8 Bit Cyberpunk
Thora Buckner
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech",[1] featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay.[2] Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip Jos Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977.[3] Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Frank Miller's Ronin is an example of a cyberpunk graphic novel. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation (also directed by Otomo) later popularizing the subgenre.
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, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.
Cyberpunk plots often involve conflict between artificial intelligence, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune.[9] The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things").[10] Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction.[11] There are sources who view that cyberpunk has shifted from a literary movement to a mode of science fiction due to the limited number of writers and its transition to a more generalized cultural formation.[12][13][14]
The origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles, techniques, and archetypes. Reacting to conventional storytelling, New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture, generally with dystopian outcomes. Writers like Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Philip Jos Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, and Harlan Ellison often examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the ongoing sexual revolution, drawing themes and influence from experimental literature of Beat Generation authors such as William S. Burroughs, and art movements like Dadaism.[15][16]
Ballard, a notable critic of literary archetypes in science fiction, instead employs metaphysical and psychological concepts, seeking greater relevance to readers of the day. Ballard's work is considered have had a profound influence on cyberpunk's development,[17] As evidenced by the term "Bellardian" becoming used to ascribe literary excellence amongst science fiction social circles.[18]
Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova is considered a forerunner of cyberpunk literature[20] includes neural implants, a now popular cyberpunk trope for human computer interfaces [21] and has influenced one of the genres most well known cyberpunk novels, William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968, shares common dystopian themes with later works by Gibson and Sterling, and is praised for its "realist" exploration of cybernetic and artificial intelligence ideas and ethics, being favourably compared to previous landmark works such as Robot by Isaac Asimov.[citation needed]
The term "cyberpunk" first appeared as the title of a short story by Bruce Bethke, written in 1980 and published in Amazing Stories in 1983.[22][23] The name was picked up by Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and popularized in his editorials.[24][25]
Bethke says he made two lists of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology. He described the idea thus:
The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly "speaking computer".[26]
About that time in 1984, William Gibson's novel Neuromancer was published, delivering a glimpse of a future encompassed by what became an archetype of cyberpunk "virtual reality", with the human mind being fed light-based worldscapes through a computer interface. Some, perhaps ironically including Bethke himself, argued at the time that the writers whose style Gibson's books epitomized should be called "Neuromantics", a pun on the name of the novel plus "New Romantics", a term used for a New Wave pop music movement that had just occurred in Britain, but this term did not catch on. Bethke later paraphrased Michael Swanwick's argument for the term: "the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly imitating Neuromancer".
Sterling was another writer who played a central role, often consciously, in the cyberpunk genre, variously seen as either keeping it on track, or distorting its natural path into a stagnant formula.[29] In 1986, he edited a volume of cyberpunk stories called Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, an attempt to establish what cyberpunk was, from Sterling's perspective.[30]
Bookending the cyberpunk era, Bethke himself published a novel in 1995 called Headcrash, like Snow Crash a satirical attack on the genre's excesses. Fittingly, it won an honor named after cyberpunk's spiritual founder, the Philip K. Dick Award. It satirized the genre in this way:
...full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers' basements ... They're total wankers and losers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures. You know, cyberpunks.[31]
Primary figures in the cyberpunk movement include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Bruce Bethke, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley. Philip K. Dick (author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, from which the film Blade Runner was adapted) is also seen by some as prefiguring the movement.[32]
Blade Runner can be seen as a quintessential example of the cyberpunk style and theme.[9] Video games, board games, and tabletop role-playing games, such as Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk writing and movies. Beginning in the early 1990s, some trends in fashion and music were also labeled as cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is also featured prominently in anime and manga (Japanese cyberpunk), with Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop being among the most notable.[33]
In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality.[38] A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk settings are dystopias with corruption, computers, and computer networks. Giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic, and even military power.[original research?]
The economic and technological state of Japan is a regular theme in the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s. Of Japan's influence on the genre, William Gibson said, "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk."[39] Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and "city lights, receding" was used by Gibson as one of the genre's first metaphors for cyberspace and virtual reality.[40]
The cityscapes of Hong Kong[41] has had major influences in the urban backgrounds, ambiance and settings in many cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner and Shadowrun. Ridley Scott envisioned the landscape of cyberpunk Los Angeles in Blade Runner to be "Hong Kong on a very bad day".[42] The streetscapes of the Ghost in the Shell film were based on Hong Kong. Its director Mamoru Oshii felt that Hong Kong's strange and chaotic streets where "old and new exist in confusing relationships" fit the theme of the film well.[41] Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City is particularly notable for its disorganized hyper-urbanization and breakdown in traditional urban planning to be an inspiration to cyberpunk landscapes. During the British rule of Hong Kong, it was an area neglected by both the British and Qing administrations, embodying elements of liberalism in a dystopian context. Portrayals of East Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk have been criticized as Orientalist and promoting racist tropes playing on American and European fears of East Asian dominance;[43][44] this has been referred to as "techno-Orientalism".[45]