Bruce Sterling

Cyberpunk in the Nineties

This is my sixth and last column for INTERZONE, as I promised a

year ago when I began this series. I've enjoyed doing these pieces,

and would like to thank the energetic editor and indulgent readership

of INTERZONE. A special thanks to those who contributed terms and

comments for "The SF Workshop Lexicon," which remains an ongoing

project, and will show up again someday, probably in embarrassing

company. Those readers who had enough smarts and gumption to buy

the SIGNAL catalog (see column one in issue 37) have been well

rewarded, I trust.

In this final column, I would like to talk frankly about

"cyberpunk" -- not cyberpunk the synonym for computer criminal, but

Cyberpunk the literary movement.

Years ago, in the chilly winter of 1985 -- (we used to have chilly

winters then, back before the ozone gave out) -- an article appeared in

INTERZONE #14, called "The New Science Fiction." "The New Science

Fiction" was the first manifesto of "the cyberpunk movement." The

article was an analysis of the SF genre's history and principles; the

word "cyberpunk" did not appear in it at all. "The New SF" appeared

pseudonymously in a British SF quarterly whose tiny circulation did

not restrain its vaulting ambitions. To the joy of dozens, it had

recently graduated to full-colour covers. A lovely spot for a

manifesto.

Let's compare this humble advent to a recent article,

"Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk," by my friend and colleague Mr.

Lewis Shiner. This piece is yet another honest attempt by Someone

Who Was There to declare cyberpunk dead. Shiner's article appeared

on Jan 7, 1991, in the editorial page of THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Again an apt venue, one supposes, but illustrative of the

paradoxical hazards of "movements." An avalanche, started with a

shout and a shove somewhere up at the timberline, cannot be stopped

again with one's hands, even with an audience of millions of mundanes.

"Cyberpunk," before it acquired its handy label and its sinister

rep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and

anarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-

band 70s punk music. Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ,

"CHEAP TRUTH," was given away free to anyone who asked for it.

CHEAP TRUTH was never copyrighted; photocopy "piracy" was actively

encouraged.

CHEAP TRUTH's contributors were always pseudonymous, an

earnest egalitarian attempt to avoid any personality-cultism or

cliquishness. CHEAP TRUTH deliberately mocked established "genre

gurus" and urged every soul within earshot to boot up a word-

processor and join the cause. CT's ingenuous standards for SF were

simply that SF should be "good" and "alive" and "readable." But when

put in practice, these supposed qualities were something else again.

The fog of battle obscured a great deal at the time.

CHEAP TRUTH had rather mixed success. We had a laudable

grasp of the basics: for instance, that SF writers ought to *work a lot

harder* and *knock it off with the worn-out bullshit* if they expected

to earn any real respect. Most folks agreed that this was a fine

prescription -- for somebody else. In SF it has always been fatally

easy to shrug off such truisms to dwell on the trivialities of SF as a

career: the daily grind in the Old Baloney Factory. Snappy

cyberpunk slogans like "imaginative concentration" and "technological

literacy" were met with much the same indifference. Alas, if

preaching gospel was enough to reform the genre, the earth would

surely have quaked when Aldiss and Knight espoused much the same

ideals in 1956.

SF's struggle for quality was indeed old news, except to CHEAP

TRUTH, whose writers were simply too young and parochial to have

caught on. But the cultural terrain had changed, and that made a lot

of difference. Honest "technological literacy" in the 50s was

exhilirating but disquieting -- but in the high-tech 80s, "technological

literacy" meant outright *ecstasy and dread.* Cyberpunk was *weird,*

which obscured the basic simplicity of its theory-and-practice.

When "cyberpunk writers" began to attract real notoriety, the

idea of cyberpunk principles, open and available to anyone, was lost

in the murk. Cyberpunk was an instant cult, probably the very

definition of a cult in modern SF. Even generational contemporaries,

who sympathized with much CHEAP TRUTH rhetoric, came to distrust

the cult itself -- simply because the Cyberpunks had become "genre

gurus" themselves.

It takes shockingly little, really, to become a genre guru.

Basically, it's as easy as turning over in bed. It's questionable whether

one gains much by the effort. Preach your fool head off, but who

trusts gurus, anyway? CHEAP TRUTH never did! All in all, it took

about three years to thoroughly hoist the Movement on its own petard.

CHEAP TRUTH was killed off in 1986.

I would like to think that this should be a lesson to somebody

out there. I very much doubt it, though.

Rucker, Shiner, Sterling, Shirley and Gibson -- the Movement's

most fearsome "gurus," ear-tagged yet again in Shiner's worthy article,

in front of the N. Y. TIMES' bemused millions -- are "cyberpunks" for

good and all. Other cyberpunks, such as the six other worthy

contributors to MIRRORSHADES THE CYBERPUNK ANTHOLOGY, may be

able to come to their own terms with the beast, more or less. But the

dreaded C-Word will surely be chiselled into our five tombstones.

Public disavowals are useless, very likely *worse* than useless. Even

the most sweeping changes in our philosophy of writing, perhaps weird

mid-life-crisis conversions to Islam or Santeria, could not erase the

tattoo.

Seen from this perspective, "cyberpunk" simply means "anything

cyberpunks write." And that covers a lot of ground. I've always had a

weakness for historical fantasies, myself, and Shiner writes

mainstream novels and mysteries. Shirley writes horror. Rucker was

last seen somewhere inside the Hollow Earth. William Gibson,

shockingly, has been known to write funny short stories. All this

means nothing. "Cyberpunk" will not be conclusively "dead" until the

last of us is shovelled under. Demographics suggest that this is likely

to take some time.

CHEAP TRUTH's promulgation of open principles was of dubious

use -- even when backed by the might of INTERZONE. Perhaps

"principles" were simply too foggy and abstract, too arcane and

unapproachable, as opposed to easy C-word recognition symbols, like

cranial jacks, black leather jeans and amphetamine addiction. But

even now, it may not be too late to offer a concrete example of the

genuine cyberpunk *weltanschauung* at work.

Consider FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley, a wellspring of

science fiction as a genre. In a cyberpunk analysis, FRANKENSTEIN is

"Humanist" SF. FRANKENSTEIN promotes the romantic dictum that

there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. There are no

mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law -- its workings

transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will.

Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe.

Dr. Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront

against the human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly

punished by his own creation, the Monster.

Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this

imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D

team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well

wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having

done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North

Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never

vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They

are next to us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have

been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured

worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have

lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants.

In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we *already* know Things

We Were Not Meant To Know. Our *grandparents* knew these things;

Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds

long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there

are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no

sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.

Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak

and mortal, but it's not the holy will of the gods; it's just the way

things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically

unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but

because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically

a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed,

and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end.

This "anti-humanist" conviction in cyberpunk is not simply

some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact

about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn't invent

this situation; it just reflects it.

Today it is quite common to see tenured scientists espousing

horrifically radical ideas: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonic

suspension of the dead, downloading the contents of the brain...

Hubristic mania is loose in the halls of academe, where everybody and

his sister seems to have a plan to set the cosmos on its ear. Stern

moral indignation at the prospect is the weakest of reeds; if there were

a devilish drug around that could extend our sacred God-given

lifespans by a hundred years, the Pope would be the first in line.

We already live, every day, through the means of outrageous

actions with unforeseeable consequences to the whole world. The

world population has doubled since 1970; the natural world, which

used to surround humankind with its vast Gothic silences, is now

something that has to be catalogued and cherished.

We're just not much good any more at refusing things because

they don't seem proper. As a society, we can't even manage to turn

our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As

a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if

there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred.

Jumpstarting Mary Shelley's corpses is the least of our problems;

something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every

day.

Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer

software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a

commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the

contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly

successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned.

The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow

destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems

weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage,

about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big

Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must

triumph.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human

being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to

think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our

eyes.

*This* is cyberpunk.

This explains, I hope, why standard sci-fi adventure yarns

tarted up in black leather fail to qualify. Lewis Shiner has simply lost

patience with writers who offer dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci-

fiberpunk drag. "Other writers had turned the form into formula," he

complains in THE NEW YORK TIMES, "the same dead-end thrills we get

from video games and blockbuster movies." Shiner's early convictions

have scarcely budged so much as a micron -- but the stuff most folks

call "cyberpunk" no longer reflects his ideals.

In my opinion the derivative piffle is a minor issue. So is the

word "cyberpunk." I'm pleased to see that it's increasingly difficult to

write a dirt-stupid book, put the word "cyberpunk" on it, and expect it

to sell. With the c-word discredited through half-witted overkill,

anyone called a "cyberpunk" will have to pull their own weight now.

But for those willing to pull weight, it's no big deal. Labels cannot

defend their own integrity; but writers can, and good ones do.

There is another general point to make, which I believe is

important to any real understanding of the Movement. Cyberpunk,

like New Wave before it, was a voice of Bohemia. It came from the

underground, from the outside, from the young and energetic and

disenfranchised. It came from people who didn't know their own

limits, and refused the limits offered them by mere custom and habit.

Not much SF is really Bohemian, and most of Bohemia has little

to do with SF, but there was, and is, much to be gained from the

meeting of the two. SF as a genre, even at its most "conventional," is

very much a cultural underground. SF's influence on the greater

society outside, like the dubious influence of beatniks, hippies, and

punks, is carefully limited. Science fiction, like Bohemia, is a useful

place to put a wide variety of people, where their ideas and actions can

be examined, without the risk of putting those ideas and actions

directly into wider practice. Bohemia has served this function since its

start in the early Industrial Revolution, and the wisdom of this scheme

should be admitted. Most weird ideas are simply weird ideas, and

Bohemia in power has rarely been a pretty sight. Jules Verne as a

writer of adventure novels is one thing; President Verne, General

Verne, or Pope Jules is a much dicier proposition.

Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia -- Bohemia in the 1980s.

The technosocial changes loose in contemporary society were bound to

affect its counterculture. Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of

this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is still growing.

Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less

respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of

people you might not introduce to your grandma.

But today, it must be admitted that the cyberpunks -- SF

veterans in or near their forties, patiently refining their craft and

cashing their royalty checks -- are no longer a Bohemian underground.

This too is an old story in Bohemia; it is the standard punishment for

success. An underground in the light of day is a contradiction in terms.

Respectability does not merely beckon; it actively envelops. And in

this sense, "cyberpunk" is even deader than Shiner admits.

Time and chance have been kind to the cyberpunks, but they

themselves have changed with the years. A core doctrine in

Movement theory was "visionary intensity." But it has been some time

since any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-blowing story, something that

writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and shattered the furniture. In

the latest work of these veterans, we see tighter plotting, better

characters, finer prose, much "serious and insightful futurism." But we

also see much less in the way of spontaneous back-flips and crazed

dancing on tables. The settings come closer and closer to the present

day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleashed fantasy: the issues at

stake become something horribly akin to the standard concerns of

middle-aged responsibility. And this may be splendid, but it is not

war. This vital aspect of science fiction has been abdicated, and is open

for the taking. Cyberpunk is simply not there any more.

But science fiction is still alive, still open and developing. And

Bohemia will not go away. Bohemia, like SF, is not a passing fad,

although it breeds fads; like SF, Bohemia is old; as old as industrial

society, of which both SF and Bohemia are integral parts. Cybernetic

Bohemia is not some bizarre advent; when cybernetic Bohemians

proclaim that what they are doing is completely new, they innocently

delude themselves, merely because they are young.

Cyberpunks write about the ecstasy and hazard of flying

cyberspace and Verne wrote about the ecstasy and hazard of FIVE

WEEKS IN A BALLOON, but if you take even half a step outside the

mire of historical circumstance, you can see that these both serve the

same basic social function.

Of course, Verne, a great master, is still in print, while the

verdict is out on cyberpunk. And, of course, Verne got the future all

wrong, except for a few lucky guesses; but so will cyberpunk. Jules

Verne ended up as some kind of beloved rich crank celebrity in the

city government of Amiens. Worse things have happened, I suppose.

As cyberpunk's practitioners bask in unsought legitimacy, it

becomes harder to pretend that cyberpunk was something freakish or

aberrant; it's easier today to see where it came from, and how it got

where it is. Still, it might be thought that allegiance to Jules Verne is a

bizarre declaration for a cyberpunk. It might, for instance, be argued

that Jules Verne was a nice guy who loved his Mom, while the brutish

antihuman cyberpunks advocate drugs, anarchy, brain-plugs and the

destruction of everything sacred.

This objection is bogus. Captain Nemo was a technical anarcho-

terrorist. Jules Verne passed out radical pamphlets in 1848 when the

streets of Paris were strewn with dead. And yet Jules Verne is

considered a Victorian optimist (those who have read him must doubt

this) while the cyberpunks are often declared nihilists (by those who

pick and choose in the canon). Why? It is the tenor of the times, I

think.

There is much bleakness in cyberpunk, but it is an honest

bleakness. There is ecstasy, but there is also dread. As I sit here, one

ear tuned to TV news, I hear the US Senate debating war. And behind

those words are cities aflame and crowds lacerated with airborne

shrapnel, soldiers convulsed with mustard-gas and Sarin.

This generation will have to watch a century of manic waste and

carelessness hit home, and we know it. We will be lucky not to suffer

greatly from ecological blunders already committed; we will be

extremely lucky not to see tens of millions of fellow human beings

dying horribly on television as we Westerners sit in our living rooms

munching our cheeseburgers. And this is not some wacky Bohemian

jeremiad; this is an objective statement about the condition of the

world, easily confirmed by anyone with the courage to look at the

facts.

These prospects must and should effect our thoughts and

expressions and, yes, our actions; and if writers close their eyes to this,

they may be entertainers, but they are not fit to call themselves

science fiction writers. And cyberpunks are science fiction writers --

not a "subgenre" or a "cult," but the thing itself. We deserve this title

and we should not be deprived of it.

But the Nineties will not belong to the cyberpunks. We will be

there working, but we are not the Movement, we are not even "us" any

more. The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who

grew up in the Eighties. All power, and the best of luck to the Nineties

underground. I don't know you, but I do know you're out there. Get

on your feet, seize the day. Dance on tables. Make it happen, it can be

done. I know. I've been there.