Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [4]
But the punk in post-cyberpunk continues to make sense if it is pointing toward an attitude: an adversarial relationship to consensus reality. This attitude is just south of cynicism but well north of mere skepticism. It has to do with a reaction to a world in which humanity must constantly be renegotiated. Ina cyberpunk story, any given moment can be at once thrilling and horrifying. Life is never smooth; it is illuminated by lightning flashes of existential insight, paved with the shards of our discredited philosophies. Sanity requires a constant recalibration of perception.
The characters in a PCP story need this healthy dose of attitude because their relationship to reality is different from ours. Yes, there may well be, and often is, a virtual reality that is as persuasive as reality itself and far more pleasant. It can be variously a trap, an escape, or a refuge. Perhaps all three at once. But reality itself is everywhere mediated, and what comes between the characters and reality must constantly be interrogated.
singular
The stories in this collection are too various for us to draw a tidy summary of what twenty-first-century cyberpunk is about, nor do we see the profit in it. However, so many of them imply or actually explore a post-human future that we would be remiss if we failed to point out that a logical consequence of much of cyberpunk extrapolation is the singularity. Vernor Vinge, by no means a cyberpunk, although highly respected by them, first proposed the notion of a technological singularity in 1993. Briefly, he contemplates a moment in history in which runaway technology causes a change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence.” Vinge speculates this change may come through artificial intelligence, through computer/human interfaces, or through biological modification of the human genome. After this point, human history will end.
One of the obsessions of PCP fiction is to explore the edges of this “end” of history, and if possible, to see beyond it.
form
So far we have spoken of cyberpunk primarily in terms of content, and CP was indeed sparked by an attempt to bring content into science fiction that was being ignored by the sf of the early 1980s.
But part of the force of Cheap Truth was also the aggressiveness of its anti-art stance. Vincent Omniaveritas had little use for the pieties of literary culture and traditional values of well-made fiction. A lot of early CP gained verve from a conscious rejection of the New Wave and the New Wave’s reaching after high modernism’s literary pretensions.
Whereas the New Wave brought stories like, for instance, Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage” and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head that drafted Joycean stream of consciousness into science fiction contexts, Cheap Truth mocked science fiction writers who too obviously adopted literary approaches. But CP was just as self-consciously aware of its ancestors. Where humanist writers might claim Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin as theirs, CP called on Alfred Bester and William S. Burroughs. Both sides claimed J. G. Ballard. Both sides, consciously or not, were expressions of postmodernism.
In abandoning “well made story values” in favor of oddness, visionary speculation, and the breaking of realist codes, CP was expressing a postmodern sensibility. Literary critics like Larry McCaffery, who edited one of the earliest critical books on cyberpunk, Storming the Reality Studio, recognized the postmodern underpinnings of CP. What the critics saw in cyberpunk was not always in accord with the Cheap Truth party line, but they were right in observing that science fiction puts quotes around the word “reality.” Science fiction is “pre-deconstructed” through the ways that writers consciously