media is easier to classify as its down on paper and is (at least once its been made) stationary. A culture resides in peoples minds and constantly evolves so can only really be difinitavly studied in retrospect.
I beleve that Cyberpunk in its oiginal form is dead mearley because it has been made obsolite by a new form of cyberpunk. As an example: compare bladeruner and the Matrix (which takes so many ideas from cyberpunk and related pholosphy that it cannot be seen as anything but). These two films are very different but show to an extent the evolution of cyberpunk.
As a cultural from it is almost intangable but I beleve is very much alive. ust look around you: The internet (and related industrial networks) is the most important system in the world, everybody has a mobile phone and a computer, man machene interfaces are in development and the young are latching on to this new digital world in droves.
This looks like the new cyberpunk to me, not a bidraggled dystopia like blade runner (yet) but a faster, more efficent, more eco-contious world.

I do not intend to live forever through my work, I intend to live forever by not dieing- Woody Allen

Ok - Let's define it before we kill it

Yelena Virago wrote:

quote:

Which still doesn't answer the question, "What is it?"

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of sf. It's use in the wider media to describe juvenile computer crims (although, admittedly, that was Bruce Bethke's usage, and he coined the term) and their pop-cultural interests was a sloppy expropriation by lazy journalists (forgive the tautology).

Cyberpunk fiction is characterised by its interest in the visceral and intrusive impact of technology on society and the human being. Specifically, cyberpunk investigates the proposition that the nature of humanity and society at any time are largely products of the available technologies.

To be less vague:

Cyberpunk explores five basic themes -

the street-level use of technology developed by higher authorities, particularly the adoption/adaptation of legitimate technology to illicit or anti-nomian uses

the blurring of the distinction between physiology and technology; cyberpunk characters are enhanced or changed by technological methods - surgery, technical prosthetics, drugs - often for purely "cosmetic" or recreational reasons

the immersion of the human mind in media - cyberpunk argues no meaningful distinction between human mentality and other data/software systems. The most obvious trope used is that of virtual reality sensoriums, although the recording of personalities, and media systems based on trading the sense experiences of celebrities are other examples

(from the above, inevitably) artificial intelligence

lastly, cyberpunk fiction pursues a fascination with the diversity of human social systems, particularly as they are expressed through technologies selected by those systems are as best suited to express their culture/politics (the technology/society relationship isn't a one-way street). Cyberpunk protagonists tend to flit from one exotic culture to another in pursuit of their McGuffins, but the fascination is also found in depiction of subcultures, street gangs and organised criminal groupings from local (i.e. local to the protagonist) urban population centres. Cyberpunk also examines the changes in overarching political structures that technological advancement would bring - the usual idea being that business corporations had an edge in developing technology and hence would supplant the nation-state.

This is the essence of cyberpunk. Everything else is cover art.

(assuming I'm not wrong, of course)

Cyberpunk's apparent exclusive concern with the impact of external influences on human behaviour explains the source of hostility from "humanist" sf who still saw character development as central to the literature, and whose protagonists were "people like us". Cyberpunk's answer was that it was (naive? wrong-headed? dull?) to assume that human beings would reach the stars with their own nature unchanged by the tools used to take them there. The universe will not be conquered by space-monkeys.

As for the cover-art - it was the dissemination through pop-culture of the mirrorshades, spiky hair gloss of cyberpunk, while it's essential themes languished, that led to Lewis Shiner declaring the genre dead (12 years ago, I might add), joined shortly in this view by Pat Cadigan and the Most High Spruiker himself, Bruce Sterling. (The Cadigan and Shiner pieces don't seem to be on-line - Sterling's Interzone piece is, quelle surprise.) Sterling argued that Cyberpunk now (then) faces a worse fate than death - respectability.

Forgive my verbosity. I now return you to whatever it is you were talking about.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: RobW,

quote:

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Ok - Let's define it before we kill it

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Well, you know, it's been dead ever since they gave it a name. Defining a cultural movement is the same thing as killing it.

In bed.

quote:

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Originally posted by dpm:
i agree with you about the literary genre, but not about the culture. what 'projects' are doomed to failure? and why baby steps over generations? what whole package? whole cultural groups, clicks, music genres, fashions, scenes and lifestyles come and go in a matter of weeks here in NYC, and all large post-industrial cities. why should cpunk take generations to mature?

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On the contrary, I think NYC and youth culture generally is really not about evolution (ala Yonderboy and the panthermoderns) at all, especially not rapid evolution.

What it is about is giving insecure, emotionally undeveloped teen psyches something they can easily identify and "join". If it wasn't stable, it wouldn't fulfill it's primary funciton: providing comfort zones where people know they will be accepted and can take part in a collective social experience.

C'mon dude, look around.

All the LSE punk rockers are aping Joey and Sid, people who are dead now, and did their respective things thirty five years ago.

Hip Hop? Stuck in a morass of recycled radio bling-bling gansterism, going nowhere for arguable 8 plus years. Dead as Biggie, maybe died with him. And don't talk to me about the coffee shop hippe East Bay underground sound, because it's not blowing up, it's just been sitting there doing nothing for four years.

Electronic? All the really cutting edge shit has been marginalized (jungle, drill and bass, idm) and we're stuck with 102,000 prada v-neck sportitg, champagne sipping, utterly cliche house DJs. even the electroclash kids are biting somehting Afrika Bambaataa et. al. nailed shut in the freakin 80s.

Where are these dandelion "cultures" you speak of, supposedly sprouting through the cracks in the Williamsburg sidewalks? Examples, please. I would like to visit this parallel NYC you inhabit, it sounds more interesting than mine.

Punk is still going and is evolving, athough slowley. Alertative Rock is always on the move (compare the presidents of the united states to the white stripes), although people need confort objects they are still prepared to throw themselves at the newist thing.
These cultures are still there but in a much more scattered form because they do not need to be in dnesley populated areas becase of the internet, just look at this board, it could be called a community (although small and fragmented).

As to cyberpunk, i recently saw a n advert for an australian jewlrey company (i can remember there name) which specialised in stuff that looked oddly like cybernetic implants i.e full cybernetic arms etc. If techno-fetishm is dead why the hell would anybody buy this stuff?

I do not intend to live forever through my work, I intend to live forever by not dieing- Woody Allen

Cyberpunk will never die!

Yes, times they've changed, they've accelerated and literature does not manage to follow their run... but cyberpunk has become a way of life, and thinking.

Future is now, here, outside the door and beyond the display... aren't you a bit distressed?

Not quite dead... afterall, PR did pretty well on the NYT Bestseller list.

Margaret Atwood in the New York Times on her latest novel 'Orxy & Crake', which I think falls right in the soft side of Cyberpunk:

Fantasy, she said, is "largely mythic and Celtic in inspiration" and deals with "dragons, magic swords and chalices that glow in the sky." She offered "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Harry Potter" series as examples. Science fiction, she said, deals with "technologies we don't yet have, other universes," as in "Star Trek" and "Star Wars."

In contrast, speculative fiction is "this planet," she said. It doesn't use things we don't already have or are not already developing. `Beam me up, Scotty' is not speculative fiction. We don't yet have the ability to disintegrate people and have them reassembled in some other place."

but speculative fiction dosnt just cover cyberpunk but also covers alternative history 'what if' storys such as Harry Tturledoves world war series

I do not intend to live forever through my work, I intend to live forever by not dieing- Woody Allen

[QUOTE]Originally posted by jandzero:
Not quite dead... afterall, PR did pretty well on the NYT Bestseller list.

Margaret Atwood in the New York Times on her latest novel 'Orxy & Crake', which I think falls right in the soft side of Cyberpunk:

Fantasy, she said, is "largely mythic and Celtic in inspiration" and deals with "dragons, magic swords and chalices that glow in the sky." She offered "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Harry Potter" series as examples. Science fiction, she said, deals with "technologies we don't yet have, other universes," as in "Star Trek" and "Star Wars."

In contrast, speculative fiction is "this planet," she said. It doesn't use things we don't already have or are not already developing. QUOTE]

I don't consider PR cyberpunk, do you? Really? *Maybe* cyberpunk lite, but that's strectching it.

Also, I think Atwood is on the mark. I've also heard WG describe the Idoru books as transpiring in an "alternate present," which I think states the same concept a different way. Too bad 'Orxy & Crake' was terribly conceived and executed.

Is the combustion engine dead?

No.

Is it likely that anyone will come out with a revolutionary combustion engine?

No. Improvements, yes - new types, yes - revolutionary, no. If it were revolutionary, it would no longer be a combustion engine.

Technology progresses in a burst pattern that quickly saturates, Punc Eek(google). Therefore, any writing sytle and subject based on technology will also progress in a burst pattern that quickly saturates.

Sure the tech is tweaked to its' fullest potential, but until a radically new way of doing the same thing comes along, we basically just keep doing it the same way.

So, Cyberpunk is not dead, it just isn't as exciting as when it first came out. i.e., when computers and the internet first hit the masses. It's saturated. Its been done. You can only make so many western movies before the folks stop coming. Subculture, sure - mass culture, not literature. Movies, maybe. But even Reloaded was considered a bust by many folks I talked to.

There's something in economics called the Elliot Wave. Basically, there is progress and then a lesser retreat, then progress...like the bunny hop. Overall the trend is upward (or downward, think stock market), but its not linear. Its like the tide. It comes in one wave at a time, but only slowly does the tideline creep up the beach.

Eventually, the tide is as high as it can go and reverses course. So, now that cyberpunk writing is well waned, perhaps it will once again rise to greatness and become the talk of the town. But maybe not in our lifetime. Afterall, how many people who wore 40s clothes in the 40s are alive to see the kiddies wearing them again. History repeats, but more often recombinantly and nonlinearly.

Thus, it does not surprise me that WG barely touches on cyberpunk in PR. He wants to be cutting edge. Commercialism is somewhat cutting edge. Cyber is a yawn. After the matrix - what are ya gonna do!

Curious: My guess is that most of the posters to this site are older than 30. An arbitrary cutoff to the cyberpunk generation. Good poll idea.

I tend to think that the question of "what is cyberpunk" is irrelevant, but then I always said that if I ever chose a religion for me, I'd become a Handdara disciple. I believe that the question boils down to who you are, and that, in turn, has been pounded by all kinds of people for thousands of years, one particular example I happen to like to be found in Dharma 101.

Whatever cyberpunk is, it can't be dead, since it never was alive. As long as there's someone reading Neuromancer, author's skill reverberating, creating interference patterns within reader's experience and feelings, that patricular work of fiction is alive. For author himself, the text might be long gone, because it's fixed, and even the brainwave pattern which accompanied it's birth will never be the same, or even close.

/\/\ike

To turn the tables on the topic: When was cyberpunk born. Most people came into contact with it with Blade runnner which is seen as the quintessential Cyberpunk film. But it was based on a book that was written in 1968 by Philip K Dick, indeed a lot of Dicks work seems to follow cyberpunk ideas and ideals such as the march of commercialism (Ubiks pay for absolutly everything hell) and technology superseeding humans (do androids dream of electric sheep?).
I think that litrature does not and should not move like technology especially scince fiction as it is the art of wrightning convincingly about what doesnt yet exist.
So is cyberpunk dead? no and I think that it will experiance a revival (in a slightly different form) soon, especially with the sucsess of the matirx encoureging people to look back into the history of cyberpunk.

I do not intend to live forever through my work, I intend to live forever by not dieing- Woody Allen

quote:

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Originally posted by mbravo:


As long as there's someone reading Neuromancer, author's skill reverberating, creating interference patterns within reader's experience and feelings, that patricular work of fiction is alive. For author himself, the text might be long gone, because it's fixed, and even the brainwave pattern which accompanied it's birth will never be the same, or even close.

/\/\ike

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I think, by "alive," we're talking about it being an aesthetic that people are still using in creating new work. I mean, that's the important part, in terms of evolution.

Plenty of people can speak Latin, read Latin, but ain't a lot of new Latin *words* been eteched into that lexicon in quite a while, you know.

As far as "new work" I really wish someone would pick up the ball and run with it in this new century. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy PR, but it is not cyberpunk. Successful (in terms of accomplishing what it sets out to do, not sales), but not cyberpunk.

quote:

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Originally posted by hughblaze:

Plenty of people can speak Latin, read Latin, but ain't a lot of new Latin *words* been eteched into that lexicon in quite a while, you know.

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So, the question is not that Latin (carrier language) is "alive"; but the works of Latin writers and poets do continue to inspire - even if as a component of classical education.

quote:

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As far as "new work" I really wish someone would pick up the ball and run with it in this new century. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy PR, but it is not cyberpunk. Successful (in terms of accomplishing what it sets out to do, not sales), but not cyberpunk.

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Well, I'm not at all sure that Pattern Recognition, or any other WG book did have something that it set out to do, an agenda or something like it At least it wouldn't fit into my personal perception of their creation process.

And to reiterate - I can't say what is cyberpunk and what isn't - it could be that Pattern Recognition's genre translates as a grandson of cyberpunk. The point is that I probably do not care enough It strums the strings of my soul as surely and in the same unique way as Winter Market, The Belonging Kind or Neuromancer does. I will never be the same person as the one I was before reading this book. This is what matters.

/\/\ike

quote:

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Originally posted by mbravo:



Well, I'm not at all sure that Pattern Recognition, or any other WG book did have something that it set out to do, an agenda or something like it At least it wouldn't fit into my personal perception of their creation process.


/\/\ike

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I disagree. I think any author worth his salt sets out to make a statement about the state of the world, what it is to be a human, or *something*. And I think interviews w/WG I've read support that conclusion about him as an author.

For example, he's said on this site that a science fiction writer only ever *really* writes about the present. And he's said in other interviews that, given the curent atmosphere of hyper-marketization, "intersttitial" or "bohemian" communities can no longer exist, they're too quickly commodified. And if you look at what's going on in PR and ATP, they're definately saying *something* about that phenomenon. Right?

So, I think it's safe to infer that 1) WG has opinions about the present 2) he expresses them in his work. I mean, otherwise these books would simply be entertainment, not literature. And who wants to be simply entertained, without getting any intellectual stimulation when they're reading a novel? Isn't that what network TV and Hollywood films are for?

Perhaps I'm getting way too metaphysical here I agree, absolutely, that WG does have a vision, an opinion - in fact, multiple ones, - and that he does express them wonderfully in his works. It's just I was nitpicking about an actual "agenda". I think an author writes because he has to, and I doubt that one has specific agenda to impress oneself on the world. When it actually happens, it's a sort of expected side effect; but not the cause of writing.

/\/\ike

I first read Neuromancer in '86 as a high school senior. The American zeitgeist back then was saturated with anxiety over Japan's apparent techno-edge.

Screw Cuba, the missile gap, and Vietnam---that was ancient history in our books. We were worried about *Japan* in the 80's.

The Japanese were not only kicking our asses in consumer electronics manufacturing, but in bigger-fish endeavors like steel and automobiles.

I was living in Hawaii then, and I recall seeing almost daily newspaper feature stories about the latest suspected Zaibatzu big-shot driving through exclusive ridge-communities like Lanikai and literally ordering his agents, through the window of his limo, to "buy that one, buy that, buy that."

Japanese entities bought Rockefeller Center and a major Hollywood studio, and were thought to be well on a path to capital-imperializing all of North America for the crown of Asia.

Cyberpunk was born in this milieu.

Apathetic American cowboys who *use* Asian technology, but who equate it somewhere along the lines of a deleterious drug habit...Not wishing to use their talents to advance the cause of any social or corporate identity, but to rip off whatever they can to justify their entropic ambitions...Asian technology as a fishing pole, reeling in redemption as the final chapter concludes...

Slackers with supernatural powers, gamely sleepwalking their way through images of cultural ennui in order to achieve their cum-shots.

The thinking around Neuromancer's time was that hardware drove software, and that he who manufactured stuff most cheaply would call the tune.

Wrong.

Intellectual property companies like Microsoft and Intel put the lie to the "Japanese Miracle". IP won and showed that manufacturing, no matter how excellent, was just manufacturing. Intellectual property is where its at...

The current bleeding edge of technology is biological.

Then maybe nanotech, and then maybe we're ready to revisit cyberpunk

Paul Tillich, a liberal theologian who is still studied even among hyper-reactionary "Bible Colleges", suggested that the word "God" not be uttered for 100 years in order to get a better point of view on the subject. In a similar vein, and with a equal respect, I suggest that "cyberpunk" be rested until "cyber" becomes fresh again, and until "punk" becomes angry again.

w00t
Michael

_______________________
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

Now I know we could wrangle for *days* about what, in a practical sense, qualifies as cyberpunk.

No one would argue that Neuromancer does. But what about Naked Lunch?

To *me* cyberpunk is iconoclastic art that questions the nature of consciousness in the context of life's intersection with technology.

And *to me* Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell" fits squarely in that category.

I note that the sequel to GitS is in production. Draw your own inferences...

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Hooker like joke.

Just to make things more interesting...

In this month's WIRED magazine, none other
than Neal Stephenson calls cyberpunk "history".

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/

He isn't calling it dead... he is saying that
"looking backward is another way of seeing the future." Other than steampunk, I've never
thought of cyberpunk as being retro in any way.

Interesting... I'm looking forward to
seeing the article.

TVgeek

quote:

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Originally posted by TVgeek:
Just to make things more interesting...

In this month's WIRED magazine, none other
than Neal Stephenson calls cyberpunk "history".

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Yeah I read that. I wish I thought historical revisionism was as sexy as trying to tip-toe out onto the ledge.

I'll be skipping his new one.

Besides Stephenson's propensity to rant and blab, I find psuedo-historical science fiction about as exciting as a civil war reenactment.

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Hooker like joke.