The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture presents Friday’s roundtable discussion:

Living in Cyberpunk Times

In his book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues that today’s social, political, and cultural realities have become science-fictional, that estrangement and dislocation constitute our habitual normalcy in the 21st century. In order to therefore understand the events in and process the “incongruous moments of technology’s intersection with everyday life” (2), Csicsery-Ronay claims we need to draw upon the imaginaries of science fiction (SF) to make sense of our quotidian realities that are saturated with such SF concepts as cloud computing, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, wearable technologies, and the increased proliferation of cyborgs in all shapes and sizes, to name only a few science-fictional tropes. But as writer and game designer Kyle Marquis reminded us in a much circulated tweet in 2013, “unless you’re over 60, you weren’t promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.” At the heart of Marquis’ claim is the realization that today’s reality is not SF in the “Golden Age” sense of the 1940s and 50s but rather as depicted by cyberpunk, that immensely popular form of 1980s SF which continues to speak to our contemporary moment. Cyberpunk, as Thomas Foster puts it, “didn’t so much die,” as has been lamented by many of its authors and critics, “as experience a sea change into a more generalized cultural formation” (xiv), a cultural formation that dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes. To put it directly: we are living in inescapable cyberpunk futures bleeding into the interstices of our present, and these cyberpunk realities intersect with our mainstream culture at every possible angle.

Published just this year, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture engages the history of cyberpunk from its earliest literary and cinematic origins and expands the focus to include the social and cultural changes that define our cyberpunk reality, all the while delving into how cyberpunk works as a cultural formation relevant to the 21st century. The entries in the collection address not only literary and cinematic cyberpunk, but other cultural manifestations, including video games, music, fashion, and online culture. In addition, the volume does not limit its analytical apparatus to overview discussions of singular media forms, but also engages in critical analysis refracted through contemporary theoretical approaches (posthumanism, human-animal relations, utopianism, postmodernism etc.) and thus engages with the cultural formation of cyberpunk from micro-level analyses of example texts to macro-level analyses of movements and the extant sea-changes of not only cyberpunk culture but cyberpunk as culture, specifically as our contemporary culture now in the 21st century.

The roundtable gathers all three editors of the volume, together with two scholars that contributed chapters to the collection and opens up to a wide discussion within science fiction studies on how cyberpunk has become one of the most important science-fictional modes to explore our contemporary world, how the cultural formation describes realities such as the transnational reign of global finance capitalism, the technologically-induced surveillance through social credit, or the growing separation into urban sprawls and elite “zaibatsu” enclaves.

Panel / Participants

  • Anna McFarlane (University of Glasgow)
  • Graham J. Murphy (Seneca College, Toronto)
  • Hugh O’Connell (University of Massachusetts Boston)
  • Lars Schmeink (HafenCity University, Hamburg)
  • Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

Discord Discussion

This discussion has been copied from the Discord server, names have been reduced to first name, discussion threads have been grouped and edited for better readability.

Lars: Hi, this is channel that will function as the chat for the roundtable … meaning, if you have questions for the panel, please post them here. Discussions, comments etc. can be placed here and we can continue the conversation after the live event.

Pawel: @Hugh, what’s in that mug?

Paul: This is fun, I can pretend Hugh is gazing intently just at me. I might practice my elevator pitches…

Steven: I’m disappointed that I cannot see all the panelists at once, in the manner of Hollywood Squares

Pawel: It’s been awesome so far! Thank you, Lars!

Ana: Graham Murphy talking about how cyberpunk has so many different variations, how it’s not a homogenous thing but a fragmented one…reminds me of the content of cyberpunk itself, which resists homogeneity, which is, as someone in a talk said yesterday, the literature of the fragment

Evan: “sharpen your pencils” LOL, Lars

Lars: wipe your keyboads?

Esko: Important in COVID-19 times, surely.

Evan: polishes VR helmet

Eero: “blow the dust off your datajack”

Evan: OK @Graham — Cyberpunk isn’t “one thing,” but there ARE accepted meta-texts that have played a huge role in “organizing” the canon — not only Neuromancer and Mirrorshades, but also CP2020 which literally has a bibliography and filmography of the canon.
What canonized “cyberpunk” and how do we get back to a more capacious idea of a cyberpunk canon with multiple strands?

Josh: Some of the short fiction pieces in Davies’ Economic Science Fictions blur the line between cyberpunk and realism in the way Sherryl is describing, especially Nora O Murchu’s “The New Black”

Steven: It is BECAUSE we are in an Ayn Rand world that Marxism is valid, since it is the best analysis of that

Pawel: This is great about the DK cassette! I didn’t know that!

Paul: Let’s lynch the landline

Carmen: Cassettes we used to buy. Ok, I’m officially middle-aged.

Josh: consumer subversion can threaten a particular business model, but not the structure of capital

Pawel: Hugh, this was brilliant!

Ana: Yes it was!

Paul: I came for the cyberpunk, but I’m staying for the emphasis on the infrastructural!

Steven: I’m reminded of how Eyal Weizman has written about how the Israeli army makes use of Deleuze and Guattari. I think there may be parallels in how US police depts at least implicitly use cyberpunk as a model for how to do counter-insurgency

Josh: Great comments Hugh. One of the things I’ve struggled with in teaching stories about digitization (“Pretty Boy Crossover”, Black Mirror‘s “San Junipero”, even something like the Pokemon-spouses of Pohl’s “Day Million”) is trying to turn student engagement away from the issue of “digitized immortality” towards those issues of infrastructure (who owns the server housing your digital soul?).

Julia: “First the streets, then the gadgets”-manifesto

Evan: Marx….

Josh: seize the clouds of computation
Re: sources of implicit conservatism in cannonical cyberpunk, Stina’s argument about the impact of noir costuming in Blade Runner and the texts it has influenced in her RCCC entry

Esko: Oh for f*ck’s sake I’d forgotten about Ready Player Two…

Pawel: So, not sure if Lars is fishing for questions, but if so, how about this: could the panelists mention 1-2 cyberpunk titles in any medium that they see escaping the narrow definitions and limitations as they’ve been outlined? Meaning, more political, non-white, street-taking, finance-suspicious cyberpunk texts?
PS. Beyond the obvious like Sleep Dealer or Tiger Flu.

Paul: Ugh, really?

Larisa: What about implementation of cyberpunk methods for fighting real battles – in Seattle recently agains police violence – could anyone comment if they observed any influence?

Lars: We actually talked about a chapter for the RCCC with Cory Doctorow writing about Hong Kong and how it is cyberpunk as a resistance movement. But the time frame did not work out. No idea if the movements themselves took up cyberpunk, but Anon comes to mind … there is a chapter by Colin Milburn in the RCCC that deals with this.

Stina: Graham, It was a good speech!

Larisa: A question on evolution of trends from the initial cyberpunk movement – any thoughts on the engagement with the levels of language and interrrelation of language and reality?

Josh: Another actual question: Doesn’t Sturgeon’s 10% maxim apply just as much within texts as it does among them? Isn’t it less that 10% are wholly good and 90% are wholly trash, but rather that even the trash contains interesting critical moments that escape forclosure or forclosure, even if that good stuff is only 10% of the content? As Sherryl noted, in hindsight critics and readers misidentified the “good stuff.”
So, the opposite of Pawel’s question: What are some examples of “90% trash” sci-fiberpunk that nevertheless contain very useful images or moments that revealed something valuable for you about this moment?

Pawel: Ryman’s Air

Paul: Seconded.

Stina: Yes to Midnight Robber as Caribbean cyberpunk. I also read Nisi Shawl’s “Deep End” as cyberpunk, although I don’t know if it’s as often taught that way

Steven: Agree with Graham’s praise of Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail

Josh: I sometimes read Parable of the Sower as cyberpunk

Esko: Maughan’s Infinite Detail is excellent, I gave a talk on it last summer kinda claiming that it brings the “street” back to cyberpunk.

Paul: Tim’s a good friend. Worth noting he pivoted to journalism after getting into writing fiction seriously; cyberpunk writer as victim of cyberpunk economics.

Josh: the movie In Time is an example of useful trash for me

Pawel: Good example, Josh!

Jaak: “In Time” is the most straightforward SF materialization of the metaphor “time is money”

Steven: Gem out of garbage: the horrible novel The Unincorporated Man by the Kollin brothers is a horrible sub-Heinlein glorification of Milton Friedman style capitalism, but its satirical premise is interesting (you can buy stock in people, and get dividends based on their earnings – this is held by the book to be horrible and oppressive, but they are unable to explain why it is any different than all the hypercapitalist stuff they glorify)
Unfriended is great, I have taught it many times

Lawrax: Unfriended was an update of the Grand Guignol play, Au Téléphone.

mlex: thinking of film, what about the cyberpunk vision in the augmented reality implants in the series

Esko: Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge also straddles that promise/reality of the internet thing Graham brings up.

Steven: Yes, Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall is amazing

Josh: Fortunate Fall is fantastic!

Pawel Frelik: Snow Crash had bits about language.

Josh: Fortunate Fall is a straight upgrade of Snow Crash. Lots of the same elements, but wierder, tighter, less hyper-masculine, less self-satisfied.

Steven: I wrote about Feed, it’s amazing and it deals with language, as Graham says

Stina: Fortunate Fall is a straight upgrade of Snow Crash. Lots of the same elements, but tighter, less hyper-masculine, less self-satisfied.

Kristy: Adam Rapp is the author for Decelerate Blue with Mike Cavallaro as the Illustrator. It’s great.

Larisa: Thanks for adding to the answers on this language-trend.

Josh: While mobile tech helps organize protests, and helps document abuse, it also provides authorities with ways to track dissent. Metadata is forever. I’ve seen a lot of debates about whether you should leave your phone at home or not.

Graham: Yes. I was trying to fill the silence.

Steven: Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland has great stuff about mobile phones – the cops can zap you and render you unconscious by accessing your phone, the phones are used for money and door keys, etc

mlex: Lars, about the use of specific language in social media, there was a great study by Todd Mostak about that, studying twitter in extremist language by neighborhoods…

Josh: Fortunate Fall is a great text for thinking about that kind of algorithmic moderation of speech

mlex: by the way, sort of cyberpunk, Todd Mostak kept going with his high-tech use of GPUs for calculation and presentation and founded OmniSci

Carmen: What a fantastic round table, thank you so much!!!

Esko: Here here, a fascinating discussion, one for the ages.

Josh: I have been struck by the structural parallels between student plagiarists trying to avoid software like SafeAssign and the tactics of the Big Igloo bois and other extremists trying to escape social media moderation.

Carmen: LOL because I cannot both LOL and cry in despair

mlex: no kidding: “early cyberpunks drank the kool aid of neoliberal transreality”

Aiden: Nice work everyone, great discussion – thank you!

David: this was great, thanks everyone!

Katherine: Thanks, panelists!

John: thank you all, this was great!

Beata: Thank you all – great conversation!

Adam: Thanks, that was fantastic

Jiré: Very interesting conversation, thank you!

Jaak: Thank You for a great discussion!

Lars: Thanks to all the participants in the panel … there is no way for me to applaud or anything there. It felt a bit rushed to say bye. But Anna, Graham, Hugh, and Sherryl … thanks so much!!!!

Graham: And thanks to you for organizing this whole thing!!!!

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