Slashdot Log In
Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto
from the future-of-science-fiction dept.
Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto
by Lawrence Person
"Critics, myself included, persist in label-mongering, despite all warnings; we must, because it's a valid source of insight-as well as great fun."
- Bruce Sterling, from the introduction to Mirrorshades
Bud, from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, is a classic cyberpunk protagonist. An aggressive, black-leather clad criminal loner with cybernetic body augmentations (including a neurolinked skull gun), Bud makes his living first as a drug runner's decoy, then by terrorizing tourists for money.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining why his ass gets wasted on page 37 of a 455 page novel.
Welcome to the postcyberpunk era.
Arguably, science fiction entered the postcyberpunk era in 1988 with the publication of Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net. Just as Sterling's The Artificial Kid encapsulated many of cyber-punk's themes before the movement had a name, Islands in the Net prefigured a growing body of work that can (at least until someone comes up with a better name) be labeled postcyberpunk. But to understand postcyberpunk, it's important to distinguish what cyberpunk was (and wasn't) about.
Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datsphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body. William Gibson's Neuromancer is, of course, the archetypal cyberpunk work, and this (along with early Gibson short fiction like "Johnny Mnemonic" and "Burning Chrome," The Artificial Kid, and the odd John Shirley work) is whence the "high tech/low life" cliché about cyberpunk and its imitators came.
The black-leather-and-chrome surface gloss was in large measure what attracted media attention, but isn't what made cyberpunk the most important science fiction literary movement since the New Wave. Cyberpunk's lasting impact came not from the milieu's details, but the method of their deployment, the immersive worldbuilding technique that gave it such a revelatory quality (what John Clute, speaking of Pat Cadigan, called "the burning presence of the future"). Cyberpunk realized that the old SF stricture of "alter only one thing and see what happens" was hopelessly outdated, a doctrine rendered irrelevant by the furious pace of late 20th century technological change. The future isn't "just one damn thing after another," it's every damn thing all at the same time. Cyberpunk not only realized this truth, but embraced it. To paraphrase Chairman Bruce, cyberpunk carried technological extrapolation into the fabric of everyday life.
The best of cyberpunk conveyed huge cognitive loads about the future by depicting (in best "show, don't tell" fashion) the interaction of its characters with the quotidian minutia of their environment. In the way they interacted with their clothes, their furniture, their decks and spex, cyberpunk characters told you more about the society they lived in than "classic" SF stories did through their interaction with robots and rocketships.
Postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world-building technique, but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future. Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs). They live in futures that are not necessarily dystopic (indeed, they are often suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant), but their everyday lives are still impacted by rapid technological change and an omnipresent computerized infrastructure.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is perhaps the most popular postcyberpunk novel, though also worthy of consideration are Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net and Holy Fire, Ian McDonald's Necroville (aka Terminal Cafe), Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, Greg Bear's Queen of Angels, Slant, and (parts of) Moving Mars, Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall, some of Greg Egan's work (Egan novels like Permutation City and Diaspora are so wildly extrapolative that it's hard to fit them into any category), and the first hundred pages or so of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi (among others).
Like their cyberpunk forebears, postcyberpunk works immerse the reader in richly detailed and skillfully nuanced futures, but ones whose characters and settings frequently hail from, for lack of a better term, the middle class. (And we do need a better term; here in the United States, economic mobility has rendered the concept of "class" nearly obsolete.) Postcyberpunk characters frequently have families, and sometimes even children. (Children, rather than plucky, hyperintelligent, and misunderstood teenage protagonists, being creatures all too lacking in most science fiction.) They're anchored in their society rather than adrift in it. They have careers, friends, obligations, responsibilities, and all the trappings of an "ordinary" life. Or, to put it another way, their social landscape is often as detailed and nuanced as the technological one.
Cyberpunk characters frequently seek to topple or exploit corrupt social orders. Postcyberpunk characters tend to seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one. In cyberpunk, technology facilitates alienation from society. In postcyberpunk, technology is society. Technology is what the characters breathe, eat, and live in (in the case of Walter Jon William's Aristoi or Greg Egan's Diaspora, live in the literal sense of the word, with their selves (in part or in toto) immersed in the datasphere). Postcyberpunk characters dwell in what Sterling has dubbed "permanent technological revolution" even as we do today.
Cyberpunk tended to be cold, detached and alienated. Postcyberpunk tends to be warm, involved, and connected. (A nod here to Paul di Filippo's half-serious "Ribofunk" manifesto.) Cyberpunk tended toward the grim, while postcyberpunk is frequently quite funny (parts of The Diamond Age shine most brightly in this respect, as do Ken MacLeod's works.) It could even be argued that postcyberpunk represents a fusion of the cyberpunk/humanist schism of the 1980s, but: A.) I'm happy leave that particular can of worms to braver (or more foolhardy) souls, and B.) Though many a cyber-punk's work has become more humanized, the reverse doesn't seem to be true (John Kessel's recapitulation of Shiner & Sterling's "Mozart in Mirrorshades" in Corrupting Dr. Nice notwithstanding).
It may have been Isaac Asimov (though I first heard it via Howard Waldrop) who said there were three orders of science fiction, using the automobile as an example. Man invents the automobile and uses it to chase down the villain: adventure fiction. Man invents the automobile, and a few years later there are traffic jams: social problem fiction. In the third type, man invents the automobile, and another man invents moving pictures: fifty years later, people go to drive-in movies. It is this third order of fiction, social fabric fiction, that was at the heart of cyberpunk. Yet many a cyberpunk tale used classic plot devices (plucky young rebels topple decaying social order, etc.) to explore such issues. The best postcyberpunk moves further into third-order science fiction, the plot arising organically from the world it's set in.
Gardner Dozois's influential 1970s essay "Living the Future: You Are What You Eat" made this very point, noting that future societies should be depicted as "a real, self-consistent, organic thing." The postcyberpunk viewpoint is not outside the fishbowl looking in, but inside the fishbowl looking around. As a result, postcyberpunk frequently skirts the edge of what can be described in late 20th century English, be it the representation of data in fourth-dimensional Pikeover space in Slant to the intelligence-enhancing something that Maya realizes she's too old to embrace in Holy Fire.
Finally, there is the inevitable issue of generational relevance. Yes, cyberpunk was about the early 1980s, while postcyberpunk is about the 1990s, and cyberpunk was largely written by people in their 20s and 30s, postcyberpunk by people in their late 30s and early 40s. But another factor is at work. Many writers who grew up reading in the 1980s are just now starting to have their stories and novels published. To them cyberpunk was not a revolution or alien philosophy invading SF, but rather just another flavor of SF. Like the writers of the 1970s and 80s who assimilated the New Wave's classics and stylistic techniques without necessarily knowing or even caring about the manifestos and ideologies that birthed them, today's new writers might very well have read Neuromancer back to back with Asimov's Foundation, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, and Larry Niven's Ringworld and seen not discontinuities but a continuum. They may see postcyberpunk not only as the natural language to describe the future, but the only adequate way to start extrapolating from the present.
Answers to the inevitable questions: Is postcyberpunk a movement? No. Aren't there cyberpunk or postcyberpunk works that don't fit these definitions? Yes. Sterling's Schismatrix and his other Shaper/Mechanist stories tend to defy this schema (though it becomes more applicable if you consider "Moving in Clades," the last third of Schismatrix, as postcyberpunk), and Cadigan seems to have run the sequence in reverse. Aren't there many newer writers (Jack Womack, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Linda Nagata, Nicola Griffith, etc.) whose work might be labeled postcyberpunk but which you haven't gotten around to reading yet? ?Tis true. Mea culpa. Aren't there books that came out in the 1990s that look like postcyberpunk that don't fit your definitions? Alexander Jablokov's Nimbus, Paul J. McAuley's Fairyland, and, of course, Stephenson's Snow Crash, all defy this taxonomy, or else must be regarded as mutant hybrids or late arriving "classic" cyberpunk. Aren't these definitions rather hard and fast? Not only that, they're ham-handed, Procrustean, and will probably look misguided in many particulars a decade or so hence. Yet postcyberpunk is a very real, and very vital, part of the modern science fiction landscape. Necroville, Slant, and Holy Fire, for all their differences, have far more in common with each other than they do with most works of modern science fiction as a whole, or even with other books in the 10% of SF that isn't crap.
Of all the mutant strains currently percolating through the science fiction body politic, postcyberpunk is the one best suited to explore themes related to world of accelerating technological innovation and ever-increasing complexity in ways relevant to our everyday lives without losing the "sense of wonder" that characterizes science fiction at its best. This is not to say that postcyberpunk is the only game in town; science fiction writers like Octavia Butler, Stephen Baxter, and Jack McDevitt (to name but three) are all doing good work outside its boundaries. But postcyberpunk is the most important game in town, and the one best suited for honing the genre's cutting edge.
Lawrence Person is a science fiction writer and editor in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in (among others) Asimov's, Analog, Reason, National Review, Liberty, and SF Eye. He currently runs the latest incarnation of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop with Bruce Sterling, and edits the Hugo-nominated small press SF magazine Nova Express .All Slashdot feature and review contributors now get *free Slashdot t-shirts* from Copyleft. Lawrence, to get yours please send your mailing/shipping address and shirt size (along with this article's URL to jog my memory) to roblimo.nojunk@slashdot.org, minus the spambot-defeating "nojunk."
And while we are on the topic (Score:3)
Had the genre down cold in THE 60's and EARLY 70's
Its sad when the sights fall short of insight into ones own favorite topics. Gibsons stuff is great and good, but it is continuations of themes rooted firly rooted Before his typewriter clacked on about the sprawl.
Also , lest we forget, lets remeber who BUTCHERED and MADE CRAP his own great work of Johny Mnemonic? Twasnt Hollywood, was the author himself.
All of which is a way of saying, beyond the post pre ant pro meaningless jangle of jaws is the fact that most genres are born years before they are given a name by the pundints.
Honor the good stuff and, as the wise sage Flavor Flav says, dont belive the hype. Lables constrain, confine and make a camp concentration of otherwise great ideas.
this message brought to you by the "Anarchists Unite Society...We Bring UNruly Things to Right(tm)
What about "Earth" by David Brin (Score:3)
The novel tells the stories of a number of characters, including a top scientist, a female shuttle pilot, an environmental activist and her rebelliously straight daughter, and four middle class kids who start by barely avoiding dropping out of Dan Quayle High School. The characters are well drawn, but they are really just the vehicle for an exploration of Earth in the mid twenty-first century.
In the afterword Brin discusses the cliches of cyberpunk and rejects them as plausible futures. Instead he has tried to take the same massively changed world that cyberpunk has, but leaven it with more rational extrapolation. The result is very convincing. Back in 94 I was trying to explain to management what the Internet was and what it could become. I told them that the best predictions I had found were "Islands In The Net" and "Earth".
Paul.
Post-cpunk also = "Technologically savvy cpunk" (Score:3)
But there's another element that defines postcpunk fiction: a technological grounding.
The cyberpunk classics, with the exception of Rucker's work, were written by nontechnological personnel. The computer stuff, cyberspace, black ice, etc, were metaphors for modern communications infrastructure: network TV, telephones. Gibson's confessions about his nontechnical status (he typed Neuromancer on a manual typewriter and didn't know what the floppy drive was on his MacPlus) are now legendary.
With the advent of programmer/writers like Stephenson and the new, improved self-trained techno Sterling, we're seeing credible SF written about computers, cyberspace and cracking.
Gibson's work is just as smart and sexy as ever, but it's dating rather quickly. Viz Idoru, in which the plotline revolves around a mystical, drug-inspired ability to make oracular predictions based on playing with a browser. Gibson still isn't into technology, and it shows.
The New Wave of sf was often about writing sf where the science was bent to tell the story (in contrast with hard sf, where the story is constructed around a scientific conceit). Cyberpunk is often considered antithetical to New Wave in that it is "post-humanist" -- stories about social constructs without much regard for believable characters.
Post-cyberpunk sf is technologically literate, and grounded in the science of the day (it's received wisdom that the 'Net is to the 90s what rocketry was to the 50s). It is also very humanist, even sentimental: Cryptonomicon, in particular, was as maudlin as any John Varley story. In this way, it is a return to pre-cyberpunk sf: the golden age hard stuff blended with the New Wave humanism and style.
Perhaps Post-cyberpunk sf doesn't have anything to do with cyberpunk in any literary sense. If you believe that the modern Internet evolved from the technological vision of cyberpunk, and that the postcpunk writers are Internet savvy, then perhaps their debt to cyberpunk isn't literary, but technological: cyberpunk gave rise to the real-world technologies that postcpunk writers dote on.
post this (Score:3)
In order for something to be post-something-else, I'd say it has to be both unimaginable without Whatever it's post-ing, and so foreign to Whatever, that practitioners and diehard fans of Whatever will consider it totally shitty in comparison. (Nice sentence, eh?)
Here's an example: Joyce's *Ulysses* is widely agreed to be exemplary of "modernism," and Mark Leyner's *My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist* is, whatever other insults you feel like hurling at it, a famous example of the "postmodern." You think James Joyce would like the look of his heir? Hardly. Does anyone you know who celebrates every Bloomsday also enthuse about the grandness of Leyner? Probably not. But if it weren't for Joyce's example in the artfully-recombined-doody-makes-great-literature department, *My Cousin* would be as tedious and pretentious as anything by John Barth or David Foster Wallace.
In fact, I think Leyner's peak stuff from a decade or so ago would be a better candidate for "post-cyberpunk" enshrinement than any of the works mentioned above (by the unimaginable-without-X/mostly-hated-by-X standard). (But then again, he wrote my sig for me, so....)
And there's a thing in a Derrida book about some prank calls he got from Heidegger's ghost that I should probably use to bolster my argument, but the book's, like, nine feet from my chair, and I'm feelin' kinda post-cogent today, so f it.
Cyberpunk in continuity (Score:3)
One of the points brought up in Person's article, that cyberpunk marked a shift in scifi mentality away from the "change one thing and see what happens" towards a world-building model, is not born out by the history. Just looking at a few classics, from Ender's Game to Stranger in a Strange Land to even the Foundation series, writers had been creating entire universes just as complex and varied as the world of Neuromancer or Snow Crash.
What separates these earlier worlds from early cyberpunk(with it's high water mark of Neuromancer), is their generally cheery view of the world. This is not the case to the same extent with Ender's Game, but the case very well could be made that, at least under Person's definitions, Ender's Game is a sort of proto-cyberpunk.
One of the main distinctions Person makes between cyberpunk and postcyberpunk is the corresponding world-views of the two subgenres. Postcyberpunk, just like the post-Cold War era into which it is written, has a rosier view of humanity, and of humanity's eventual perfectability(even if that eventual perfectability doesn't look precisely human(this is scifi, after all)), contrasting to the late Cold War mentality that the world is on it's way down; while technology gets increasingly spiffy, it's not making the world a better place.
Postcyberpunk is a return to an earlier, and much larger theme in science fiction: the future is going to be better than the past. Earlier Cyberpunk is the anomaly.
Economic mobility has created a classless society? (Score:4)
To say the US is largely a classless society is so crazy. My girlfriend teaches in a school where most of the kids can't identify unique letters of alphabet at the end of grade two! These kids will never see the economic mobility the author is referring to.
Let's not mention the fact that these kids don't access to key services that other countries would consider a necessity, like 1st-rate health care, public safety, etc. These are all things that those of us in the "middle class" largely take for granted.
Then there's the upper class, the top 1% of our society that now have significantly more collective wealth than the remaining 99% of our society.
This is a classless society?