Rob Latham
Cyberpunk = Gibson = Neuromancer
George Slusser and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. vii+303. $45.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.
In the informal interview that closes Fiction 2000 (a collection of essays from
"an international symposium on the nature of fiction at the end of the twentieth
century...held in Leeds, England...between June 28 and July 1, 1989...[and focusing]
specifically on the form of science fiction called cyberpunk"[279]), Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, responding to a remark that the conference had featured "an emphasis
on [William] Gibson's Neuromancer," replies: "I think the impression that
much of the conference centered on Neuromancer may actually just be an effect of
the convergence in time of the talks. I don't perceive this as having been a 'Neuromancer
conference' at all" (280-81). Csicsery-Ronay is wrong. It was a Neuromancer
conference, at least judging by the 17 essays gathered in this volume of proceedings. The
overwhelming impression presented is that most of the conferees operated with the
following equation implicitly in mind: cyberpunk = Gibson = Neuromancer. As a
result, the movement, as a literary practice and a cultural ideology, gets forced into a
straitjacket—a flashy one, true, patterned with intricate Orientalist flourishes, but
confining nonetheless.
I don't mean to imply that I think Neuromancer (1984) undeserving of such close
attention. If the essays in this book do nothing else, they certainly establish the
novel's formal and thematic complexity, its openness to diverse and often conflicting
modes of interpretation, and its sheer power to capture the critical imagination. But this
is not all that Fiction 2000 promises to accomplish, and I'm afraid the volume is
rather deficient in its other goals.
These goals are stated in George Slusser's introduction: since "Story telling is
entering the future of the electronic den, a wraparound world of images and signals and
data" (1), the essayists hope, by "examining cyberpunk's claims in relation both to
traditional SF and to contemporary fiction in general...to go to the heart of the problems
narrative faces in the information age" (3). This is an ambitious and worthwhile
enterprise, but one gets the sense that the conference participants either didn't fully
understand their charge or were not entirely comfortable with it. Several of them refuse
even to venture a guess as to the prospects of "fiction 2000," instead devoting
themselves to Slusser's more modest corollary aims: "examining cyberpunk...in
relation to traditional SF and to contemporary fiction." In those goals they are
moderately successful (and then only with regard to Gibson's work specifically), yet one
wonders why the editors felt the need to draw such a grandiose frame around their venture
since the effect is to undermine the genuine achievements of their essays by requiring a
larger purpose of them than they can fulfill.
The book is divided into five parts. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the dubious status
of the editors' framing assumptions, the three well-focused middle parts—devoted to
establishing cyberpunk's roots in genre SF, its relation to postmodern literature and
culture, and the parameters of its canon—are bookended by sections whose rationale is
either vague or overblown. Part 1, "The Movement: Forward or Backward?," opens with
a meditation by Lewis Shiner on the crucial differences between "cyberpunk"— an
historically useful, if now perhaps dated, term describing the work of a group of
consciously affiliated writers striving to bring SF into the information age at the
beginning of the '80s—and "scifi-berpunk," a mass-market version
"commodified, summarized, codified, and reduced to formula" (22). His essay is
amusing and often thoughtful, but the grounds for it as a point of departure for the
volume are nebulous: one suspects it is because he was the only (more or less)
self-identified cyberpunk author in attendance, and the editors wanted a programmatic
kick-off. If so, this is the most mellow manifesto imaginable.
The two other essays in this section, by Csicsery-Ronay and Slusser, are broad
theoretical discussions evaluating cyberpunk's modes of imagining the future. Both critics
have axes to grind against the literature, expanding on complaints aired in earlier pieces
that appeared in Larry McCaffery's Storming the Reality Studio (1991).
Csicsery-Ronay provocatively diagnoses cyberpunk as suffering from an affliction he calls
"retro-futuristic chronosemiitis," a disease in which the future takes revenge on
the present for its cynical postmodernity, its delegitimation of transcendental
(especially ethical) categories for evaluating technology. The result is that the utopian
imagination historically embodied in SF is given over to visions "of a destructive,
pathological future" (33) that, in a return of the ethical dimension repressed in
postmodernism, pass the sentence of posterity on the present's reckless narcissism. The
essay is a tour-de-force, combining theoretical sweep with meticulous close readings.
Though I strongly disagree with its essentially organicist humanism—which pays off in
the conclusion that "feminist futurism" (44) can cure SF of its affliction (because
women, as mothers, have a special concern for coming generations?)—the argument is
important and worth grappling with.
Slusser's essay is another matter. It definitely provides a good counterpoint to
Csicsery-Ronay's piece, because its agenda is aggressively antihumanist: Slusser contends
that cyberpunk, like a good deal of SF, is constrained from fully imagining the future by
"the Frankenstein barrier"—an ideological impediment generated by the conflict
between utilitarian and humanist values in the extrapolation of technology. The former
permit the future to be envisioned as a lineal progress of technological innovation, but
the latter persistently intervene with misgivings about the corrosive effects on
traditional forms, biological as well as cultural. The result is Victor Frankenstein's bad
faith, his apparent commitment to a futuristic vision yet his ultimate rejection of it on
humanist grounds. And so the future, as with Csicsery-Ronay's retrovirus, returns to wreak
vengeance on the present: "The creature of the future is now present as object of
horror in the eyes of a humanity that cannot accept its futurity" (48). In effect, Slusser is merely restating a longstanding distinction in the world of SF fandom between
science-fictional and "mundane" perspectives, and while I have a good deal of
sympathy with the political animus behind this distinction, I really don't see what Slusser hopes to accomplish by couching it in a dense rhetoric replete with allusions to
Plato, Descartes, and Shakespeare. In short, his essay is more complexly written than the
argument itself requires (and perhaps merits). In any case the entire opening section is
hardly auspicious for the volume's putative focus on "fiction 2000"; given that
cyberpunk is variously seen as mired in the humanist past (Slusser), immured in
postmodernism's eternal present (Csicsery-Ronay), or commodified out of existence
(Shiner), it doesn't seem a very fruitful harbinger of anything.
The book's closing section, "The New Metaphoricity: The Future of Fiction," is
even more disappointing in the gap between its promise and its achievement. Frankly, it's
a mess. The first two essays extend Slusser's brief for utilitarian extrapolation,
starting with Gregory Benford's defense of hard SF in contrast to cyberpunk's chic
recycling of "film noir and pulp plots against a background taken mostly from the
glossy aesthetics of magazine ads" (223). For those familiar with Benford's ubiquitous
attacks on "cyberjunk," this snide, rambling piece offers nothing new. It is
followed by Ruth Curl's essay unfavorably comparing Neuromancer with Benford's
novel Great Sky River (1987) in light of the divergent metaphorical systems guiding
their extrapolations of computer technology: Gibson's approach is anthropomorphic,
deploying metaphors as ontological categories ("Paradise, the Fall, Frankenstein")
which shackle the future to the humanist past, whereas Benford "demythifies the
computer" by using metaphors epistemologically, as vehicles for exploring an uncertain
future (237). It's a perfectly defensible argument, but unfortunately it has been Slusserized—i.e., rhetorically boosted by a philosophical apparatus that adds nothing
to the account save pointless complication and citations of Descartes, Nietzsche, W.V.
Quine, and Paul de Man. Benford's and Curl's essays both take a "back to the future"
approach to SF narrative, evoking nostalgia for, quoting Benford, "the deeper,
long-view realism" of traditional hard SF (224)—which is a paradoxical attitude to
assume given that this section is nominally devoted to limning contemporary fiction's
lineal future. Are we to imagine that the coming avant-garde will operate in the mode of
Asimov and Clarke?
Curl's piece establishes a focus on metaphor that is expanded by Eric Rabkin in the
best essay in this section. Rabkin identifies the trope of oxymoron as a device
pervasively deployed in SF to depict the radical otherness of futurity; he locates in
oxymoron the source of SF's traditional "sense of wonder," the compelling
estrangement generated by its capacity to yoke seemingly incommensurate modes of being (as
in the figure of the "cyborg"). Rabkin's case is methodically argued and persuasive;
the problem in context is that he isn't discussing a metaphorical strategy peculiar to
cyberpunk or even contemporary fiction, but to the timeless body of fantastic literature.
To the extent that he is concerned at all with the "current hot, so-called cyberpunk
brand of science fiction" (265), his whole purpose seems to be to debunk its pretensions
to originality. This is quite a puzzling animus to discover in a section purporting to
analyze the new metaphoricity.
The other two pieces in this section don't go any further towards establishing a
plausible rationale for the blanket title. David Porush's essay is a collection of
scattered fragments verging on prose poetry, arresting if essentially glib. The closing
"interview" is even more disjointed, less a focused discussion geared for public
consumption than a sprawling gabfest overheard during a conference lunch break. The only
reason I can guess for the editors' choosing to include this slovenly ramble is for SF
author Greg Bear's comments on HyperCard, the computer hypertext system designed for
Macintosh, whose ennested informational structure, incorporating sound and image into a
generalized digital text, could potentially create a "multifaceted, multisensory,
multimedia experience, spreading out and eventually becoming something like real life, so
that perhaps eventually you would actually be experiencing the novel as if you were one or
two of the characters within it" (286). Embedded as it is in a contentious conversation,
this fascinating tidbit goes nowhere, but its mere presence suggests the dimensions of
truly exciting extrapolation the volume otherwise never provides. Tucking it in here at
the end was, in my view, a major miscalculation: it makes the whole book seem a
fundamentally botched enterprise.
Despite this draconian assessment, there is still valuable material in Fiction 2000,
most of it located in the more modestly purposed middle sections. Part 2 opens with good
essays by Paul Alkon and Gary Westfahl analyzing the convergence of Gibson's work with the
agendas for SF set by Félix Bodin and Hugo Gernsback, respectively. Both essays establish
suggestive parallels but these remain purely speculative, since neither critic details the
historical filters through which the influence of these precursors might have been
transmitted to Gibson. Westfahl's essay in particular goes much too far in arguing for Neuromancer
as a virtually unmediated descendant of Gernsback's Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12),
detailing every resemblance, no matter how tenuous or far-fetched. Moreover, the critic's
casual contempt for contemporary literature and culture (which he dismisses with the
blanket slur of "nihilism" [103]) leads him to seriously undervalue their influence
on Gibson's work.
The paucity of historical argument in Westfahl's and Alkon's essays is more than made
up for by Carol McGuirk's, which provides a magisterial periodization of modern SF and
meticulously details Gibson's position within it. McGuirk identifies cyberpunk as merely
the most recent in a long series of overlapping ideological renovations of the genre,
whose evolution she details in an erudite and nuanced typology. Her anatomy of the
"soft SF" tradition of the 50s, which is among the best I have seen anywhere, shows
how that decade's writers were divided between two camps: humanism, concerned with the
potential efficacy of heroic action and typified by James Blish and Walter M. Miller, Jr,
and SF noir, focused on "psychic mutilation, used to set a stylized atmosphere"
(118) and associated preeminently with Alfred Bester. While cyberpunk (i.e., Gibson)
evinces some superficial similarity to hard SF in its "tendency to place technology
in the foreground" (111), it is, McGuirk convincingly demonstrates, actually a variant of
SF noir.
McGuirk's excellent placement of cyberpunk within American SF is equaled, in my view,
only by Brian McHale's treatment in Constructing Postmodernism (1992; expanding
material in McCaffery's Reality Studio), which has the added value that it sees
cyberpunk not only as the latest installment in the immanent evolution of the genre but
also as the historical culmination of a process of crossbreeding between SF and the
literary avant-garde (a process only implicit in McGuirk's analysis). It is unfortunate
that Fiction 2000 does not feature McHale—or McCaffery or Scott Bukatman, the
critics who have done the most to establish how the cyberpunk movement converges with the
methods and concerns of postmodernist fiction and culture. Fiction 2000's third
section, devoted to outlining and analyzing this convergence, features an excellent essay
by Brooks Landon and good ones by John Huntington and Lance Olsen, but these do not
compare with the pathbreaking and synoptic achievements of the aforementioned group of
scholars. The result is a patchwork of perceptive fragments rather than a detailed case.
Huntington offers yet another leftwing assault on cyberpunk's complacent postmodern
politics. His efforts to locate and analyze a class dynamic in Neuromancer are
earnest and diligently prosecuted; however, I must admit that, much as I sympathize with
the socio-political agenda animating the critique, I find its chilly assurance and
Olympian disdain a bit stultifying. Huntington's judgment that Gibson's novel
"creates anxiety about an ambiguous and oppressive reality and at the same time
revels in the increased possibilities the ambiguity allows and the anarchy the oppression
justifies" (139) is both unanswerable and jejune, merely repeating an indictment already
proffered by Andrew Ross, Peter Fitting, Neil Easterbrook, and several others.
Olsen's essay on "Cyberpunk and the Crisis of Postmodernity" takes up the
neo-pragmatist, as opposed to the Marxist, line of critique against postmodernism: In both
the political and the aesthetic arenas, it is simply impossible to "practically
challenge all we once took for granted about language and experience" (144). I
feel there is something essentially banal about this argument as well, but Olsen does not
so much naively endorse it as deploy it as a rationale for the developing conservatism of
mainstream literature in the '80s: the emergence of "neorealism" may be seen as a
pragmatic counterrevolution against postmodernism's formal subversiveness. While Neuromancer
deployed strategies akin to postmodernist experimentation, Olsen argues, Gibson's later
novels have backtracked, displaying more conventional literary values. There is a slippery
facility to Olsen's systematic contrasts that bothers me, but his effort to situate
Gibson's work within the (d)evolving framework of postmodernist literature is generally
commendable.
Brooks Landon's essay focuses fruitfully on postmodernist texts in which the
representation of memory is foregrounded. The explosion of information in electronic
culture, which amounts to an epochal challenge to the capacities of human memory, has
generated two sorts of "digital narratives": the "postmnemotechnic," which
proliferate synthetic alternatives to and simulacra of human memory (works by the
cyberpunks, obviously, but also by postmodernists Kathryn Kramer and Don DeLillo), and the
"antimnemotechnic," which are radically skeptical about the viability of memory
altogether (texts by Kathy Acker, Steve Erickson, Denis Johnson). Landon's analysis is
well thought out and engagingly written, offering a genealogy for cyberpunk that
transcends genre boundaries in its articulation of a problematic shared by SF and
mainstream authors alike.
The essays in part 4 pull back to the genre borders, purporting to trace the horizon of
the cyberpunk canon. There are essays by John Christie on Gibson, Robert Donahoo and Chuck
Etheridge on Shiner, Tom Shippey on Sterling, and Francis Bonner on cyberpunk in film and
television. Not a far horizon obviously: the work of three writers and a handful of visual
texts. The first two essays are at best routine, but Shippey on Sterling is excellent,
showing convincingly how Sterling's extrapolations are guided less by a systematic
philosophy than by a kind of ideological bricolage. With Bonner's essay, though, we are
back to the routine: rigidly concerned with establishing plausible canonicity for the
texts she surveys, she measures various SF films of the '80s against a thematic tally
sheet. What possible value there can be in such a procrustean enterprise I can hardly
imagine, especially considering that Vivian Sobchack's analysis of the subgenre of the
"marginal postfuturist SF film" in her book Screening Space (1987) already
comes fairly close to establishing a cinematic canon of cyberpunk (though this is not
Sobchack's specific agenda), and is moreover part of an overarching treatment of SF film
that is complex, subtle, and fascinating. Not so Bonner's picayune hair-splitting.
(Csicsery-Ronay's brief analysis, in the essay mentioned above, of David Cronenberg's 1982
film Videodrome is a much more exciting treatment of cyberpunk themes in
contemporary cinema.)
Aside from its fumbled prophetic agenda and its narrow focus on essentially a single
text, Fiction 2000 has other editorial problems. Cordwainer Smith's Norstrilia
(1975) is cited as "Nostralia" (102) and the film Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) as
"Colossus: The Forbin Connection" (195); H.R. Giger's name is persistently
misspelled "Geiger"; Gale Anne Hurd is listed as the director of the 1986 film Aliens
(295), whereas she was the producer (James Cameron directed). More egregiously, John
Huntington, in his essay, rehearses the plot of a J.G. Ballard story that is cited as
"The Terminal Beach" when in fact he is describing "The Voices of Time" (140).
I don't mean to nitpick, merely to register that the volume's problems are endemic. As an
assessment of the prospects of fiction in a cybernetic culture, I recommend instead Paul Delany and George P. Landow's Hypermedia and Literary Studies (1991) and William R.
Paulson's The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (1988),
while as an overview of cyberpunk and its relations to postmodernism, McCaffery's Storming
the Reality Studio, McHale's Constructing Postmodernism, and Bukatman's Terminal
Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993) are greatly to be
preferred. At best, the various excellences of the Csicsery-Ronay, Rabkin, McGuirk,
Landon, and Shippey essays make the book worth consulting if not acquiring. In sum, though
Fiction 2000 is not a bad book, it could, in every way, have been a substantially
better one.
Back to Home