ABSTRACT
There is a moment in an interview when Jeff Noon notes how little written science fiction now influences people: “The last (written) sf movement to capture the general public’s imagination to any real extent was cyberpunk. That’s a long time ago, twenty years now” (Butler, “Quality” 15). In the mid-to late-1990s, Noon’s early novels were seen as being part of the cyberpunk movement. But this movement had been declared dead as a potentially revolutionary and cutting edge subgenre almost as soon as it was born-Bruce Sterling under his pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas wrote in 1986: “I hereby declare the revolution over. Long live the provisional government.” The label continued, however, and indeed continues, along with post-cyberpunk, as a device used to sell books. Geoff Ryman described Vurt (1993) as “a fast-paced, cyberpunk-seasoned sf thriller” (“Rev.” 90), a judgment that situates the novel in the margins of the subgenre rather than anywhere near the centre. This chapter will explore the novel’s use of an equivalent to cyberpunk’s use of virtual reality, the meaning of such virtual realms, and thus cyberpunk’s attitudes to the body and death. To my mind, the cyberpunk movement is best used to describe a group of
writers who were associating together in the 1980s-writing to each other, taking part in workshops, attending conventions, and communicating on bulletin boards. At the ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas (October 1982), a panel called “Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF,” William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and John Shirley discussed “Len Deighton, Nelson Algren, Burroughs and Ballard … rock and roll, MTV, Japan, fashion, drugs, and politics” (Shiner, “Inside” 21). The fiction that best fit the new label drew on the hard-boiled traditions of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the works of William S. Burroughs, and the shake-up of SF occasioned by the British New Wave, in particular the writings of J.G. Ballard. It could be described as “science fiction set in a near future, dominated by high technology including computers, computer networks and human/machine hybrids” (Butler, Cyberpunk: 9). It was SF of the mean streets featuring hookers and cowboys or freelance programmers-rather than the square-jawed heroes and white-coated rocket scientists of traditional SF. It was stylistically dense, and often explored what was then
a strange new realm of cyberspace. Bruce Sterling edited the crucial anthology Mirrorshades (1986), bringing together stories by Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, Gibson, Marc Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, Shirley, and himself-although not all of the stories fit what we would recognise as cyberpunk. I regard the writers who emerged after this anthology as being post-cyberpunks.1
