“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters.”
– Bruce Sterling
Science fiction is new. Barely over a hundred years old or perhaps three thousand if you include the Epic of Gilgamesh. Or perhaps forty billion if you subscribe to the admittedly tenuous tenets of Jediism.
Regardless, the early iterations of science-fiction literature, in the form of H.G Wells or Jules Verne, were set in familiar locales with the unfamiliar phenomenon of invisible individuals or space flight attributed to advances in science. Their literature wasn’t wholly distinct from what came before in style or tone. The genre was born but it was in a fledgling state. It had no distinct aesthetic, no singular ethos or vision.
Next came the Golden Age. Bradbury, Heinlen, Clarke, and Sturgeon. Space Opera, robot insurrections, and ultra-competent spacemen. Some of the writers, namely Bradbury, touched on the present with his commentary on civil rights and the death of independent thought. Others, namely Heinlein, touched on the pressing need for militarized societies in the face of apocalyptic wars against space bugs. And then there was H.P Lovecraft, who remains in a benighted class of his own entirely.
The Golden Age was optimistic, idealistic, and above all straight as an arrow. There was no sex, drugs, or anger. However, it moved science fiction forward in a massive leap through hyperspace and into a galaxy of its own making. No longer could the genre be mistaken for a Victorian adventure serial. It now had its own flavor and distinct layers of thought.
Then the world began to change. And science fiction changed along with it. Optimism- dead, idealism- comatose, hope- never heard from again. Gone were the competent men of the 1950s who solved calamities with a stiff upper lip and entering the scene were the incompetent men and women of sci-fi’s New Wave who solved nothing at all in their overwhelming sense of self-doubt and world-weary cynicism.
It is often said that science fiction is never about the future but is in fact about the present. The New Wave of writers of among others, Philip. K Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Harlan Ellison dragged the misery of the present into their imagined futures. Endless wars, drug epidemics, and the specter of nuclear devastation. Their characters cursed, murdered, despised themselves, and eschewed the constraints of linearity. Their plots were non-existent or completely incomprehensible.
Ninety-five years before the prescribed setting of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, an adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, retitled Blade Runner was released. It was a detective tale, a noir, set in the neon-drenched streets of a future Los Angeles. The aesthetics of the film created an entire subset of science fiction- cyberpunk. It’s familiar to us today. The eternally dark city, rain-soaked with kanji reflecting off puddles of acid rain. Cityscapes dominated by the towers of mega-corporations and the slums below where body-augmentation and scrappy high-tech reign.
Two years after Blade Runner, William Gibson, inspired by his sojourns in Hong Kong and Tokyo published Neuromancer, the literary godfather of cyberpunk. It too reflected the growing anxiety surrounding Asia’s economic ascendancy and the proliferation of multinational conglomerates. Cyberpunk is dystopian but the threat of a malevolent government is replaced by the opaque shadow of all-powerful mega-corporations.
Blade Runner opens with a human eyeball staring into the camera. A lidless eyeball that is a physical manifestation of constant surveillance, of the sense that somewhere in the shadows, there is always someone watching.
In the 80s cyberpunk was fresh. It was hated, mocked, derided. It was angry, dark, and hopeless. It invented jargon and cracked the edges of prose. It exploded off the page in ones and zeroes. It foresaw the Internet and the interlocking webs of free trade zones.
Its protagonists were beaten down and mired in the crap of society. They were “punks” but with a cyber twist. They injected computer nodes instead of heroin, they stole intellectual property instead of petroleum. They sipped lithium on stopovers in between the sprawl of mega-cities, they slept in coin-rented capsule hotels ‘stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth’ perched on the periphery of intergalactic airports. They were on the Edge.
The genre has since exploded. Ghost in a Shell, The Matrix, Blade Runner 2049 and the list scrolls on and on. Although at this point, the fame of Cyberpunk 2077 supersedes the genre itself and many don’t realize that the game is using a pre-existing term and drawing on a host of influences.
Cyberpunk is still alive. They haven’t killed it yet. It survived because it lost all its meaning. The genre exists solely because of its aesthetic, because we can’t look away from the neon. The economic dominance of Japan has faltered and mega-corporations are no longer a novelty. The original impetus for the genre is no longer relevant. Cyberpunk is now a look, a feeling, a mood. It is one of the few genres that consist entirely of a shared set of ambient markers. A sunless city, dominant corporations, low life, and high tech. There is nothing like it. It was once a warning and now it is an escape. And I love every page of it, every image, every decaying high-rise and burned-out hologram. Every flicker of static as the sky above the port “turns the color of television tuned to a dead channel.”
The Junction Journal 