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.