Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode we'll be giving you the 101 on cyberpunk. Neon lights, shiny chrome, a pulsating eighties synth track, mirror shades, and black trench coats. Put those together as, and you probably have an image in your mind of a host of eighties and nineties action movies because these are the defining aesthetics of the cyberpunk era.  But cyberpunk as a sub genre of science fiction is about so much more than just the aesthetic. We really need to go into some detail about it. In previous episodes, we've mentioned cyberpunk a couple times and it's gonna be relevant for future episodes as well, so I thought we'd take a quick moment to step out of the Westworld episode sequence - and that gives us an opportunity to kind of bring the numbering of both our podcast and season four of Westworld back in alignment - and look at what we mean when we're talking about cyberpunk. 

Now, cyberpunk loosely defined is a sub genre of science fiction that came to prominence in the 1980s. Works of literature in the sub genre generally have a few defining elements including being hard sci-fi based on earth in the near future with a dystopian background.  There's often a focus on the intersection of computers, technology, and society, and it may include characters that skirt the law or are beyond the boundaries of society, but despite all those characteristics, every single work that might be included in the sub genre also defies those characteristics in certain ways.

Key authors may include William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neil Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan and others, and once the sub genre really started gaining attention in terms of awards and publication, as the eighties progressed, a lot of different authors had cyberpunk elements that were included in their stories.  Much like any field of artistic endeavor, there's never one point that's the beginning of anything with cyberpunk. It's often clearly attributed to William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, but there were still some predecessors. The big influences on the genre most definitely include Burroughs, Ballard, and Brunner. We could probably throw in Bester as well. Each of those authors had their own unique elements, which were incorporated into the genre of cyberpunk. 

For William S Burroughs, who was highly influential in Gibson's own writing, it wasn't just the noir that can be seen in titles such as Naked Lunch, but also the disdain for the human body, something that Burroughs sees as obsolete can be seen mirrored in the retreat into cyberspace that the console cowboys in Gibson's work seem to all undergo. However, possibly the two most important contributions of Burroughs to cyberpunk is the concept of the viral function of language, and its continuous evolution - the way it functions as a replicator - and we'll see the influence of that in later works, including those by Neil Stephenson, and the other influence is that of technique. Part of Burroughs' method is using something he calls “folding in” where he will cut up the various pieces of texts and then rearrange it in order to develop and create new words and concepts, a technique he borrowed from Brion Gysin. This technique was also employed by Gibson when he was trying to coin the term cyberspace.

Shifting gears to author J.G. Ballard, we see that his work provides the bridge between Burroughs and the rest of cyberpunk literature. Author Brent Wood goes on in 1996 to note that Ballard kind of comments on Baudrillard and the nature of simulacra in his novel Crash. You know, that novel was famously adapted for the screen in 1996 by director David Cronenberg, of which more we'll have to say much later. If anyone recalls that now it's mostly for James Spader's performance, but the main idea at the heart of the film and the novel, the idea of the simulation explored through the characters that were existing in the marginality of society and the idea of an accident being a way to escape the current systems of control that we exist in. Other academics like Paul Virilio have gone deep into the idea of speed and accidents in the control society, but that's way outside of our scope right now. 

Of the other authors, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Alfred Bester, who's work The Stars, My Destination was deeply influential in the sci-fi genre. In it we can see the very first mention of synesthesia, and the literary way that he manages to capture that otherworldly experience influence the later cyberpunk authors as they tried to describe the liminal place of cyberspace, a virtual realm that did not exist at the time. 

The final predecessor of the Cyberpunk genre that we wanna mention is John Bruner. Of his works, two novels stand out, the first being Stand on Zanzibar from 1968. It deals with life on an overcrowded earth in the early 21st century, taking place now in what is a recent past, but it's the way the Bruner goes about world building that near future that really influenced the cyberpunk genre using the snippets of media and presenting a world as being a lived in place, much like our own. 

The other Bruner novel we'd like to look at is, of course, 1975’s Shockwave Rider. This book was in turn inspired by futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, describing a postmodern world of quickly changing styles, fashions and identities. Bruner's novel is important as it represents one of the very first instances of computer hacking is presented in literature of here the protagonist is hacking the phone networks using a technique, much similar to what's called freaking. That's with a PH. The computer system is much like the Minitel system that was used in France, and the protagonist is able to interject a worm or a virus into the system in order to take it down. You might remember this plot point from other movies like Independence Day, but this is where it all came from and the cyberpunk genre took that and ran with it throughout the eighties and nineties.

And with the main influences laid out, we start to transition into the cyberpunk era with the start of the eighties. Now, most of the authors that were leading lights in the genre were working well before the eighties, and there were a few short stories in novellas that were published prior to cyberpunk really coalescing as a genre.

The main one of these, of course, is 1981's True Names by Vernor Vinge. True Names is a story of a man named Pollock, a man who leads a dual life with a fake identity online as a warlock overlapping with his real identity attached to his physical body. Much like the wizards in a Faustian bargain, knowledge of the real-world identity, the true name can provide others leverage over the actions one pursues online as the protagonist discovers.  He is eventually tracked down by agents of the government and persuaded to turn against his online cabal under the auspices of anti-terrorism. And while those themes are relevant to the rest of the cyberpunk genre, as well as the current way we deal with computers online, the main thing was the representation of the internet.  Within True Names, there is entirely symbolic interaction with the computer systems take place on the other plane, which is a precursor to cyberspace or the metaverse where communication occurs between the various databases and networks. Entry into the system is made by interacting with puzzles and pathways.  Defense systems may look like mythological creatures or medieval castles, and a person's avatar or their online identity may be anything at all. The true cybernetic entity is constantly subjective and malleable in form. 

Now Vinge purposely left the technology behind this other plane as vague and somewhat abstract 'cause he wanted to engage the reader's imagination.  The fact that we have in various ways replicated that since speaks to how vivid that presentation was. Now there's a bunch of other technologies in the text and we'll have to get at that at a later date. But mostly the connection between the person and cyberspace was done through dermal EEG devices attached to the user's scalp, a little different than the cyber helmets we currently have, but maybe under development somewhere in some secret laboratory. At least that's how the trope goes. I cannot stress how much of a game changer Vinge’s novella was. It introduced so many of the concepts that we still use and some of the ways we still conceive of cyberspace within not just science fiction, but within our current material reality that we really need to give it a lot of credit. I think we're going to need to do a full episode on this sometime in the near future, so once we're done with the Westworld run, we'll go in depth on True Names and we'll come back to it. But for now, we're gonna move a little bit deeper into the 1980s. 

In the midst of the early 1980s computer hardware proliferation, William Gibson's Neuromancer hit the ground like conceptual atomic bomb. Winning every major science fiction award for the year that it was released, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick Awards, the book's impact reverberated throughout the realms of literature and beyond into both academia and popular culture as a whole. The book captured the zeitgeist to the time of it was released in 1984 and was the exemplar of the new science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk.  Now there's a couple reasons for this and there's been a lot written on Neuromancer, and seeing as this is the 101 episode, we'll just kind of touch on a few of the elements. 

The basic plot is that of a heist where a former console cowboy named Case is attempted to regain some of his past life and his ability to interface with the Matrix (which is cyberspace) as he's hired by some shadowy forces to undertake some undefined espionage work. He joins up with a number of other characters, including Molly, who's given the evocative title of a street samurai. She has razor blades for fingers and cybernetic eyes, and a number of other enhancements, and they go about either breaking out or recruiting several other people to take place with their team as they attempt the break in of an extremely wealthy family who lives in a space station in lower Earth orbit and tends to clone themselves. So I think we can think of that as maybe another Westworld tie-in.  So Gibson was also responsible for introducing some of the thematic plot elements that we see in common with within cyberpunk novels, the noir and heist influences, the aesthetic, but also some of the technology as well. He did introduce cyberspace and we did see how it was referred to as the Matrix, so we know where some of those influences lie. 

Let me just read to you the definition of cyberspace as introduced in Gibson's work: 

“A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity, lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind clusters and constellations of data like city lights receding.”

I mean, that's pretty evocative in and of itself. And while Gibson wasn't explicit on how the technology worked, he did detail some of what led up to the development of the technology:

“’The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games’ said the voiceover ‘in early graphics programs, a military experimentation with cranial jacks…’ On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals. Cold blue military footage burned through lab animals wired into test systems, helmets, feeding into fire control, circuits of tanks and war planes.”

So we get the sense of military R&D feeding into the development of the technology, and that kind of mirrors the real world development of virtual reality as well.  It gives the work an authenticity and grounding in our present day, and then extrapolates that outwards to develop the new technology into the cyberpunk era. And this is one of the reasons it was so evocative and it got so much buy-in: that it really seemed prescient when it comes to the development of that technology, especially as we're looking back at it now 40 years later.

Now, as we mentioned earlier, one of the things Gibson was really trying to do was to get into that idea of a non-space and simulation, pulling from the works of Ballard, as well as the dissociation of the body from this liminal area following on Burroughs. So we have those strong ties, the lineage about what the novel's really getting into, but of course, all everything else kind of exploded afterwards, and the cyber became the focus.  And that's kind of the interesting thing, the amount of real-world impact that the novel actually had in the further development of computer technologies since its release. We saw an increased use in the number of commercial enterprises that were really looking at the development of a network, and they were even referring to the network or interconnected networks as the Matrix, taking the name from the computer network that was described William Gibson's Neuromancer. That's from Hafner and Markoff; researchers who are writing in 1991. So while ARPA-Net was being developed at the time and being rolled out to more and more institutions and corporations during the late eighties and early nineties, in 1984 when Neuromancer was written, high fidelity computer graphics and a worldwide computer network were things of fiction.  This is why it fits within science fiction as well as the rest of the genre. One could almost argue that as the real world started to catch up with the technical vision that was displayed in the early cyberpunk novels, it became less and less relevant. But there's some other factors that went into its dissolution and downfall as well.  We'll get into that in a bit. 

The final thing I'd like to bring up with respect to cyberpunk and Neuromancer is the idea of a computer underground where the hackers hang out. It was mentioned a little bit by both Bruner and V as well, but the idea in the early eighties that the hackers were the ones living in that liminal space, they were at the margins of society was seen as quite novel.  Remember, Neuromancer came out four years before the Morris Worm was released. That's the first largely accepted internet “virus”. The cyberpunk novels presented computer hackers and programmers as edgy anti-heroes when the general perception at large was anything but: they were corporate men with suits and ties, and it's that punk, that “punkiness”, that has been one of the enduring legacies of the genre as well. 

Now, as we noted, Gibson wasn't the only author, and Neuromancer wasn't the only novel that was being written at that time that would become incorporated into sub-genre that was cyberpunk. There was a lot of other authors who were contemporaries of Gibson that were also putting out similarly themed work. One of the knock-on effects of the popularity of Gibson's work was that it brought attention to a lot of the other authors working in the genre, and more titles were able to get promoted and these authors, some established, some new, continued to put out amazing works within science fiction and cyberpunk as well. A lot of those works were published as short stories as there was a number of magazines that were releasing science fiction on a regular basis back then, including Analog Asimov's, Interzone, and others. And while those magazines still carry the full gamut of science fiction, occasionally you'd see cyberpunk stories within it.  There was a sense that something new was developing, but it really wasn't until the release of the Mirror Shades anthology edited by Bruce Sterling in 1986 that that cyberpunk came together as a genre. It put the name to the collection that we had been experiencing at that time. That anthology included work by a number of the other authors we'd include within his genre, including Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, Louis Scheer, John Shirley, as well as works by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling themselves. It kind of set the tone for the later half of the 1980s where we saw more and more works being put out within the traditional publishing system that was already extant the internet as we know it. In 2022, the Matrix cyberspace, et cetera, had yet to actually been developed as they were still writing.

From here, I'd like to just give a quick overview of some of those authors and their works and themes. Rudy Rucker published a number of novels including his Ware Tetralogy, the first one of which Software came out in 1982, set in 2020. It includes robots, mind transference, and a lot of other new tech that we can see in current shows like Westworld. 

Pat Cadigan wrote several short stories and a few novels that were within the cyberpunk genre as well, including Mindplayers and Synners. The latter includes a look at direct neural connection and some of the problems that that may cause; those looking at at least one of Elon Musk's R&D projects may want to have a look at that book. 

John Shirley, as an author of rather prodigious output, but for the works that was most closely associated with the cyberpunk genre it would be his Eclipse trilogy. First published in 1985, it details a mid-21st century where Russia has invaded Europe, the US is in chaos, private contractors have taken over the military, a la Blackwater and as neo-fascists are using that military alliance to gain power in the United States, the new resistance is rising up to fight them. I have no idea what that would be relevant in 2022. 

As the 1980s progressed, a number of other authors included cyberpunk elements in works that were largely set in other genres or traditional sci-fi, such as Dan Simmons’ Hyperion had a portion of the book, which was basically a noir cyberpunk tale.  Iain M Banks’ Player of Games as part of his Culture series where his galaxy spanning civilization has a number of interactions with AIs as well as where artificial intelligences are treated as full citizens of the civilization and computer interaction is obfuscated hidden behind a wall of ubiquitous technology that is supported by a complete intergalactic network.

And the books continued to win awards, whether it was the short stories or the novels, authors writing the genre were actually doing quite well in terms of literary awards within the niche of science fiction publishing, and they started to gain some attention outside that niche as well. And as new authors continued to enter the field and write works within the genre, the authors that were already established in that genre continue to put out more and more output, releasing new novels and new series.  

These series were often inventive, even though they continued to replicate the tropes of the genre. William Gibson wrote two more books within the sprawl universe, including Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and then moved on to what was called the Bridge Trilogy, starting with Virtual Light. Bruce Sterling followed from Schismatrix and Mirrorshades with some really inventive near future work, including Holy Fire, Heavy Weather, and Islands in the Net, and each of these titles that I'm mentioning deserve their own episodes. They’re really prescient in the way they described the current state of say North America and the world. Rudy Rucker continued his Ware tetralogy and more and more works entered into the field. In addition to the increase in short stories and novels being published, the genre had started to spread out into other media as well. Initially, it found purchase in comic books and role-playing games, and eventually into music, television, and film. 

Video games are a special case, just mostly due to the timeframe that we're talking about. In the late eighties and early nineties, video games were not what they are now, and it was a very different world for how they actually represented elements on the screen.  In terms of media that could faithfully replicate the genre, things like comic books and RPGs, it was in the late eighties that we saw the real changeover. The Cyberpunk roleplaying game was released by R. Talsorian in 1988, and Shadowrun by FASA came out a year later in 1989. Both these games attempted to replicate the genre within the context of a roleplaying game giving agency to the players, attempting to codify some of the tropes and giving a lot more detail on various elements, including things like weapons, cyberware, and hacking, especially.  Various systems were developed to represent the process of hacking or entering the matrix within the context of a role-playing game. Now, the nature of RPGs is that they're very structured. They have to present rules for things in the game, so they will attempt to codify things that were probably left to the reader's imagination within the novels and short stories, and this had the additional effect of really expanding the genre because all these things that were just a passing reference in a novel ended up having to be fully explained, and that required a lot more work. 

Comic books also saw a renewed interest in cybernetic or cyberpunk characters. Marvel revived DeathLok, a character that was present in the 1970s with the 1990 limited series and at DC, the publication of Frank Miller's Dark Night Returns in 1986, which is basically a near future cyberpunk-themed Batman story, had major implications for the comic industry at large.

Movies and television are a little bit more complicated as the lengthier production timeframes means that works that were often in development may show up with a bit of a cyberpunk theme later on. The key movies include 1982's Bladerunner with Harrison's Ford Deckard tracking down androids in a near future Los Angeles, 1987's Robocop by Paul Verhoeven with the titular character fighting crime in a near future Detroit that's riddled by economic inequality, and then James Cameron's Terminator films from 1984 in 1991 featuring a cybernetic assassin sent back from the future in order to kill a revolutionary leader.

And we need to be clear that just because a movie has cybernetics or hacking, and it doesn't inherently make it a cyberpunk film. Movies like Hackers or even the Six Million Dollar Man TV show are not necessarily cyberpunk, though they may influence and feedback from the genre, but media like that would still be worthy of examination for its ancillary influences.

So with all this influence, with all this spread throughout various forms of media, where did Cyberpunk go? What happened? For cyberpunk, it isn't that all good things come to an end, rather something different happened, something most unusual. Yes, much like other genres or fads. There became more and more product that was coming out of lesser quality and it wasn't nearly as inventive.  Some of the main authors moved into other realms, other genres, and explored different ways of telling stories, and that happens with everything. That's fine. The thing with cyberpunk isn't that it disappeared. There was still great works being put out in the late nineties and early 2000s, work like Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robinson, or The Matrix by the Waschowskis. 

Rather, what happened is that reality caught up to the fiction. More and more people came to use the internet on a daily basis. We survived Y2K and rolled into the new millennium. More and more technologies became deployed to more people. And the future seemed that much closer. The fiction became reality.  Now, not all of that is great because the books as a whole were very dystopian, and so was the genre at large. This is part of what also led to its diminishment because you can only handle dealing with the dystopia for so long. It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't wanna live there. 

So to talk about how cyberpunk came to a close, we're gonna take a look at the one author that has probably received more attention in recent years than any of the others mentioned, the author who introduced the idea of the Metaverse, that Facebook rebranded their company around when they shifted to a VR focus, and that author is Neil Stephenson, and the two books we're gonna look at are Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. Snow Crash came out in 1992 and it was Neil Stephenson's breakout work.  It was lauded as either the glittering epitome of the cyberpunk genre and fused with every stylish trope available, or the beginning of the post cyberpunk era. It had wry postmodern references suffusing its pages, and it left an impression on the audience that grown up with the video cages of the early 1980s.  It was also a lot more technically precise than any of its predecessors, and where Gibson or Vinge would often just kind of hand-wave the tech, Snow Crash and Stephenson were very precise in how it might actually be formulated. It had more of a “how to actually make this, how to get this done” flavor to it than its predecessors, and because it came out in 1992, it's straddled the edge of the birth of the internet “in real life” (IRL), and was provided a real place of privilege of being the most recent work in people's memory as they became exposed to the worldwide web, and so it sparked the imaginations of those who thought “this is how it should be”.

I want to illustrate this with two quotes from early on in Snow Crash that detail how cyberspace may actually be working within the context of the novel. When it comes to the interface, the way that humans interact with the computers, it doesn't involve any electrodes or direct neural interface. It's simply lasers:

“in this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer up through the fisheye lens in any direction Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of hero's goggles. In much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the pons tube, the resulting image hangs in space in front of hero's view of reality.”

So we can see how this more direct explanation of the technology makes it seem achievable. And that leads into the second quote of how the metaverse is actually structured: 

“the dimensions of the street are fixed by a protocol hammered out by the computer graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machineries global multimedia Protocol Group. The street seems to be a Grand Boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with the radius of a bit more than 10,000 kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than the earth.”

So technological developments within Snow Crash, things like the gargoyle or the unrestricted interface are much more in line with recent technological developments, at least 1992-era ones that are out in the real world. And Snow Crash was just exuding the punkiness of the cyberpunk as well from all the characters, including Hiro Protagonist, the hacker and pizza delivery guy, YT, the skateboard courier, Raven, the indigenous mercenary armed with a nuclear bomb, Reverend Wayne, Uncle Enzo, and the rest, the whole novel just bursts with characters that are much larger than life, and it's a fantastic read. 

Snow Crash takes that vividness almost to the point of parody, which is why it's seen as almost the beginning of the post cyberpunk era. But that didn't really happen until Neil Stephenson's next novel, 1995’s The Diamond Age, in an article titled “Notes Toward a Post-cyberpunk Manifesto” published by Lawrence Pearson in an issue of Nova Express in 1998 and reposted on the tech blog Slashdot in 1999.  He goes on to describe how the character of Bud from the beginning of the novel The Diamond Age is a classic cyberpunk protagonist, the black leather clad criminal with cybernetic augmentations who ends up getting, you know, killed 37 pages into a 455-page novel. Clearly the paradigm had changed, and this shift from cyberpunk to post-cyberpunk can be seen in those characters that they're more integrated into society. It isn't just about alienated loners and criminals and that it's less dystopic necessarily than it was in the eighties-era cyberpunk novels. It had many of the same elements that focus on description and “show, don't tell” but. The shift had changed, the focus had changed, and this is what also led to the demise of cyberpunk. And looking back at it now in 2022, we can see that we've had one more shift, a reintegration because. Nobody talks about post-cyberpunk anymore. It's just all cyberpunk. Post cyberpunk has been fully integrated into the genre, largely called cyberpunk. When something comes out now that fully engages with those tropes, we generally just say it's part of the same genre. It's become its own thing. And as I said earlier, it's because the present has largely caught up to that imagined future that we're witnessing within the year 1984. 

Now, here's the big question: If the imagined future is now caught up to our present reality, is there still relevance in cyberpunk fiction? Well, yeah, because it goes beyond the aesthetics and the tropes, the new tech and the shiny black leather and chrome. The cyberpunk literature detailed society in a number of different ways, and it was a reflection of the society at the time, of course, but it also looked at the society in the near future, if those trends that were happening in the seventies and eighties came to pass, and in many ways they have. So those dystopian writings of the past have a lot of relevance for how we live in and deal with our dystopian present. One of the things we're gonna be looking at as we go forward with this podcast is returning to the literature mentioned in this episode and looking at the implications that those particular novels had for our dystopian present.

Now, this isn't the only thing we're gonna be looking at, as my research does fall across a number of different areas, and one of the other things we have queued up for once Westworld is done is something called Appendix W, which will be looking at some of the literary antecedents to the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

But we'll be back returning to the cyberpunk literature very soon. This is just an introduction of course. Once again, I've been Dr. Implausible. Thank you for joining us for this extended episode. Until the next time, you can contact us at Dr. Implausible at implausi dot blog or follow the email link in the show notes. Also, we're a bit present on most of the social medias, including Twitter and others. We hope to speak to you again soon. Thank you for joining us.