ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, the cyberpunk genre revitalized interest in science fiction among both academic and popular audiences. Canonical cyberpunk fiction typically depicts a doomed and desperate world that reiterates a globalization replete with multinational corporate domination, powerless and pliable masses, and environmental degradation. It offers a consensual consensus vision of the imminent production and deployment of technology in the service of capitalism writ large. The conflict between the individual and a technologically advanced global capitalist machine produces different spins on a standard story, one exemplified by William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992): a techno-savvy man poaches from the corporations, acquiring fantastic amounts of conflicting information; he accomplishes incredibly difficult feats that require acute mental prowess; and ultimately decides the fate of the planet. This protagonist
is normally surrounded by a few supporters/rebels (at least one of whom is a sexy, independent, often smitten female sidekick) who assist or distract him in his quest to conquer technological power-mongers and save the world. Though this is admittedly a reductive characterization of an entire subgenre of science fiction, the limited notion of what constitutes cyberpunk has been justly critiqued and countered by alternative fictional portrayals. In this chapter, I argue for a broader vision of cyberpunk, one that includes the novels of authors situated “on the receiving end of the colonization,” particularly Nalo Hopkinson. Through both language and vision, Hopkinson articulates an example of offline digital creolization, casting a future that makes visible current socioeconomic inequities, suggests alternative formulations of the relationship between humans and technology, and in the process increases the cultural repository of ideas that inspire technological development. Hopkinson’s novel Midnight Robber (2000) portrays a world controlled by the Marryshow Corporation and powered by a Web-based Artificial Intelligence.4 Radical environmental destruction necessitates human habitation on a remote planet, and a rebel becomes a hero by manipulating technology and confronting the inequities she perceives in her society. Hopkinson renders transparent the complexities of multiple cultures in contact: the cross-fertilization of histories, languages, and diasporic dislocations.5 She explains:
To create such a text, Hopkinson combines English with Trinidadian and Jamaican Creole, “hacking” a language that recalls the histories of the Middle Passage, slavery, and imperialism. Similarly, her characters break and create code and exhibit a hacker notion of community. Ultimately, Hopkinson succeeds in hacking the genre of science fiction by blending cyberpunk and planetary romance.7 Centered on a feminine Artificial Intelligence who commands the planet and its inhabitants, Midnight Robber simultaneously invokes and challenges the conventions of cyberpunk, revealing cyberpunk’s ideological underpinnings and complicating popular accounts of the intersections of gender, technology, and corporate domination. Through this depiction, Midnight Robber models technologies premised on the histories and beliefs of New World subjects who have been either fetishized (as in Gibson’s accounts of Voudon) or voiceless in the majority of science fiction. Hopkinson, like other Afrofuturist visionaries,8 fashions unconventional scenarios premised on technological development, thus envisioning unorthodox versions of future societies.9
