The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture collects original entries that engage cyberpunk’s diverse ‘angles’ and its proliferation in our life worlds. The Companion traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary sf subgenre to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion also provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, so the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, or empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking as much as differentiating our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world.
This collection follows contemporary research trends by re-placing cyberpunk within the history of the genre, but also charting the ways in which the idea of cyberpunk moved across media and into cultural practice more generally.
Reviewer 2 (anonymous)
If Ellison ever read a book like this one, he’d react in fizzing proletarian rage and urge me to sue everybody involved, but he’d also grumble: “Well, maybe it’s not too bad for some hopelessly non-Jewish Texan kid who doesn’t even write for television.” I sort of enjoy it when academics really get into the trenches with 1980s cyberpunk novels, like: “Hmm, this drug-addled dystopian rock star from a John Shirley novel seems to lack coping skills and also makes poor life-choices.” There’s something endearing about it.
Bruce Sterling on Twitter, Cyberpunk Legend
Table of Contents
I: Cultural Texts
- Cyberpunk as Cultural Formation
Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink
I: Cultural Texts
- Literary Precursors
Rob Latham - The Mirrorshades Collective
Graham J. Murphy - Bruce Sterling: Schismatrix Plus (Case Study)
Maria Goicoechea - Feminist Cyberpunk
Lisa Yaszek - Pat Cadigan: Synners (Case Study)
Ritch Calvin - Post-Cyberpunk
Christopher D. Kilgore - Charles Stross: Accelerando (Case Study)
Gerry Canavan - Steampunk
Jess Nevins - Biopunk
Lars Schmeink - Non-SF Cyberpunk
Jaak Tomberg - Comic Books
David M Higgins / Matthew Iung - American Flagg! (Case Study)
Corey K. Creekmur - Manga
Shige (CJ) Suzuki - Early Cyberpunk Film
Andrew M. Butler - Strange Days (Case Study)
Anna McFarlane - Digital Effects in Cinema
Lars Schmeink - Blade Runner 2049 (Case Study)
Matthew Flisfeder - Anime
Kumiko Saito - Akira and Ghost in the Shell (Case Study)
Martin de la Iglesia and Lars Schmeink - Television
Sherryl Vint - Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes into the Future (Case Study)
Scott Rogers - Video Games
Pawel Frelik - Deus Ex (Case Study)
Christian Knöppler - Tabletop Role-Playing Games
Curtis Carbonell - Shadowrun (Case Study)
Hamish Cameron - Photography and Digital Art
Grace Halden - Fashion
Stina Attebery - Music
Nicholas C. Laudadio - Janelle Monáe: Dirty Computer (Case Study)
Christine Capetola
II: Cultural Theory
- Simulation and Simulacra
Rebecca Haar and Anna McFarlane - Gothicism
Anya Heise-von der Lippe - Posthumanism(s)
Julia Grillmayr - Marxism
Hugh Charles O’Connell - Cyborg Feminism
Patricia Melzer - Queer Theory
Wendy Gay Pearson - Critical Race Theory
Isiah Lavender III - Animality
Seán McCorry - Ecology in the Anthropocene
Veronica Hollinger - Empire
John Rieder - Indigenous Futurisms
Corinna Lenhardt - Afrofuturism
Isiah Lavender III and Graham J. Murphy - Veillance Society
Chris Hables Gray - Activism
Colin Milburn
III: Cultural Locales
- Latin America
M. Elizabeth Ginway - Cuba’s Cyberpunk Histories
Juan C. Toledano Redondo - Japan as Cyberpunk Exoticism
Brian Ruh - India
Suparno Banerjee - Germany
Evan Torner - France and Québéc
Amy J. Ransom
2 thoughts on “The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture”
Comments are closed.