Consider FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley, a wellspring of science fiction as a genre. In a cyberpunk analysis, FRANKENSTEIN is "Humanist" SF. FRANKENSTEIN promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. There are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law -- its workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will. Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe. Dr. Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront against the human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly punished by his own creation, the Monster.
Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants.
In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we *already* know Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Our *grandparents* knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves.
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.