From
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986): "This book showcases writers who have come to prominence within this decade.... Cyberpunk is a product of the Eighties milieu.... But its roots are deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modern popular SF...." A list of influences follows: Ellison, Delany, Spinrad, Moorcock, Aldiss, Ballard. Also Stapledon, Wells, Niven, Anderson, Heinlein. And then Farmer, Varley, Dick, Bester, Pynchon. "...a concern for literary craftsmanship...fashion-conscious to a fault...they prize their garage-band esthetic.... They love to grapple with the raw core of SF: its ideas... in some sense a return to roots..." Then a list of current practitioners: "Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Sterling". Mirrorshades as an icon of the group: "They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." Cyberpunk "has a global range...decentralization...fluidity...comes from the realm where the computer hacker and the rocker overlap..." Technology is "visceral.... Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds... the theme of body invasion...mind invasion..." Cyberpunks "are fascinated by interzones". "Cyberpunk is widely known for its telling use of detail... It favors 'crammed prose': rapid, dizzying bursts of novel information, sensory overload that submerges the reader in the literary equivalent of the hard-rock 'wall of sound'."
Swanwick's "A User's Guide to the Post-Moderns" (
IAsfm, August 1986) makes the case that SF has twice-a-decade revolutions in controlling groups of hot new writers who, with more or less resistance, come in and set up shop. However, the 80s generation "marched into the Eternal City and found it undefended. The lion gates were open; there were no archers on the walls. The citizenry turned out to throw flowers, and petty officials proffered the key to the city. The barbarians were dumbfounded. They'd spent years assembling their arms, perfecting their tactics, honing their skills, and they were spoiling for battle. They had to fight
someone.
"They looked at one another."
And Swanwick proceeds to dump them into a magnetic field where Gibson, Sterling, Shiner, Bear, "possibly Rudy Rucker, and sometimes Pat Cadigan" drift to the cyberpunk pole and Willis, Robinson, Kessel, Sanders, Scholz, and Kelly drift to the humanist pole. (As would Swanwick if he possessed the cyberpunk habit of referring to himself in the third person - though his
Vacuum Flowers is superb, quintessential crossover cyberpunk, much like Kelly's "Cyberpunk trilogy" of stories.) The humanists "produce literate, often consciously literary fiction, focusing on human characters who are generally seen as frail and fallible and us[e] the genre to explore large philosophical questions, sometimes religious in nature" whereas cyberpunks are "stereotypically characterized by a fully-realized high-tech future, 'crammed' prose, punk attitudes including antagonism to authority, and bright inventive details." Outlaw fantasists (mostly from Sterling's Texas), a "love-hate relationship with 'hot tech'" and other streams fed into "the cyberpunk thing". Again, a list of precursors: van Vogt/Harness, Bester/Ellison, Shirley (whom Swanwick calls a precursor rather than a cyberpunk proper - "It could be said that he serves as their John the Baptist figure" - which is hilarious in so many ways), Delany/Zelazny, and Varley and Stapledon. Swanwick quotes Sterling as saying this came about because "SF was drifting without a rudder, at the mercy of every commercial breeze." And it goes on to talk about the shootout at high noon, at the Hugo and Nebula awards, in which the Cyberpunk big gun,
Neuromancer, took everything with ease.
But it's important to note that the above, I hope is informative, but it's also a lot of BS. Two extremely skilful writers bring their talents to bear on dramatizing the issue, making awards count for more than they do, making everything sound much more exciting and violent than it was, and - as can be seen in the fuzziness of it - it's partly myth even down to who's who doing what. Shirley is a very different kind of writer who tends more to horror and a true punk attitude without so much "cyber". Most of the "cybers" aren't very punk at all but middle-class suburban as Sterling will admit about himself in distinction with Shirley. Rucker is a gonzo mathematician and not a cyberpunk at all. And, indeed, Cadigan is often the cyberpunkiest of them all but is often not cyberpunk at all. And Shiner and some others never achieved critical mass. Whereas Bear, who sometimes ("Hardfought"'s crammed techno-explosion and "Blood Music"'s transformative biotech invasion) fits, was really just center-core good ol' Hard SF. So cyberpunk almost boils down to two writers: Sterling and Gibson, and a horde of commercial copycats. And it's to be noted that cyberpunk was basically
over as a creative force by the time it was being noticed - the very 1985 awards and 1986 books and articles mark the end, when you can look back on what was going on from c.77-84, rather than any beginning.
See
Cheap Truth and
other writings, especially
the checklist, for yet more information. ("Vincent Omniaveritas" is Bruce Sterling and, contrary to Gramm838, I'm a huge fan of Sterling and think he can think and write circles around Gibson, but early Gibson weren't too bad, neither.
)
