The Style that Defines Cyberpunk
A movement is an organized action by people working toward a goal. A literary movement may be based on the goals of writing about a particular subject or writing about many subjects while using the same type of style or language. The latter is the classification of literary movements under which cyberpunk falls. Cyberpunk is a literary movement in which the authors are working toward the goal of writing fiction that focuses on the actual or projected technological nature of society and that utilizes sexual imagery as a representation of the importance of sex in our culture. The cyberpunk authors use the technology and sex to add a realistic feel to their prose.
The elements that make up the technological nature of our society include nuclear science, fusion of organic and inorganic matter, computers, artificial organs, genetic engineering, the internet and virtual reality. The brief list consists of some of the many technological advances in our society and in the futuristic societies created by cyberpunk writers.
The subject of sex is used in cyberpunk prose because it is so pervasive in society. Sex is everywhere. The president of the US pointed out the bad taste of the Calvin Klein commercials which contained children in sequences where a photographer asks them to do perform certain poses. One gets an ugly feeling that uncle perv is asking them to do these poses and somehow enjoys it. Sex is so pervasive that it is present in advertising, film and television. The cyberpunk authors create futuristic societies that contains sex in an amount equivalent to present day society to add a realistic feel to their view of the future. The use of technology and sex are evident in the following st...
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... technology to consider the possible consequences of their use. People may disagree with the claim that all cyberpunk writers have the goal of writing science fiction about the technological and sexual aspects of society, and the author acknowledges that his knowledge of the cyberpunk movement is limited. However, given the preponderance of sexual and technological material in the stories read, it may be construed that, on the whole, prose in the cyberpunk genre possess these elements.
Works Cited
Gibson, William. "The Gernsback Continuum." Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace, 1988. 1-11.
Maddox, Tom. "Snake Eyes." Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace, 1988. 12-33.
Shirley, John. "Freezone." Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace, 1988. 139-177.
Reed, Peter J. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Writers for the 70's). New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1972
Kurt Vonnegut’s science fiction, short story, “Harrison Bergeron” satirizes the defective side of an ideal, utopian American society in 2081, where “everyone was finally equal” (Vonnegut 1). When you first begin to read “Harrison Bergeron”, through an objective, nonchalant voice of the narrator, nothing really overly suggests negativity, yet the conclusion and the narrator's subtle description of the events show how comically tragic it really is. Vonnegut’s use of morbid satire elicits a strong response from the readers as it makes you quickly realize that this scenario does not resemble a utopian society at all, but an oppressive, government and technology-controlled society. “A dystopian society is a
Solecki, Sam. "Introduction." Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Ed. Sam Solecki. Montréal: Véhicule, 1985. 7-11.
Warrick, Patricia S. "Science Fiction Images of Computers and Robots." The Cybernetic Imagination. N.p.: The MIT, 1980. 53-79. Rpt. in Contemporary Lieterary Criticism. Ed. Jean C. Stine. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 53-56. Print.
Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill. "Heart of Darkness." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 126-86. Print.
In Bruce Sterling's article, "Cyberpunk in the Nineties," he explained how public opinion had defined himself, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, and Gibson as the cyberpunk "gurus" in the 1980's. Because of being labeled cyberpunk "gurus," the public had come to understand the definition of cyberpunk as "anything that cyberpunks write." To break this definition of cyberpunk established by popular public opinion, I will pursue giving cyberpunk a more definite definition. After reading numerous cyberpunk fiction stories, I noticed reoccurring themes in these stories. I believe these themes can form a criteria under which a story can be defined as cyberpunk. These criteria are total enhancement and integration of everyday life by technology, some degree of pleasure (by the author) in explaining this technology, cyber-lingo, and some degree of global connectiveness.
As time progresses technology increases and improves. However, this progression could pose as a serious problem for generations to come, and New York University department chair of communication arts Neil Postman expresses this concern in his 1992 book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. In the opening of Postman’s book he expresses that technology is indeed our friend because technology provides our society with fast and easy convenience and accessibility. As with most other things, there are always two sides to everything and Postman notes, that “of course, there is a dark side to this friend” referring to technology (Postman, 1992). Many people do not address the negative sides to technology and just turn a blind eye to them so it is refreshing to have someone point them out and discuss the issues technology possess on our society.
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. “The Norton Introduction to Literature.” New York: W.W Norton &, 2014. Print.
For nearly half of a century, fragments of our society have continually made outward attempts to create and popularize movements that try to ‘go against’, ‘take over’ or ‘change’ popular culture; in even more far-fetched examples, ‘change’ society as a whole. This idea, as referred to by Roszak in the 1960’s, is commonly known as “counterculture”. A counterculture movement takes one or multiple social norms from established culture that it is in opposition to, and fights said norms. This idea of “culture jamming”, a term coined by the San Franciso area band Negativland, is built on a hope that a counterculture movement can reshape the norms it tries to destroy, into ones which suit its’ needs and ideologies. In the vast majority of cases, the objective of counterculture has not even remotely been reached; in fact, most attempts have failed miserably, unable to attract even the most minute amount of noteworthy attention or following.
The Postmodernist movement begun after World War II in which, high and low culture are questionable in the view of society and Art. The postmodernist movement in literature creates a new set of ideals for fiction, such as the metafiction, the fable like representation in novels, the pastiche, irony, and satire. Fredric Jameson speaks about the movement and its theory in his essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”. He questions postmodernism in society as it creates the new societal norm of popular culture. On the other hand, Jean Baudrillard analyzes the simulacra of postmodernism in “The Precession of Simulacra”. Baudrillard speaks of the “truth” and “reality” also as a questionable representation for the reader. Yet, both critics agree that postmodernist literature is depthless. Spiegelman’s Maus series is a metafiction, which tells the story of Art Spiegelman’s journey of writing this novel through the present-day retelling of Vladek Spiegelman’s life during the Holocaust. However, as a postmodernist text, Jameson and Baudrillard calls it depthless and an “unreal” representation. Nevertheless, the representation of Maus presents the characteristics of a postmodernist text, but argues that it is not depthless because of the representation of an authoritative view, a historical continuum, and the text does not depict itself as a mode of pop culture.
New York: Random House, 1989.
In the early 1980's, cyberpunk was used as a label to describe a new form of science fiction written by a group of five writers, which challenged the traditional genres associated with science fiction (Shiner, 7). SF used highly imaginative ideas to project scientific phenomenas, resulting in dreamy, stylized stories of space colonies and flying space crafts. This new science fiction was different, because it incorporated present global, social and technological situations to help induce the future of the world. It generated new outcomes for the future's high technological, society and global environment that would help categorize it into a specific form of writing known as cyberpunk.
In conclusion, technology has evolved and influenced our society drastically when it comes to human interaction. William Gibson’s Burning Chrome is a postmodernism/cyberpunk story that blurs the boundaries between what is being human. The story also blurs the line between the physical and the virtual that a human being interacts. The advances we had made with our technology have gotten to the point where it has entwined with human anatomy. Gibson’s novel was partly based on how our civilization is more and more coming together with technology. Another thing Gibson portrayed was how a person’s mind is transferred into a whole new world with the use of our modern devices. In the end, our society’s interaction with both machines and humans is getting to the furuturistic virtural world that Burning Chrome depicts in its text.
In the latter half of the twentieth century society, culture and science evolved visions and capability around the common prefix ‘cyber’. It took on several virtual, computational, functional, scientific, sexual and criminal connotations. In the 21st Century, many computational notions have been replaced by ‘e’ to mean ‘of computer’ - however ‘cyber’, represented in music, words and films emerging at this time, which communicate the content of culture at the time, not simply technology – have not become ePeople, eMusic or eFilms, but remained postulated in cyberculture.
In the late twentieth century, two words cybernetics and punk were merged together to form a term that would label the art of combining the science of communication, with an anti-social or rebellious attitude. An ideology was established that included an infatuation with high-tech tools and disdain for conventional usage of them (Elmer-Dewitt 59). Many descriptive phrases have been connected with the cyberpunk culture. An activist in the movement calle...