Somewhere between the recent release of Projeckt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, the remake of Squaresoft’s seminal Final Fantasy 7, or possibly a recent rereading of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about cyberpunk as a genre, what it does, what’s its appeal, what it aims to accomplish? Whether it is the supreme vehicle for highlighting the issues, crises, conflicts of today’s and future societies for those who write and think in terms of Afro-futurism. I mean if the aim of writing is to provoke thought about the real world and more specifically the plight of the millions of African Americans living in the impoverished diaspora isn’t it better to make our fictional worlds as close to the real world as possible so that our insights are that much more relevant. That is to say for a long time I felt Cyberpunks strength was economics and the broader of appeal of grunt and spook style combat vs sword and sorcery.
As a genre Cyberpunk was born out of the New Wave Science Fiction of the 1960’s and 1970’s and carries the strength of that movement within it as writers came to look for new forms and new ideas in the drug culture, new technologies, and sexual revolutions of those times. As of today the genre includes definitive works in film, Literature, video-games, comics, manga, and television. Common trappings of the genre include urban corruption, street samurai with codes, street samurai without codes, megalomaniac AI, kids with telekinetic powers, globe spanning Mega Corporations, and all other forms of godlike macguffins. It is modern. It is exciting. It is urban. It is Grimy. It is Shiny….
I remember seeing somewhere that Gibson was big on the visual aspects of his novels and if you’ve ever read the Sprawl trilogy you can feel this impression in his sometimes overly long, sometimes overly psychedelic descriptions of decking, and hacking and tuning in, but the best part of Cyberpunk in my own experience at least, is the sort of marriage of economic possibility and desperation that presents itself when we see our lone poor and grime covered hero stare down the big bad of the super rich corporation A la Cloud Strife vs Rufus on the rooftop of the Shinra building in the above-mentioned Final Fantasy 7. The inherent tech based structure gives the genre good room to mock and call out…capitalism, the rich, financial inequality, Western ways of thinking, overly secular or religious ways of thinking, and sometimes, just sometimes, even racism. That’s some good action and primarily I think the number one reason I find myself going with more modern speculative fiction these days in my free time these days.
Which I suppose is a good way of saying I like my sci-fi hard and rooted in reality and for a long time I thought this economic based setting was the supreme strength of the genre. Lately though on reading or rather rereading Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian I am wondering if perhaps the real appeal for me as a reader was not the economics, or even the science married with futurism. If perhaps the strength is somehow deeper on a psychological level. Cyberpunk is economic. It is modern. It is shiny. It is… religious?
Or at least every decker, telekinetic, and street samurai worth his weight comes face to face in some sense with his own test of gear and god. Cyberpunk films and the beloved Mass Effect franchise are full of fast typing sweating hackers, juiced up jacked in, pushing their hacks to the limits. Which I suppose can be read as a stand-in for the effort of actually caring about something enough to take it to it’s limits. But somewhere in there under all that technology, and wiring, and is the romantic idea that like Frankenstein every Joe Blow hacker when he confronts the villain at last is on the verge of unleashing or halting some world changing story, some society altering new technology. A few scenes from the matrix trilogy quickly come to mind and perhaps one or two from Dan Simmons Hyperion. The Keats Cybrid looking to understand his place in the world but past and future, asks Ummon “are there multiple futures?” Ummon the ultra distant Ai intelligience responds “Does a dog have fleas?” Thus the prophet of Hyperion was born and man and machine cross over. At least in that fictional reality created by Dan Simmons. That’s not economics or critique, nor disdain for the rich, or correction, those are the big ideas, philosophical ideas in a cyberpunk capsule.
Which is to say I am still at a lost as to why I love the Cyberpunk. Is it the social criticism, the new modes of living and thinking, my passing fad-like interest into subjects like Marxism, Post Modernism, Black Futurism and the Dharmi Bums. Or is it the chance to Finally look the villains of this woe begotten world in the eye with a Gun and deck and tell them their time has come. Who can say for sure, but it sure is easier to hate in The Sprawl and Night City than in Gondor.