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Cyberpunk

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Literature types

   Berlin's Sony Center in Potsdamer Platz reflects the global reach of a
   Japanese corporation. Much cyberpunk action occurs in urbanized,
   artificial landscapes, and "city lights at night" was one of the
   genre's first metaphors for cyberspace (in Gibson's Neuromancer).
   Enlarge
   Berlin's Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz reflects the global reach of a
   Japanese corporation. Much cyberpunk action occurs in urbanized,
   artificial landscapes, and "city lights at night" was one of the
   genre's first metaphors for cyberspace (in Gibson's Neuromancer).

   Cyberpunk is a sub-genre of science fiction, noted for its focus on
   "high tech and low life" and taking its name from the combination of
   cybernetics and punk. It features advanced science such as information
   technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or a
   radical change in the social order.

          "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, a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and
          invasive modification of the human body."

   The plot of cyberpunk writing often centers on a conflict among
   hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega corporations, tending to be
   set within a near-future Earth, rather than the far future settings or
   galactic vistas found in novels like Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank
   Herbert's Dune. The settings of this future tend to be post-industrial
   dystopias, but are normally marked by extraordinary cultural ferment,
   and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators
   ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's
   "atmosphere" echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use
   techniques from detective fiction. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk
   field include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker
   and John Shirley.

   Unlike New Wave Science Fiction, which imported stylistic techniques
   and concerns that already existed in literature and culture at large,
   cyberpunk originated in the written science fiction genre first before
   gaining mainstream exposure. During the early and mid-1980s, cyberpunk
   became a fashionable topic in academic circles, where it began to be
   the subject of postmodernist investigation. In the same period, the
   genre penetrated Hollywood and became one of cinema's staple
   science-fiction styles. Many influential films such as Blade Runner and
   the Matrix trilogy can be seen as prominent outgrowths of the genre's
   styles and themes. Computer games, board games and role-playing games
   (such as Shadowrun, or the rather appropriately named Cyberpunk 2020)
   often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk
   writing and movies. Beginning in the early 1990s, trends in fashion and
   music were labeled as cyberpunk.

   As a wider variety of writers began to work with cyberpunk concepts,
   new sub-genres emerged, each of which focuses on technology and its
   social effects in a different way. Examples include steampunk,
   pioneered by Tim Powers, K. W. Jeter and James Blaylock, and biopunk or
   alternatively ribofunk, in which Paul Di Filippo is prominent. In
   addition, some people consider works such as Neal Stephenson's The
   Diamond Age as being in a postcyberpunk category.

Style and ethos

   Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from the hard-boiled detective
   novel, film noir, and postmodernist prose to describe the often
   nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. The genre's
   vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the
   generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s.
   (Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian SF in his 1981
   short story The Gernsback Continuum, which pokes fun of and, to a
   certain extent, condemns utopian SF.)

   Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling summarized the cyberpunk ethos in
   Cyberpunk in the Nineties as follows:

          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.
          That is cyberpunk.

   In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in
   cyberspace, blurring the border between the actual and the virtual
   reality. A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between
   the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk depicts the world as a
   dark, sinister place with networked computers which dominate every
   aspect of life. Giant, multinational corporations have for the most
   part replaced governments as centers of political, economic and even
   military power. The alienated outsider's battle against a totalitarian
   or quasi-totalitarian system is a common theme in science fiction (cf.
   Nineteen Eighty-Four) and cyberpunk in particular, though in
   conventional science fiction the totalitarian systems tend to be
   sterile, ordered, and state controlled.

   Protagonists in cyberpunk writing usually include computer hackers, who
   are often patterned on the idea of the lone hero fighting injustice:
   Western gunslingers, ronin, etc. They are often disenfranchised people
   placed in extraordinary situations, rather than brilliant scientists or
   starship captains intentionally seeking advance or adventure, and are
   not always true "heroes"; an apt comparison might be to the moral
   ambiguity of Clint Eastwood's character in the Man with No Name
   trilogy. One of the cyberpunk genre's prototype characters is Case,
   from Gibson's Neuromancer. Case is a "console cowboy," a brilliant
   hacker, who betrays his organized criminal partners. Robbed of his
   talent through a crippling injury inflicted by the vengeful partners,
   Case unexpectedly receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be
   healed by expert medical care, but only if he participates in another
   criminal enterprise with a new crew.

   Like Case, many cyberpunk protagonists are thus manipulated, placed in
   situations where they have little or no choice, and although they might
   see things through, they do not necessarily come out any further ahead
   than they previously were. These anti-heroes — "criminals, outcasts,
   visionaries, dissenters and misfits" — do not experience a Campbellian
   " hero's journey", like a protagonist of a Homeric epic or an Alexandre
   Dumas novel. Instead, they call to mind the private eye of detective
   novels, who might solve the trickiest cases but never receive a just
   reward. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents — what Thomas
   Pynchon called the "preterite" and Frank Zappa the "left behinds of the
   Great Society" — is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk
   literature is often used as a metaphor for the present day-worries
   about the failings of corporations, corruption in governments,
   alienation and surveillance technology. Cyberpunk can be intended to
   disquiet readers and call them to action. It often expresses a sense of
   rebellion, suggesting that one could describe it as a type of
   countercultural science fiction. In the words of author and critic
   David Brin,

          … a closer look at [cyberpunk authors] reveals that they nearly
          always portray future societies in which governments have become
          wimpy and pathetic … Popular science fiction tales by Gibson,
          Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations
          of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the
          secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite. (The
          Transparent Society, Basic Books 1998)

   Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the
   evolution of the Internet. The virtual world of what is now known as
   the Internet often appears under various names, including "cyberspace",
   "the Wired", "the Metaverse" or "the Matrix". In this context it is
   important to note that the earliest descriptions of a global
   communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered
   popular awareness, though not before traditional science fiction
   writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and some social commentators such as
   James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.

Literature

   The science fiction editor Gardner Dozois is generally acknowledged as
   the person who popularized the use of the term "cyberpunk" as a kind of
   literature. Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1980 for
   his short story "Cyberpunk", although the story was not actually
   published until November 1983, in Amazing Science Fiction Stories,
   Volume 57, Number 4 . The term was quickly appropriated as a label to
   be applied to the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John
   Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner,
   Richard Kadrey and others. Of these, Sterling became the movement's
   chief ideologue, thanks to his fanzine Cheap Truth. (See also John
   Shirley's articles on Sterling and Rucker .)

   Cyberpunk elements are present in the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons.
   The planet Lusus has many characteristics of Neuromancer's dystopian
   world, and the cybernetic levels of existence where the AI:s live has
   obviously been influenced by Gibson's works.

   William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is likely the most
   famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, a
   fascination with surfaces and the "look and feel" of the future, and
   atmosphere over traditional science-fiction tropes. Regarded as
   ground-breaking, and sometimes as "the archetypal cyberpunk work" ,
   Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards.
   According to the Jargon File, "Gibson's near-total ignorance of
   computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate
   about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers
   have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating."

   Early on, cyberpunk was hailed as a radical departure from
   science-fiction standards and a new manifestation of vitality. Shortly
   thereafter, however, many critics arose to challenge its status as a
   revolutionary movement. These critics said that the SF " New Wave" of
   the 1960s was much more innovative as far as narrative techniques and
   styles were concerned. Further, while Neuromancer's narrator may have
   had an unusual "voice" for science fiction, much older examples can be
   found: Gibson's narrative voice, for example, resembles that of an
   updated Raymond Chandler, as in his novel The Big Sleep (1939). Others
   noted that almost all traits claimed to be uniquely cyberpunk could in
   fact be found in older writers' works — often citing J. G. Ballard,
   Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Stanislaw Lem, Samuel R. Delany and
   even William S. Burroughs. For example, Philip K. Dick's works contain
   recurring themes of social decay, artificial intelligence, paranoia,
   and blurred lines between reality and some kind of virtual reality, and
   the cyberpunk movie Blade Runner is based on one of his books. Humans
   linked to machines are found in Pohl and Kornbluth's Wolfbane (1959)
   and Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1968).

   In 1994, scholar Brian Stonehill suggested that Thomas Pynchon's 1973
   novel Gravity's Rainbow "not only curses but precurses what we now
   glibly dub cyberspace". Other important predecessors include Alfred
   Bester's two most celebrated novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars
   My Destination, as well as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names.

   Science-fiction writer David Brin describes cyberpunk as "...the finest
   free promotion campaign ever waged on behalf of science fiction." It
   may not have attracted the "real punks", but it did ensnare many new
   readers, and it provided the sort of movement which postmodern literary
   critics found alluring. (One illustration of this is Donna Haraway's
   "Cyborg Manifesto", an attempt to build a "political myth" using
   cyborgs as metaphors for contemporary "social reality". ) Cyberpunk
   made science fiction more attractive to academics, argues Brin; in
   addition, it made science fiction more profitable to Hollywood and to
   the visual arts generally. Although the "self-important rhetoric and
   whines of persecution" on the part of cyberpunk fans were irritating at
   worst and humorous at best, Brin declares that the "rebels did shake
   things up. We owe them a debt. [...] But," he asks, "were they
   original?"

   Cyberpunk further inspired many professional writers who were not among
   the "original" cyberpunks to incorporate cyberpunk ideas into their own
   works, such as Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired and Voice of the
   Whirlwind, and George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails.

   As new writers and artists began to experiment with cyberpunk ideas,
   new varieties of fiction emerged, sometimes addressing the criticisms
   leveled at the original cyberpunk stories. Lawrence Person writes, in
   an essay he posted to the Internet forum Slashdot,

          "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."

   Person's essay advocates using the term " postcyberpunk" to label the
   new works such writers produce. In this view, typical postcyberpunk
   stories continue the focus on an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized
   information and cybernetic augmentation of the human body, but without
   the assumption of dystopia. Good examples might be Neal Stephenson's
   The Diamond Age or Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's
   Transmetropolitan. Like all categories discerned within science
   fiction, the boundaries of postcyberpunk are likely to be fluid or ill
   defined. To complicate matters, there is a continuing market for "pure"
   cyberpunk novels strongly influenced by Gibson's early work, such as
   Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon.

   Among the subgenres of cyberpunk is steampunk, which is set in an
   anachronistic Victorian environment, but with cyberpunk's bleak film
   noir world view. The term was originally coined around 1987 as a joke
   to describe some of the novels of Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock, and
   K.W. Jeter, but by the time Gibson and Sterling entered the subgenre
   with their collaborative novel The Difference Engine the term was being
   used earnestly as well. The early 1990s saw the emergence of biopunk
   AKA ribofunk, a derivative style building not on informational
   technology but on biology. In these stories, people are changed in some
   way not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation of their very
   chromosomes. Paul Di Filippo is seen as the most prominent biopunk
   writer, although Bruce Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist cycle is also a
   major influence.

Film and television

   The film Blade Runner (1982), adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids
   Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in a dystopian future in which
   manufactured beings called replicants are slaves used on space colonies
   and are legal prey on Earth to various bounty hunters who "retire"
   (kill) them. Although Blade Runner was not successful in its first
   theatrical release, it found a wide viewership in the home video
   market. Since the movie omits the religious and mythical elements of
   Dick's original novel (e.g., empathy boxes and Wilbur Mercer), it falls
   more strictly within the cyberpunk genre than the novel does. William
   Gibson would later reveal that upon first viewing the film, he was
   surprised at how the look of this film matched his vision when he was
   working on Neuromancer.

   As mentioned above, the short-lived television series Max Headroom also
   spread cyberpunk tropes, perhaps with more popular success than the
   genre's first written works.

   The number of films in the genre or at least using a few genre elements
   has grown steadily since Blade Runner. Several of Philip K. Dick's
   works have been adapted to the silver screen, with cyberpunk elements
   typically becoming dominant; examples include Screamers (1996),
   Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).
   But unfortunately for cyberpunk's arguable originator, the film Johnny
   Mnemonic (1995) was a flop, both commercially and critically. Gibson
   fans derided the screenplay as deviating substantially from his
   original work, even though Gibson wrote the final screenplay himself.

   Director Darren Aronofsky set his debut feature π (1998) in a
   present-day New York City, but built its script with influences from
   cyberpunk aesthetic. According to the DVD commentary, he and his
   production team deliberately used antiquated machines (like 5-1/4 inch
   floppy disks), echoing the technological style of Brazil (1985), to
   create a cyberpunk "feel". Aronofsky describes Chinatown, where the
   film is set, as "New York's last cyberpunk neighbourhood".

   The RoboCop series has a more near-futuristic setting where at least
   one corporation, Omni Consumer Products, is an all-powerful presence in
   the city of Detroit. Until the End of the World (1991) shows another
   example where cyberpunk provides an assumed background, and a plot
   device, to an otherwise mood and character-driven story. Gattaca (1997)
   directed by Andrew Niccol is a futuristic film noir whose mood-drenched
   dystopia provides a good example of biopunk.

   The Matrix series, which began with 1999's The Matrix (and now also
   contains The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, and The
   Animatrix) uses a wide variety of cyberpunk elements.

   Cyberpunk style and futuristic design have influenced anime, including
   Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis, Armitage III, Silent
   Möbius, Serial Experiments Lain and Texhnolyze.

   Anime has also provided examples of the " steampunk" sub-genre,
   particularly in much of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but also notably in
   Last Exile (2003), created by studio GONZO and director Koichi Chigira,
   which features a curious blend of Victorian society and futuristic
   battles between ships of the sky. Also of note is 2004's Steamboy
   directed by Katsuhiro Otomo and more recently Ergo Proxy from Manglobe.

Music and fashion

   The term "cyberpunk music" can refer to two rather overlapping
   categories. First, it may denote the varied range of musical works
   which cyberpunk films use as soundtrack material. These works occur in
   genres from classical music and jazz—used, in Blade Runner and
   elsewhere, to evoke a film noir ambiance—to " noize" and electronica.
   Typically, films draw upon electronica, electronic body music,
   industrial, noise, futurepop, alternative rock, goth rock, and IDM to
   create the proper "feel". The same principles apply to computer and
   video games; see the discussion of Rez below. Of course, while written
   works may not come with associated soundtracks as frequently as movies
   do, allusions to musical works are used for the same effect. For
   example, the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch (1992), a dark fantasy
   about a world of living toys, features a hard-bitten teddy bear
   detective with a sugar habit and a predilection for jazz.

   "Cyberpunk music" also describes the works associated with the fashion
   trend which emerged from the SF developments. The Detroit techno group
   Cybotron, which arose in the early 1980s, drew influences both from
   European synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk and from Toffler's Future
   Shock, producing songs which evoke a distinctly dystopian mood. In the
   same era, Styx released the concept album Kilroy Was Here (1983), the
   story of a rock star living in a dark future where music has been
   outlawed. Kilroy and in particular its hit single "Mr. Roboto" may
   easily be "appropriated" into the cyberpunk genre, whether or not the
   term was applied at the time. However, starting around the year 1990,
   popular culture began to include a movement in both music and fashion
   which called itself "cyberpunk", and which became particularly
   associated with the rave and techno subcultures. With the new
   millennium came a new movement of industrial bands making "laptop"
   music. Homeless traveling squatter punks armed themselves with digital
   equipment and fused technology into their street sounds- El-wire and
   the Vagabond Choir. The hacker subculture, documented in places like
   the Jargon File, regards this movement with mixed feelings, since
   self-proclaimed cyberpunks are often "trendoids" with affection for
   black leather and chrome who speak enthusiastically about technology
   instead of learning about it or becoming involved with it. ("Attitude
   is no substitute for competence," quips the File.) However, these
   self-proclaimed cyberpunks are at least "excited about the right
   things" and typically respect the people who actually work with
   it—those with "the hacker nature".

   Certain music genres like drum'n'bass were directly influenced by
   cyberpunk, even generating a whole subgenre called neurofunk, where the
   bass lines, synths and beats try to give the listener the sensation of
   being inside a sprawl or crawling through cyberspace. Neurofunk was
   pioneered by artists like Ed Rush, Trace and Optical. In the words of
   the journalist Simon Reynolds:

          Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social
          realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like
          collapsing buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric
          shredding [...] The post-techstep style I call "neurofunk"
          (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient
          drones, blips 'n blurts of electronic noise, and chugging,
          curiously inhibited two-step beats). Neurofunk is the fun-free
          culmination of jungle's strategy of "cultural resistance": the
          eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and
          you make dread your element.

   Arriving toward the tail end of both the inital cyberpunk boom and his
   own career, pop singer Billy Idol released an album called Cyberpunk,
   which included a song called "Neuromancer." The album was neither a
   critical nor commercial success.

Games

   Computer games have frequently used cyberpunk as a source of
   inspiration. Some of them, like Blade Runner and the Matrix games, are
   based upon genre movies, while many others like Deus Ex and System
   Shock are original works.

   Several role-playing games (RPGs) called Cyberpunk exist: Cyberpunk
   (aka Cyberpunk 2013), Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk v3 (aka Cyberpunk
   203X), by R. Talsorian Games, and GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve
   Jackson Games as a module of the GURPS family of RPGs. Cyberpunk 2020
   was designed with the settings of William Gibson's writings in mind,
   and to some extent with his approval, unlike the (perhaps more
   creative) approach taken by FASA in producing the Shadowrun game (see
   below). Both games are set in the near future, in a world where
   cybernetics are prominent. Netrunner is a collectible card game
   introduced in 1996, based on the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game; it
   launched with a popular online alternate reality game called Webrunner,
   which let players hack into an evil futuristic corporation's mainframe.
   In addition, Iron Crown Enterprises released an RPG named Cyberspace,
   now out of print.

   In 1990, in an odd reconvergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the U.S.
   Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games's headquarters and
   confiscated all their computers under Operation Sundevil, which was a
   massive crackdown on computer hackers and crackers. This
   was—allegedly—because the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook could be used to
   perpetrate computer crime. That was, in fact, not the main reason for
   the raid, but after the event it was too late to correct the public's
   impression. Steve Jackson Games later won a lawsuit against the Secret
   Service, aided by the freshly minted Electronic Frontier Foundation.
   This event has achieved a sort of notoriety, which has extended to the
   book itself as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a
   tagline on the front cover, which reads "The book that was seized by
   the U.S. Secret Service! (See p. 4)". Inside, the book provides a
   summary of the raid and its aftermath.

   2004 brought the publication of a number of new cyberpunk RPGs, chief
   among which was Ex Machina, a more cinematic game including four
   complete settings and a focus on updating the gaming side of the genre
   to current themes among cyberpunk fiction. These tropes include a
   stronger political angle, conveying the alienation of the genre and
   even incorporating some transhuman themes. 2006 saw the long-awaited
   publication of R. Talsorian's Cyberpunk v3, the followup to Cyberpunk
   2020, although many see the new edition as more Transhumanist or
   Postcyberpunk than truly Cyberpunk.

   Role-playing games have also produced one of the more original takes on
   the genre in the form of the 1989 game series Shadowrun. Here, the
   setting is still that of the dystopian near future; however, it also
   incorporates heavy elements of fantasy literature and games, such as
   magic, spirits, elves, and dragons. Shadowrun's cyberpunk facets were
   modeled in large part on William Gibson's writings, and the game's
   original publishers, FASA, have been accused by some as having directly
   ripped off Gibson's work without even a statement of influence. Gibson,
   meanwhile, has stated his dislike of the inclusion of elements of high
   fantasy within setting elements that he helped pioneer. Nevertheless,
   Shadowrun has introduced many to the genre, and still remains popular
   among gamers.

   The trans-genre RPG Torg (published by West End Games) also included a
   variant cyberpunk setting (or "cosm") called the Cyberpapacy. This
   setting was originally a medieval religious dystopia which underwent a
   sudden Tech Surge. Instead of corporations or corrupt governments, the
   Cyberpapacy was dominated by the " False Papacy of Avignon". Instead of
   an Internet, hackers roamed the " GodNet", a computer network rife with
   overtly religious symbolism, home to angels, demons, and other biblical
   figures. Another "cosm" setting that was part of the Torg gameworld was
   Nippon Tech, which incorporated other aspects of cyberpunk, such as
   dominant corporations with professional assassins. It did not, however,
   deal with computer networks as a major part of the setting.

   Cyberpunk has also been used in computer adventure games, most notably
   the now freeware Beneath a Steel Sky (published by Revolution
   Software), Neuromancer (published by Interplay in 1988), Bloodnet
   (published by Microprose 1993) and Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller ( Gametek
   1994). The action adventure game Neuromancer, is based directly on the
   novel's main theme including Chiba City, some of the characters,
   hacking of databases and cyberspace decks.

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