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.
As cyberpunk's practitioners bask in unsought legitimacy, it becomes harder to pretend that cyberpunk was something freakish or aberrant; it's easier today to see where it came from, and how it got where it is. Still, it might be thought that allegiance to Jules Verne is a bizarre declaration for a cyberpunk. It might, for instance, be argued that Jules Verne was a nice guy who loved his Mom, while the brutish antihuman cyberpunks advocate drugs, anarchy, brain-plugs and the destruction of everything sacred.
This objection is bogus. Captain Nemo was a technical anarcho- terrorist. Jules Verne passed out radical pamphlets in 1848 when the streets of Paris were strewn with dead. And yet Jules Verne is considered a Victorian optimist (those who have read him must doubt this) while the cyberpunks are often declared nihilists (by those who pick and choose in the canon). Why? It is the tenor of the times, I think.
There is much bleakness in cyberpunk, but it is an honest bleakness. There is ecstasy, but there is also dread. As I sit here, one ear tuned to TV news, I hear the US Senate debating war. And behind those words are cities aflame and crowds lacerated with airborne shrapnel, soldiers convulsed with mustard-gas and Sarin.
This generation will have to watch a century of manic waste and carelessness hit home, and we know it. We will be lucky not to suffer greatly from ecological blunders already committed; we will be extremely lucky not to see tens of millions of fellow human beings dying horribly on television as we Westerners sit in our living rooms munching our cheeseburgers. And this is not some wacky Bohemian jeremiad; this is an objective statement about the condition of the world, easily confirmed by anyone with the courage to look at the facts.
These prospects must and should effect our thoughts and expressions and, yes, our actions; and if writers close their eyes to this, they may be entertainers, but they are not fit to call themselves science fiction writers. And cyberpunks are science fiction writers -- not a "subgenre" or a "cult," but the thing itself. We deserve this title and we should not be deprived of it.
But the Nineties will not belong to the cyberpunks. We will be there working, but we are not the Movement, we are not even "us" any more. The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties. All power, and the best of luck to the Nineties underground. I don't know you, but I do know you're out there. Get on your feet, seize the day. Dance on tables. Make it happen, it can be done. I know. I've been there.