The Failure of Cyberpunk

How Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades became the tombstone of science fiction movements

“Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions have lost control of the pace of change.” - Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, 1986

The final literary movement in science fiction rose up in the 1980s and was over by the end of the decade, but it left a mark - a line in the silicon, perhaps - that still echoes today. The name ‘cyberpunk’ belonged to a group of up-and-coming writers who, like the Golden Age writers of Astounding Stories, or the New Wave of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, broke into writing via magazines thanks to editors like Ellen Datlow at Omni who were committed to exploring new horizons. Gardner Dozois at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine popularised the term ‘cyberpunk’, and while the writers themselves tended to prefer the flatter title ‘the Movement’, in the early days they flirted with ‘the Mirrorshades Group’. This gave Bruce Sterling the title of the 1986 anthology that is both a memorial to the work of the Movement and a last desperate attempt to rescue cyberpunk from domestication.

The Movement writers blended speculative technology and politics in the spirit of H.G. Wells shaped by the enormous influence of New Wave author J.G. Ballard’s dystopian visions of worlds where technological decadence threw ecology out of balance, leaving behind ruined landscapes. For the pioneers of cyberpunk, technology was no longer “the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins”. Loss of control is implicit to the Movement, who owed an acknowledged debt to Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (“a bible to many cyberpunks”). From Rudy Rucker’s mind-bending reflections on consciousness, to Lewis Shiner’s punk rock magical realism, through John Shirley’s Gothic biological surrealism, they collided the past and the future in vivid and disturbing tales of grim circumstances. Sterling was right at the heart of it all, co-operating on more cyberpunk short stories and novels within the Movement than anyone else.

But it was William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer and its sequels that were to flourish into commercial success, and herald the coming bowdlerization of cyberpunk. Gibson’s vision of ‘cyberspace’ foreshadowed high-tech VR, yes, but what Gibson called a “consensual hallucination” was only trivially relevant to virtual reality (which was already around as he was writing). Rather, Gibson’s cyberspace was eerily prescient of the pervasive intrusion of the internet into human existence. As Sterling wrote in his seminal introduction to Mirrorshades: “For the cyberpunks, technology is visceral.” With escape impossible, subversion became the only possible avenue for resistance: the hacker and the rocker thus came to symbolise the capacity to rebel against the growing economic and technical ubiquity of transnational corporations. Technology may have careened out of control, but the cyberpunks would be, in John Brunner’s term, the ‘shockwave riders’ who would carve out little rebellions within their dystopias.

Yet the success of Neuromancer heralded the downfall of cyberpunk. The public at large, and the film makers who service the mythology of our time, latched onto a very different message from the Movement’s warnings. The cyberpunk writers were attempting a revolt in the Romantic spirit of Mary Shelley and her friends, but in visions of a sprawling urban techno-future where corporate power transcends attempts at national rule, the audience at large merely found dystopia cool. Rather than overthrowing the destructive regime that represented the present day projected thirty seconds into the future, the generations that followed passively accepted the Faustian bargain of corporate technological domination, which soon became locked down against any attempt at resistance.

The tech trinity of Google, Pfizer, and Meta no longer represented an oppressive force to be resisted, they became saviours - not of humanity as such, but of transhumanity, the people yet to come for whom the broken world of technological excess foreshadowed by Ballard and the New Wave was merely an unfortunate phase. Utopia always lies around the corner, you just have to believe. As the internet supplanted magazines, the venues for literary science fiction dried up and blew away in the digital wind. Thus cyberpunk failed, and with it ended the journey of science fiction as the exemplary literature for challenging our assumptions, leaving behind merely recycled clichés and kitsch images of how cool it will be to watch the end of the world through the distorting glow of the smartphone.