This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
2/27/03
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Literary and Artistic Responses to
Information as Work and Power (works
that respond to or criticize the postindustrial
paradigm):
"Cyberpunk literature,
in general, deals with marginalized
people in technologically-enhanced
cultural 'systems'. In cyberpunk
stories' settings, there is
usually a 'system' which dominates
the lives of most 'ordinary'
people, be it an oppressive
government, a group of large,
paternalistic corporations,
or a fundamentalist religion.
These systems are enhanced
by certain technologies (today
advancing at a rate that is
bewildering to most people),
particularly 'information
technology' (computers, the
mass media), making the system
better at keeping those within
it inside it.
Often this technological system
extends into its human 'components'
as well, via brain implants,
prosthetic limbs, cloned or
genetically engineered organs,
etc. Humans themselves become
part of 'the Machine'. This
is the 'cyber' aspect of cyberpunk.
However, in any cultural system,
there are always those who
live on its margins, on 'the
Edge': criminals, outcasts,
visionaries, or those who
simply want freedom for its
own sake. Cyberpunk literature
focuses on these people, and
often on how they turn the
system's technological tools
to their own ends. This is
the 'punk' aspect of cyberpunk."
The
first note from Fredric Jameson's
Postmodernism, or The Culture
Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991):
"This is the place to
regret the absence from this
book of a chapter on cyberpunk,
henceforth,for many of us,
the supreme literary
expression if not of postmodernism,
then of late capitalism itself."
"Cyperspace" as
Jameson's missing "cognitive
map" of postindustrialism
(cf., Tim Bray's visualizations
of Web space)
"Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate
operators, in every nation,
by children being taught
mathematical concepts. . . .
A graphic representation
of data abstracted from
the banks of every computer
in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace
of the mind, clusters
and constellations of
data. Like city lights,
receding. . . ."
William Gibson's Neuromancer
and Cyberpunk Fiction: A Bibliography
Influences on Cyperpunk Fiction
Literary precedents: (Gibson originally
an English major)
Gibson: Pynchon
has been a favorite writer
and a major influence all
along. In many ways I see
him as almost the start
of a certain mutant pop
culture imagery with esoteric
historical and scientific
information. Pynchon is
a kind of mythic hero of
mine, and I suspect that
if you talk with a lot of
recent SF writers you'll
find they've all read Gravity's
Rainbow (1973) several
times and have been very
much influenced by it. I
was into Pynchon early on-
I remember seeing a New
York Times review of V.
when it first came out-
I was just a kid- and thinking,
Boy, that sounds like some
really weird shit!
After a burglar tampers
with the Mac she's been
using, Cayce finds herself
on the trail of what may
be an international conspiracy
or may, like the footage
itself, be merely ''an illusion
of meaningfulness, faulty
pattern recognition.'' As
an ode to paranoia, ''Pattern
Recognition'' resembles
not that Pynchonian bible,
''Gravity's Rainbow,'' but
''The Crying of Lot 49.''
In fact, it can almost be
read as a tribute or, as
Hollywood would say, a remake.
After all, when Pynchon
explored entropy, counterculture
and the postal monopoly
in 1966, there was no Internet.
Sci-Fi precedents:
"New Wave" science fiction
of 1960s-70s
[from
SF Timeline 1960-1970:] "The
psychedelic 1960's love-generation political
revolution hippie "drugs, sex,
rock & roll" era penetrated
science fiction with a movement called
"The New Wave", characterized
by stylistic experiment, rejection of
standards, emphasis on relevance, bold
and sometimes obscene language, and
altered states of consciousness. This
movement reached its high point in Harlan
Ellison [as editor] "Dangerous
Visions" (Garden City NY: Doubleday),
the most important anthology of the
decade by far. "
Harlan Ellison (Dangerous Visions
story series; "A Boy and His
Dog", 1969)
Phillip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep?, 1968; Ridley
Scott's Bladerunner, 1982)
Vernor Vinge, True Names (1981)
["high-resolution EEGs as input/output
devices," "the Other Plane,"
"true names"]
[Gibson on how he thought
of "cyberspace"]:
I was walking down Granville
Street, Vancouver's version
of "The Strip,"
and I was looking into one
of the video arcades. I could
see in the physical intensity
of their postures how rapt
the kids inside were. It was
like one of those closed systems
out of a Pynchon novel: a
feedback loop with photons
coming off the screens into
the kids' eyes, neurons moving
through their bodies, and
electrons moving through the
video game. These kids clearly
believed in the space games
projected. Everyone I know
who works with computers seems
to develop a belief that there's
some kind of actual space
behind the screen, someplace
you can't see but you know
is there.
popular culture as communicated through
media:
video games, film, TV, music
genres: detective, gangster,
Western, Hong Kong kung-fu, Japanese
samurai, Spaghetti Western (Gibson's
characters as media pastiches ("cowboy,"
"gangster," "moll,"
"samurai") (p. 213)
the countercultural and subcultural
"edge" of popular culture:
"street" culture, drugs, gangs,
Rastafarianism, "punk," "kung
fu," hackers
Well-Known Cyperpunk Writers
William Gibson
Neuromancer (NY: Berkley,
1984) (won Hugo, Nebula, and Phillip
K. Dick awards) (Japanese translation
by Hisashi Kuroma in 1985)
Count Zero (NY: Arbor House,
1986)
Burning Chrome (NY: Arbor
House, 1986)
Mona Lisa Overdrive (NY:
Bantam, 1988)
Screenplay for Aliens III
(with Bruce Sterling) The Difference
Engine (NY: Bantam, 1990)
Virtual Light (NY: Bantam,
1993)
Idoru (NY: Berkley, 1996)
All Tomorrow's Parties (NY:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1999)
Pattern Recognition (NY:
Putnam, 2003)
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead),
engravings by Dennis Ashbaugh (NY:
Kevin Begos Publishing, 1992)
Bruce Sterling
The Artificial Kid (NY: Ace,
1980)
Schismatrix (NY: Arbor House,
1985)
ed., Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk
Anthology (NY: Arbor House, 1986)
Islands in the Net (NY: Morrow,
1988)
Crystal Express (Sauk City,
Wisc.: Arkham House, 1989)
Holy Fire (NY: Bantam, 1996)
A Good Old-Fashioned Future
(NY: Bantam, 1999)
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and
Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
(New York: Bantam, 1992); also available
online as freeware from numerous sources,
including versions with a Preface
and Epilogue added in 1994 (e.g.,
<http://www.lysator.liu.se/etexts/hacker/>)
Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash (NY: Bantam, 1992)
The Diamond Age, or, A Young
Lady's Illustrated Primer (NY:
Bantam, 1995)
Some authors sharing
a similar "cyber" and/or "punk"
universe:
Greg Bear,Blood Music (NY: Arbor House,
1985)
Pat Cadigan
Mindplayers (NY: Bantam,
1987)
Synners ((NY: Bantam,
1991)
Greg Egan,Diaspora (NY: Harper, 1998)
Jeff Noon,Nymphomation (Trafalgar, 2000)
Rudy Rucker
Software (NY: Ace, 1982)
Wetware (NY: Avon, 1988)
Selected Secondary Works
Larry
McCaffery, ed., Storming the
Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk
and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham:
Duke Univ. Press, 1991); contains a
nice selection of essays and interviews
on cyberpunk. Esp. useful:
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay,
Jr., "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism"
Veronica
Hollinger, "Cybernetic
Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism"
Brooks Landon,
"Bet On It: Cyber/video/punk
performance"
Timothy
Leary, "The Cyberpunk:
The Individual as Reality Pilot"
Larry McCaffery
"An Interview with William
Gibson"
"Cutting Up: Cyberpunk,
Punk Music, and Urban Decontextualizations"
Brian McHale,
"POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM"
Bruce Sterling,
"Preface" from Mirrorshades
Darko Suvin,
"On Gibson and Cyberpunk SF"
Takayuki
Tatsumi, "The Japanese
Reflection of Mirrorshades"
Andrew Ross,
"Cyberpunk in Boystown," in
his Strange Weather: Culture, Science,
and Technology in the Age of Limits
(London: Verso, 1991) [an acid critique
of cyberpunk in the mode of British
Retro-Marxist meets North American Cyber-Macho-Boys
from Suburbia]
Scott Bukatman
Terminal Identity: The Virtual
Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993)
"Gibson's Typewriter,"
South Atlantic Quarterly 92
(1994): 627-45
Michael Benedict,
ed., Cyberspace: First Steps
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992)
[on the construction of computer "cyberspace"]
Impact on Recent Films
Johnny Mnemonic (1995), dir.
Robert Longo [story and screenplay by
William Gibson]
The Matrix, dir. Wachowski
brothers (1999)
eXistenZ, dir. David Cronenberg
(1999)
Plan for lectures
on Neuromancer
Today: "extrinsic" approach
to the "world" of the novel
(the contexts, background, and setting)
Next lecture: "intrinsic"
interpretation of the narrative and
characters of the novel
Neuromancer:
An Imagination of the Postindustrial World
Written in the 1980s-90s during the same
period as the encounter of American corporations
with the new Japanese business model,
global competition, knowledge work, information
technology, and restructuring, cyberpunk
is the literary equivalent of books like
Workplace 2000 or The Virtual
Corporation. It is an imagination
of postindustrialism, but a "kinked"
one.
Why start with the background "world"
in which Gibson sets his novel?
McCaffery: There are
so many references to rock music
and television in your work
that it sometimes seems your
writing is as much influenced
by MTV as by literature. What
impact have other media had
on your sensibility?
Gibson: Probably more
than fiction. . . .
I've been influenced by Lou
Reed, for instance, as much
as I've been by any "fiction"
writer. I was going to use a
quote from an old Velvet Underground
song—"Watch out for
worlds behind you" (from
"Sunday Morning")—as
an epigraph for Neuromancer.
Neuromancer as
a remix of old media (TV, film,
books and magazines, "dub" music)
Ashpool's dead-media collection
"The room was very
large, cluttered with an
assortment of things that
made no sense to Case. He
saw a gray steel rack of
old-fashioned Sony monitors . . .
Molly's eyes darted from
a huge Telefunken
entertainment console to
shelves of antique disk
recordings, their crumbling
spines cased in clear plastic,
to a wide worktable littered
with slabs of silicon."
(p. 183)
A prophecy of new media
simstim (Tally Isham, Sense/Net
star; the Panthern Moderns as terrorist
media artists)
Zaibatsu: "A Japanese
conglomerate or cartel [Japanese
zai wealth . . .
batsu powerful person
or family . . ."
(American Heritage Talking
Dictionary, ver. 4.0)
cf. Neal Stephenson's "phyles"
and "claves" in
The Diamond Age (1995),
pp. 260-61:
"Why
do the Vickys have such
a big clave?" Nell
asked. . . .
"Well,
each phyle has a different
way, and some ways are better
suited to making money than
others, so some have a lot
of territory and others
don't"
"What
do you mean, a different
way?"
"To
make money you have to work
hard—to live your life
a certain way. The Atlantans
[Vicky's] all live that
way, it's part of their
culture. The Nipponese too.
So the Nipponese and the
Atlantans have as much money
as all the other phyles
put together."
(cf., Eric S. Nylund, Signal
to Noise, 1998)
A world of business as radical change
and "creative destruction"
E.g., the new technology that allows
the Chiba city black-market biotech
firm to leapfrog competition; corporate
assassinations, kidnappings, and defections
in later Gibson novels
A world of global competition
Paradigm of Japan, Inc.
Hybrid Japanese, American ("Sprawl"),
European scene of the novel
Fusion culture: (pp. 9, 19)
Freeside as the epitome of globalism
(a free port like Hong Kong, except
extraterrestrial)
A world of knowledge work and information
technology
"Cyberpunk literature,
in general, deals with marginalized
people in technologically-enhanced
cultural 'systems'. In cyberpunk
stories' settings, there is
usually a 'system' which dominates
the lives of most 'ordinary'
people, be it an oppressive
government, a group of large,
paternalistic corporations,
or a fundamentalist religion.
