TECHNOLIGICAL CHANGES REFLECTED IN CYBERPUNK FICTION

1. About Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech
and low life." The name was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story
"Cyberpunk," published in 1983. It features advanced science, such as information technology
and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.
Cyberpunk works are well situated within postmodern literature. Cyberpunk plots often
center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and mega-corporations, and tend to
be set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels
such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune.
The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be 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.
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." Lawrence Person
Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson,
Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley.
Many influential films such as Blade Runner and the Matrix trilogy can be seen as
prominent examples of the cyberpunk style and theme. 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, Akira and Ghost in the Shell being among the most notable.

2.Technological Changes Reflected in (Post)Cyberpunk Fiction

The twentieth century, unlike any other before it, saw an accelerated pace of
technological changes, and the first decade of the twenty- first century has carried right on.
The original cyberpunks' protest against the elderly science-fiction writers of the Golden Age
was partly rooted in an objective change in actual reality - in many respects, over half a
century, everyday technology had evolved beyond the standard themes of Golden-Age science
fiction. In the 1980s, and increasingly in the 1990s and in the Noughties, the public interest
shifted away from the space race and robotics and towards fresh technologies that, more often
than not, were personal, portable, small, cheap, ubiquitous, disposable and out of centralised
control.
To professor Florin Piteas questions (about the contrast between these two visions of the
future belonging to two different generations of science-fiction writers) Do you believe that
some of your work was not only science- fictional, but also visionary? Do you feel vindicated
against the Golden-Age science-fiction authors whose starships-and-robots vision failed to
materialise? Or do you have an entirely different feeling about the ways in which the world
has changed since the 1980s? John Shirley 1 answered :
No one is entirely right in predicting the future. I predicted ATM dealings, and the primacy of electronic money; I think I predicted some social patterns that came true. I do think
our society is closer to the cyberpunk model (dystopian, street oriented) than to the GoldenAge model. But my main drive was always as much about social criticism and trying to create
some kind of art (in my pulplike, not always sophisticated manner), as about futurological
prediction. Even with many Golden- Age writers, much of the best science fiction was always
about social satire, creating a mirror for our own times through imagery set in the future. It's
both. 2
Far from stagnating between 1980 and 2010, space exploration, planetology, astronomy,
astrophysics and robotics advanced by leaps and bounds, yet they somehow failed to capture
the interest of large audiences the way the Apollo missions to the Moon did in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Instead, young generations of people in the developed countries became
1
2

John Shirley (b. 1953) is an American writer of science fiction and punk music composer
(Florin Pitea, "The Air Crackles - An Interview with John Shirley")

everyday users of personal computers, mobile telephones, portable musical devicon, the
Internet and the global positioning system (to name only a few), and (post)cyberpunk authors
who paid attention to thoan technological trends extrapolated on them in their literary works.
That is why, in this chapter, we are going to examine a number of technologies that were either
developed in the last three decades or became very widespread in this interval and, given the
frequency with which they were mentioned in (post)cyberpunk fiction, became easily
recognisable motifs of this literary genre, or, in somr cases, cliches.