In 1984, American author William Gibson published Neuromancer, a novel that was to herald the arrival of a new and influential subgenre of science fiction: cyberpunk. So what is, or was, “cyberpunk”? Novels classified as cyberpunk are invariably set in a dystopian future, where the laws of an oppressive society are enforced by extensive computer technology. The “-punk” suffix refers to the heroes of the genre: lawless rebels who subvert the technological dominance of major corporations in order to scratch out an existance for themselves.
Although numerous authors contributed to the genre’s rapid expansion (in scope and influence) throughout the 1980s, Gibson soon rightly came to be recognised as the doyen of cyberpunk. Two further novels, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), secured his position as leader of the cyberpunk revolution, completing a trilogy that is now known as his cyberspace sequence. To uncover the key ingredients of cyberpunk, however, one need look no further than his ground-breaking debut novel, the aforementioned Neuromancer. Rather fittingly, given its publication in 1984, Neuromancer presents the reader with a dystopia that, although not an entirely Orwellian vision of the future, is just as terrifying and compelling in its scope. It is, as Stuart Moulthrop writes in his seminal essay “Hypertext and the Laws of Media”: “Nineteen Eighty- Four updated for 1984, the future somewhat gloomily surveyed from Reagan’s America.” Neuromancer is set in a near-future Earth: while its geography is dominated by the Sprawl, its commerce is run by faceless Japanese corporations known as “zaibatsus”. The book’s protagonist is Case, a computer cowboy who makes his living stealing from the megacorps, cruising through cyberspace in order to crack black ice– security programs that protect vital and potentially lucrative stores of data. Gibson’s plot owes much to the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler, except that in Neuromancer it is Case that is doing the cracking, not just a case that is being cracked. Gibson’s hero is offered a job–a big job, and one that cannot be refused–by a man ostensibly named Armitage. Who Case is really working for only gradually becomes clear. Chandler’s influence is also discernible in the novel’s hard-boiled, wisecracking dialogue, the pace of which rarely slows below a sprint. Take this exchange between Case and Molly, another of Armitage’s hired hackers:

“You’re street samurai,” he said.
“How long you work for him?”
“Couple of months.”
“What about before that?”
“For somebody else. Working girl, you know?”
He nodded.

So far, so derivative, but it is the many exciting imaginative concepts popularised by Gibson in Neuromancer that make the novel truly ground-breaking, supporting its claim to be the original work of cyberpunk fiction, both as a genre and an ethos. The most vital of these concepts is one with which we are all now familiar; so familiar, in fact, that its previous mention in this article will scarcely have raised an eyebrow. I speak, of course, of “cyberspace”, a word still unknown to the world only twenty-five years ago. Although the concept of a limitless virtual space inhabited by data had been around for some time, the first recorded use of the term “cyberspace” to refer to such a realm appears in a short story by Gibson, published in Omni magazine in 1982. Gibson shows off his neologisms with abandon in Neuromancer, setting up patterns of usage that still operate today. Witness Case, emerging from a lengthy venture into cyberspace:

Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He’d been in cyberspace for five hours.

An alternative term used by Gibson for this virtual space has also, thanks to Keanu Reeves and the Wachowski brothers, become part of popular culture: The Matrix. For Case, as with Neo, the matrix is a place of excitement, providing its users with an addictive thrill that keeps them coming back, despite the danger. Many of Gibson’s descriptions of Case draw attention to this compulsion:

Seven days and he’d jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he’d see the matrix.

Call it what you will–cyberspace, the matrix, the Internet–one cannot escape the fact that Gibson was the first writer to embed the concept of an accessible, limitless virtual space into popular consciousness. His cyberspace trilogy leaves behind it both a conceptual and linguistic legacy, lending support to the claim that the most inspired science fiction novelists truly have the power to predict the future.
But despite the phenomenal success experienced by authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and many others, cyberpunk was to prove unsustainable as a literary genre, and by the early nineties many commentators were lamenting the “death of cyberpunk”. Gibson’s later novels, while still addressing themes of technological mastery, utilise a more conventional narrative style, and his increase in popularity has been accompanied by a move towards the mainstream of science fiction. Of his many acolytes, few still publish what could truly be termed cyberpunk novels. A telling example is that of Jonathan Littell, whose cyberpunk novel Bad Voltage (1989) stands incongruently alongside his only other published novel–the Prix Goncourt winning Les Bienveillantes (2006). So was cyberpunk just another literary fad, a revolution that ended before it had begun to make any real impact? With so many of its key players quickly moving on to bigger and better things, it is indeed tempting to view it as such. Yet bizarrely, just as cyberpunk was in its death throes, the genre started gaining recognition from academia, with Stuart Moulthrop in particular adopting Gibson’s definition of cyberspace as:

A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

Gratifying as this recognition undoubtedly was, the genre’s adoption by post-modernist academics effectively gave cyberpunk the kiss of death. The inevitable tag of “postcyberpunk” began to be bandied around, yet many fans found a way to keep the ethos of cyberpunk alive through the most natural of mediums– cyberspace itself. It is difficult to generalise about any group of loosely associated individuals, but a key demand of these self-styled cyberpunks is that technology be used for the dissemination and sharing of information. Like Case, the original cyberpunk hero, modernday subscribers to the cyberpunk philosophy tend to distrust authority, and enjoy subverting new technologies developed by powerful multinational corporations.
In addition to this underground movement, Internet discussion groups devoted to cyberpunk as a literary genre still abound today. However, it is important to remember that the exploration of the possibilities provided by cyberspace was far from being solely a fan’s phenomenon. As one would expect from the progenitor of cyberpunk, Gibson has embraced the possibilities provided by technology, rewarding his devotees with frequent blog entries and a self-erasing electronic poem entitled Agrippa (The Book of the Dead). Cyberpunk’s appearance on the literary stage may have been a fleeting one, yet its legacy endures. Without it, there would be no trilogy of Matrix films, no such word as “cyberspace”, and the canon of twentieth- century literature would be missing some of its most imaginative and cutting-edge works. The ethos of cyberpunk survives amongst many web-based virtual communities, yet the genre owes its conception to a novel written entirely on a manual typewriter. If you haven’t yet done so, read Neuromancer tonight.