Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel Hacking Cyberpunk

The Hugo Award-winning editor David Hartwell tells the story of how Bruce Sterling approached him in 1983 with a proposal for an anthology of short stories which would eventually become the classic Mirrorshades. The book was to be a kind of literary manifesto for the newly emerging cyberpunk movement. David said he was indeed interested and asked how many writers Bruce expected would be in Mirrorshades. Bruce said he had five or six in mind. David replied that five or six was not enough for a movement and that Bruce would need at least a dozen. So Bruce set out to recruit writers for the movement and his anthology, even if they were not card-carrying cyberpunks. Among those he found was one of the editors of this book, who was at the time most closely associated with the humanist camp, said to be in opposition to cyberpunk.

It is not surprising that the cyberpunk movement, so quick to sneer at other kinds of science fiction and to strike an attitude of hip self-importance, would be controversial. To its critics, cyberpunk was all borrowed surface and no substance: rock and roll Alfred Bester, Raymond Chandler with the serial numbers filed off. To the cynical, it was nothing but a marketing ploy to advance the careers of those select few who were permitted to hang their leathers in the secret Node Zero clubhouse. But as they continued to publish their innovative stories and novels, readers and — eventually — writers and critics began to acknowledge that there might be something to cyberpunk. In 1986, the pseudonymous Vincent Omniaveritas, writing in the cyberpunks’ snarky house organ, Cheap Truth, brought the classic cyberpunk era to an end. “I hereby declare the revolution over,” crowed Vince. “Long live the provisional government.”

And then the real arguing started.

In the quarter century since, the debate has continued over the place of cyberpunk not only in science fiction, but in the culture as a whole. The literary discussion was complicated when some of the original cyberpunks tried to distance themselves from the movement. Naysayers seized on this to declare that cyberpunk was actually a movement of just one and his name was William Gibson. It soon became apparent that the center could not hold. However, the movement did not implode. Rather, popular culture hacked into it and turned cyberpunk to its own purposes. We saw cyberpunk music, movies, comics, and videogames. The slick magazine Wired became the Popular Science of cyberpunk. The cyberpunks had made computers and programming sexy; digital geekdom returned the favor by trying to reverse-engineer their ideas in silicon and code. But as it became more familiar, it also became tamer. Or maybe it grew up. There were cyberpunk ad agencies, cyberpunk fashion designers. Timothy Leary declared that the movie War Games was cyberpunk. The more people appropriated cyberpunk to their own uses, the fuzzier it became.

Our genre has been largely nonplussed by the spread of the cyberpunk meme. Learned papers have been given to explain the phenomenon. Some complain that science fiction has more to offer than dark visions of disaffected loners contending with totalitarian corporations. “The street,” so central to the classic cyberpunk vision, is not the world, they say. And they are right, of course. Meanwhile, as second and third generation writers have put on their mirrorshades, they are all too often dismissed as mere imitators. Some in our genre have decided that they know what cyberpunk had to say, and, whether they agree with it or not, have consigned it to the dustbin of literary history. Cyberpunk can no longer be an ideology, they would say. It can only be a flavor.

In retrospect, it seems clear to us that cyberpunk was a movement. We acknowledge all the criticisms leveled against it. The hyperbole that helped launch it was unfortunate. Yes, some core cyberpunks found other things to write about or fell silent. Of course, the term’s use in common parlance is now so vague as to verge on meaningless, but our dictionary offers two definitions of movement that fit: “a. A series of actions and events taking place over a period of time and working to foster a principle or policy. b. An organized effort by supporters of a common goal.” In the heyday of Mirrorshades and Cheap Truth, the latter definition of classic cyberpunk — CP — made sense. There was a Movement with a capital M. We believe that the sixteen postcyberpunk[1] — PCP — stories in this anthology illustrate the former definition of a movement: they are events that occurred in the last decade, long after classic cyberpunk, that continue to foster its principles and policies. No, that’s not quite right. Fostering principles and policies isn’t quite the cyberpunk style, is it? What these stories share, instead, are obsessions.

Briefly, we believe that the signature obsessions of cyberpunk are:

> Presenting a global perspective on the future.

> Engaging with developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.

> Striking a gleefully subversive attitude that challenges traditional values and received wisdom.

> Cultivating a crammed prose style that takes an often playful stance toward traditional science fiction tropes.

The PCP stories collected here do not share all of these characteristics, but most have at least two or three. Any story that exhibits all of them just as they were used in 1985 is an instant cliché. Still, the realizations that the future will be one of intimate connections between the psyche and technology, that middle-class American values are not automatically going to prevail, and in fact, the vast majority of the world will not be like Iowa or New York, have had a profound and broad effect on science fiction published in the last decade.

Cyberpunk obsessions have evolved over time; some writers extend them, some react against them, some take them for granted and move the basic attitudes into new territories. Our purpose here is to document these changes, which we believe have rewired CP into PCP. The writers we have chosen include some but not all of the CP founders. Some of our contributors came immediately after CP, while others were struggling to parse the subtleties of Green Eggs and Ham when Mirrorshades first appeared in bookstores. We have tried to confine ourselves to stories published in the last decade or so. Because we have limited ourselves to the short form, we were forced to leave out novelists like Melissa Scott and Richard K. Morgan and Chris Moriarty and — most difficult of all — Neal Stephenson.

But what is the “Post” in “PostCyberpunk”? In the effort to understand just what PCP has to do with CP, let’s take a closer look at some of these obsessions.

A major CP obsession was the way emerging technologies will change what it means to be human. Much science fiction has concerned itself with technology and changes in human culture. Indeed, the cautionary tale is a staple of the genre: if this goes on, things will get very bad indeed. But the assumption of the cautionary tale is that we have some control over the changes that technology will bring, so that if we act in a timely way, we can preserve consensus values. The cyberpunks studied the history of how humans have tried to manage change, and were not impressed. Moreover, the technologies of the twenty-first century are invasive and intimate. A key insight of CP, extended still further in PCP, is that we are no longer changing technology; rather it has begun to change us. Not just our homes and schools, our governments and workplaces, but our senses, our memories, and our very consciousness. Ubiquitous computing with access to all recorded knowledge, instantaneous communication across the entire planet, add-ons to the Human Operating System, manipulation of our genome — all are on the horizon. The changes these technologies will bring are qualitatively different than the changes caused by the automobile, or even by science fiction’s longed-for invention of faster-than-light starships. Yes, cars transformed the landscape and gave rise to the malls, McDonald’s and the suburbs. Sure, FTL will get us to the stars. But cars and starships change what we do, not who we are.

It has been observed that the future that cyberpunks envisioned seems very dark indeed. However, dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. While we may shudder at the thought of living in some of these worlds, the fictional denizens of pep stories seldom exhibit nostalgia for the good old days of 2007. What seems grim to us is simply the world to them. Characters in these stories are too busy living their lives to waste much time wringing their hands over the subversion of our values. Why should they? Do we live in a dystopia? One can easily imagine the American Founding Fathers, even the technophilic libertine Benjamin Franklin, recoiling in horror at some of the values of our society. In pep stories, human values are not imprinted on the fabric of the universe because what it means to be human is always negotiable.

These traits of PCP are so far mere extensions of CP obsessions. Another obsession of CP was to tell stories about the people that science fiction had traditionally ignored. Originally “the street” in CP meant the shadowy world of those who had set themselves against the norms of the dominant culture, hackers, thieves, spies, scam artists, and drug users. But for PCP writers the street leads to other parts of the world. Their futures have become more diverse, and richer for it. Asians and Africans and Latinos are no longer just sprinkled into stories as supporting characters, as if they are some kind of exotic seasoning. PCP writers attempt to bring them and their unique concerns to the center of their stories. PCP pays attention to the underclass, who do not have access to the transformative technologies that were the CP stock-in-trade.

“I think we live in an incomprehensible present, and what I’m trying to do is illuminate the moment. I’m trying to make the moment accessible. I’m not even trying to explain the moment, I’m just trying to make the moment accessible.”

— William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories

In the beginning, the stereotypical cyberpunk protagonist was a disaffected loner from outside the cultural mainstream. Ultimately this proved not only tiresome but also betrayed a lack of extrapolative rigor. No future could exist in which there were only data thieves in trench coats and megalomaniacal middle managers. Someone had to be baking the bread and driving the trucks and assembling all those flat screens. Cyberspace needs electricians! Where was the middle class in the CP stories? What were the families like? Could the cyberpunks write about community and still be punks?

The punk in cyberpunk has always been a problem. If by punk, one meant to say that the writers of the Mirrorshades generation were young, well, they were — at the time. But while they were to varying degrees outsiders, very few of the original cyberpunks — or indeed, the contributors to this collection — could be said to have lived “on the street.” It is difficult to write orderly sentences if one is caught up in the chaos of a punk lifestyle. And as time passed, it became more and more of a stretch for some of the original cyberpunks to take their inspiration from youth culture.

But the punk in postcyberpunk continues to make sense if it is pointing toward an attitude: an adversarial relationship to consensus reality. This attitude is just south of cynicism but well north of mere skepticism. It has to do with a reaction to a world in which humanity must constantly be renegotiated. Ina cyberpunk story, any given moment can be at once thrilling and horrifying. Life is never smooth; it is illuminated by lightning flashes of existential insight, paved with the shards of our discredited philosophies. Sanity requires a constant recalibration of perception.

The characters in a PCP story need this healthy dose of attitude because their relationship to reality is different from ours. Yes, there may well be, and often is, a virtual reality that is as persuasive as reality itself and far more pleasant. It can be variously a trap, an escape, or a refuge. Perhaps all three at once. But reality itself is everywhere mediated, and what comes between the characters and reality must constantly be interrogated.

The stories in this collection are too various for us to draw a tidy summary of what twenty-first-century cyberpunk is about, nor do we see the profit in it. However, so many of them imply or actually explore a posthuman future that we would be remiss if we failed to point out that a logical consequence of much of cyberpunk extrapolation is the singularity. Vernor Vinge, by no means a cyberpunk, although highly respected by them, first proposed the notion of a technological singularity in 1993. Briefly, he contemplates a moment in history in which runaway technology causes a change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence.” Vinge speculates this change may come through artificial intelligence, through computer/human interfaces, or through biological modification of the human genome. After this point, human history will end.

One of the obsessions of PCP fiction is to explore the edges of this “end” of history, and if possible, to see beyond it.

So far we have spoken of cyberpunk primarily in terms of content, and CP was indeed sparked by an attempt to bring content into science fiction that was being ignored by the sf of the early 1980s.

But part of the force of Cheap Truth was also the aggressiveness of its anti-art stance. Vincent Omniaveritas had little use for the pieties of literary culture and traditional values of well-made fiction. A lot of early CP gained verve from a conscious rejection of the New Wave and the New Wave’s reaching after high modernism’s literary pretensions.

Whereas the New Wave brought stories like, for instance, Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head that drafted Joycean stream of consciousness into science fiction contexts, Cheap Truth mocked science fiction writers who too obviously adopted literary approaches. But CP was just as self-consciously aware of its ancestors. Where humanist writers might claim Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin as theirs, CP called on Alfred Bester and William S. Burroughs. Both sides claimed J. G. Ballard. Both sides, consciously or not, were expressions of postmodernism.

In abandoning “well made story values” in favor of oddness, visionary speculation, and the breaking of realist codes, CP was expressing a postmodern sensibility. Literary critics like Larry McCaffery, who edited one of the earliest critical books on cyberpunk, Storming the Reality Studio, recognized the postmodern underpinnings of CP. What the critics saw in cyberpunk was not always in accord with the Cheap Truth party line, but they were right in observing that science fiction puts quotes around the word “reality.” Science fiction is “pre-deconstructed” through the ways that writers consciously encode information that must be read out of the work. In much cyberpunk, no matter how grim, there was a sense of play. Play with content — ideas, technological developments, extrapolations — but also with genre tropes, expectations built up over generations of pulp science fiction since Hugo Gernsback started Amazing Stories.

As PCP writers began to react to and incorporate CP visions, the urge to playfulness grew. Perhaps the more literary interests of humanist science fiction writers had an influence. Or maybe the writers who were never part of the Movement with a capital M no longer felt bound to foment CP’S revolution. Twenty minutes after Vincent Omniaveritas declared victory in Cheap Truth, cyberpunk began to suffer from an inevitable genrefication. The moves that had seemed so daring in 1982 began to look a little stilted. The leathers were by now scuffed and stained; there were scratches on the mirrorshades. The PCP writers had to try something different or else take their places behind the glass in the display cases at the Science Fiction Museum. In the final analysis the CP writers went to war so that the PCP writers could be free to experiment with new forms.

The idea that the physical, mental, and moral structures that most of us live by are radically contingent is at the heart of science fiction. It is evident throughout the history of the form, from H. G. Wells through John W. Campbell through Philip K. Dick and James Tiptree, Jr. It pervades the New Wave, and the feminist science fiction of the 1970s.

All cyberpunks, pre-, classic-, and post-, know this. Perhaps cyberpunk’s greatest contribution to the genre was its uncanny ability to broadcast this science fictional idea to the culture at large. It’s an understanding that, caught in whatever historical moment we write from, is all too easy to forget. We long for permanence, although we grow older with each tick of the clock. We proceed from the assumption that the world is comprehensible, even as we reel from its dizzying complexity. There are no guarantees; tomorrow we maybe uploading ourselves into cyberspace or drowning off the coast of Nevada.

This understanding is the reason why science fiction, if it rises to its own challenge, can be the literature of the twenty-first century. Our hope is that the postcyberpunk fiction here assembled will point the way for the readers and writers to come.