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By Root 964 0

than dark visions of disaffected loners contending with totalitarian corporations. “The street,” so central to the classic cyberpunk vision, is not the world, they say. And they are right, of course. Meanwhile, as second and third generation writers have put on their mirrorshades, they are all too often dismissed as mere imitators. Some in our genre have decided that they know what cyberpunk had to say, and, whether they agree with it or not, have consigned it to the dustbin of literary history. Cyberpunk can no longer be an ideology, they would say. It can only be a flavor.

rewired

In retrospect, it seems clear to us that cyberpunk was a movement. We acknowledge all the criticisms leveled against it. The hyperbole that helped launch it was unfortunate. Yes, some core cyberpunks found other things to write about or fell silent. Of course, the term’s use in common parlance is now so vague as to verge on meaningless, but our dictionary offers two definitions of movement that fit: “a. A series of actions and events taking place over a period of time and working to foster a principle or policy. b. An organized effort by supporters of a common goal.” In the heyday of Mirrorshades and Cheap Truth, the latter definition of classic cyberpunk — CP — made sense. There was a Movement with a capital M. We believe that the sixteen post-cyberpunk1 — PCP — stories in this anthology illustrate the former definition of a movement: they are events that occurred in the last decade, long after classic cyberpunk, that continue to foster its principles and policies. No, that’s not quite right. Fostering principles and policies isn’t quite the cyberpunk style, is it? What these stories share, instead, are obsessions.

Briefly, we believe that the signature obsessions of cyberpunk are:

Presenting a global perspective on the future.

Engaging with developments in infotech and biotech, especially those invasive technologies that will transform the human body and psyche.

Striking a gleefully subversive attitude that challenges traditional values and received wisdom.

Cultivating a crammed prose style that takes an often playful stance toward traditional science fiction tropes.

The PCP stories collected here do not share all of these characteristics, but most have at least two or three. Any story that exhibits all of them just as they were used in 1985 is an instant cliché. Still, the realizations that the future will be one of intimate connections between the psyche and technology, that middle-class American values are not automatically going to prevail, and in fact, the vast majority of the world will not be like Iowa or New York, have had a profound and broad effect on science fiction published in the last decade.

Cyberpunk obsessions have evolved over time; some writers extend them, some react against them, some take them for granted and move the basic attitudes into new territories. Our purpose here is to document these changes, which we believe have rewired CP into PCP. The writers we have chosen include some but not all of the CP founders. Some of our contributors came immediately after CP, while others were struggling to parse the subtleties of Green Eggs and Ham when Mirrorshades first appeared in bookstores. We have tried to confine ourselves to stories published in the last decade or so. Because we have limited ourselves to the short form, we were forced to leave out novelists like Melissa Scott and Richard K. Morgan and Chris Moriarty and — most difficult of all — Neal Stephenson.

But what is the “Post” in “Post-Cyberpunk”? In the effort to understand just what PCP has to do with CP, let’s take a closer look at some of these obsessions.

obsessions

A major CP obsession was the way emerging technologies will change what it means to be human. Much science fiction has concerned itself with technology and changes in human culture. Indeed, the cautionary tale is a staple of the genre: if this goes on, things will get very bad indeed. But the assumption of the cautionary tale is that we have some control over the changes