Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak and mortal, but it's not the holy will of the gods; it's just the way things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed, and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end.
This "anti-humanist" conviction in cyberpunk is not simply some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn't invent this situation; it just reflects it.
Today it is quite common to see tenured scientists espousing horrifically radical ideas: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cryonic suspension of the dead, downloading the contents of the brain... Hubristic mania is loose in the halls of academe, where everybody and his sister seems to have a plan to set the cosmos on its ear. Stern moral indignation at the prospect is the weakest of reeds; if there were a devilish drug around that could extend our sacred God-given lifespans by a hundred years, the Pope would be the first in line.
We already live, every day, through the means of outrageous actions with unforeseeable consequences to the whole world. The world population has doubled since 1970; the natural world, which used to surround humankind with its vast Gothic silences, is now something that has to be catalogued and cherished.
We're just not much good any more at refusing things because they don't seem proper. As a society, we can't even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley's corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.
Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes.
*This* is cyberpunk.
This explains, I hope, why standard sci-fi adventure yarns tarted up in black leather fail to qualify. Lewis Shiner has simply lost patience with writers who offer dopey shoot-em-up rack-fodder in sci- fiberpunk drag. "Other writers had turned the form into formula," he complains in THE NEW YORK TIMES, "the same dead-end thrills we get from video games and blockbuster movies." Shiner's early convictions have scarcely budged so much as a micron -- but the stuff most folks call "cyberpunk" no longer reflects his ideals.
In my opinion the derivative piffle is a minor issue. So is the word "cyberpunk." I'm pleased to see that it's increasingly difficult to write a dirt-stupid book, put the word "cyberpunk" on it, and expect it to sell. With the c-word discredited through half-witted overkill, anyone called a "cyberpunk" will have to pull their own weight now. But for those willing to pull weight, it's no big deal. Labels cannot defend their own integrity; but writers can, and good ones do.
There is another general point to make, which I believe is important to any real understanding of the Movement. Cyberpunk, like New Wave before it, was a voice of Bohemia. It came from the underground, from the outside, from the young and energetic and disenfranchised. It came from people who didn't know their own limits, and refused the limits offered them by mere custom and habit.
Not much SF is really Bohemian, and most of Bohemia has little to do with SF, but there was, and is, much to be gained from the meeting of the two. SF as a genre, even at its most "conventional," is very much a cultural underground. SF's influence on the greater society outside, like the dubious influence of beatniks, hippies, and punks, is carefully limited. Science fiction, like Bohemia, is a useful place to put a wide variety of people, where their ideas and actions can be examined, without the risk of putting those ideas and actions directly into wider practice. Bohemia has served this function since its start in the early Industrial Revolution, and the wisdom of this scheme should be admitted. Most weird ideas are simply weird ideas, and Bohemia in power has rarely been a pretty sight. Jules Verne as a writer of adventure novels is one thing; President Verne, General Verne, or Pope Jules is a much dicier proposition.
Cyberpunk was a voice of Bohemia -- Bohemia in the 1980s. The technosocial changes loose in contemporary society were bound to affect its counterculture. Cyberpunk was the literary incarnation of this phenomenon. And the phenomenon is still growing. Communication technologies in particular are becoming much less respectable, much more volatile, and increasingly in the hands of people you might not introduce to your grandma.
But today, it must be admitted that the cyberpunks -- SF veterans in or near their forties, patiently refining their craft and cashing their royalty checks -- are no longer a Bohemian underground. This too is an old story in Bohemia; it is the standard punishment for success. An underground in the light of day is a contradiction in terms. Respectability does not merely beckon; it actively envelops. And in this sense, "cyberpunk" is even deader than Shiner admits.
Time and chance have been kind to the cyberpunks, but they themselves have changed with the years. A core doctrine in Movement theory was "visionary intensity." But it has been some time since any cyberpunk wrote a truly mind-blowing story, something that writhed, heaved, howled, hallucinated and shattered the furniture. In the latest work of these veterans, we see tighter plotting, better characters, finer prose, much "serious and insightful futurism." But we also see much less in the way of spontaneous back-flips and crazed dancing on tables. The settings come closer and closer to the present day, losing the baroque curlicues of unleashed fantasy: the issues at stake become something horribly akin to the standard concerns of middle-aged responsibility. And this may be splendid, but it is not war. This vital aspect of science fiction has been abdicated, and is open for the taking. Cyberpunk is simply not there any more.
But science fiction is still alive, still open and developing. And Bohemia will not go away. Bohemia, like SF, is not a passing fad, although it breeds fads; like SF, Bohemia is old; as old as industrial society, of which both SF and Bohemia are integral parts. Cybernetic Bohemia is not some bizarre advent; when cybernetic Bohemians proclaim that what they are doing is completely new, they innocently delude themselves, merely because they are young.
Cyberpunks write about the ecstasy and hazard of flying cyberspace and Verne wrote about the ecstasy and hazard of FIVE WEEKS IN A BALLOON, but if you take even half a step outside the mire of historical circumstance, you can see that these both serve the same basic social function.
Of course, Verne, a great master, is still in print, while the verdict is out on cyberpunk. And, of course, Verne got the future all wrong, except for a few lucky guesses; but so will cyberpunk. Jules Verne ended up as some kind of beloved rich crank celebrity in the city government of Amiens. Worse things have happened, I suppose.