they were people who had concerns or awareness about the subject, many of the works that followed later were just happy to use the setting and the aesthetic because it was already established, popular, and increasingly relevant. Gibson himself (2020 Gibson, which I think might be very different than 1980’s Gibson, but we’re just about to get to that) describes Neuromancer not as a dystopia but as a “economically naturalistic” projection. The unfortunate truth is that if you’re Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, the cyberpunk genre can be read like an instruction manual (and sometimes it sure does feel like it has been).
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1333522441625239552?s=20
Here’s an insane comparison: just like vaporwave, as the genre grew more popular and attracted more talent trying to imitate it, the values that spawned the genre turned into an aesthetic to be aped. So over time the originating anti-cap influence has been downplayed. If you’d like to know more I’d recommend [Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts (2016)](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/29006193-babbling-corpse)
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https://twitter.com/VitoGesualdi/status/1336903709788307456?s=20
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“great point” is being too generous, but to counteract this argument about law enforcement/establishment protagonists, oftentimes the “punks” they are pursuing are just as much if not more so the “subjects” of the story, even if they are not the main character. (Mozart In Mirrorshades would actually count as an example of this). In fairness, many cyberpunk works do depict the main character as an agent of the establishment charged with upholding the broken order of their society, but obviously real life late capitalism is also full of people compromising their morals in order to survive inside this system. Even in Shadowrun it's very common for runners to be taking jobs from megacorps, even if it's a tenuous relationship and ultimately the hope might be to undermine your employer whenever possible. Also many works have a character start with supporting the system, but have had a change of heart by the end of it, so the reader/player/watcher can experience that awakening.
So, some more open questions before I dive into bullying William Gibson:
Food for thought.
Lets move on again.
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lol, I have broken the board.
The second half will follow below.
