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 “PostCyberpunk”? In the effort to understand just what PCP has to do with CP, let’s take a closer look at some of these 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 that technology will bring, so that if we act in a timely way, we can preserve consensus values. The cyberpunks studied the history of how humans have tried to manage change, and were not impressed. Moreover, the technologies of the twenty-first century are invasive and intimate. A key insight of CP, extended still further in PCP, is that we are no longer changing technology; rather it has begun to change us. Not just our homes and schools, our governments and workplaces, but our senses, our memories, and our very consciousness. Ubiquitous computing with access to all recorded knowledge, instantaneous communication across the entire planet, add-ons to the Human Operating System, manipulation of our genome — all are on the horizon. The changes these technologies will bring are qualitatively different than the changes caused by the automobile, or even by science fiction’s longed-for invention of faster-than-light starships. Yes, cars transformed the landscape and gave rise to the malls, McDonald’s and the suburbs. Sure, FTL will get us to the stars. But cars and starships change what we do, not who we are.
It has been observed that the future that cyberpunks envisioned seems very dark indeed. However, dystopia is in the eye of the beholder. While we may shudder at the thought of living in some of these worlds, the fictional denizens of pep stories seldom exhibit nostalgia for the good old days of 2007. What seems grim to us is simply the world to them. Characters in these stories are too busy living their lives to waste much time wringing their hands over the subversion of our values. Why should they? Do we live in a dystopia? One can easily imagine the American Founding Fathers, even the technophilic libertine Benjamin Franklin, recoiling in horror at some of the values of our society. In pep stories, human values are not imprinted on the fabric of the universe because what it means to be human is always negotiable.
These traits of PCP are so far mere extensions of CP obsessions. Another obsession of CP was to tell stories about the people that science fiction had traditionally ignored. Originally “the street” in CP meant the shadowy world of those who had set themselves against the norms of the dominant culture, hackers, thieves, spies, scam artists, and drug users. But for PCP writers the street leads to other parts of the world. Their futures have become more diverse, and richer for it. Asians and Africans and Latinos are no longer just sprinkled into stories as supporting characters, as if they are some kind of exotic seasoning. PCP writers attempt to bring them and their unique concerns to the center of their stories. PCP pays attention to the underclass, who do not have access to the transformative technologies that were the CP stock-in-trade.
“I think we live in an incomprehensible present, and what I’m trying to do is illuminate the moment. I’m trying to make the moment accessible. I’m not even trying to explain the moment, I’m just trying to make the moment accessible.”
— William Gibson, No Maps for These Territories
In the beginning, the stereotypical cyberpunk protagonist was a disaffected loner from outside the cultural mainstream. Ultimately this proved not only tiresome but also betrayed a lack of extrapolative rigor. No future could exist in which there were only data thieves in trench coats and megalomaniacal middle managers. Someone had to be baking the bread and driving the trucks and assembling all those flat screens. Cyberspace needs electricians! Where was the middle class in the CP stories? What were the families like? Could the cyberpunks write about community and still be punks?
The punk in cyberpunk has always been a problem. If by punk, one meant to say that the writers of the Mirrorshades generation were young, well, they were — at the time. But while they were to varying degrees outsiders, very few of the original cyberpunks — or indeed, the contributors to this collection — could be said to have lived “on the street.” It is difficult to write orderly sentences if one is caught up in the chaos of a punk lifestyle. And as time passed, it became more and more of a stretch for some of the original cyberpunks to take their inspiration from youth culture.
But the punk in postcyberpunk 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.