ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the connections between cyberpunk and Gothic aesthetics, arguing that cybergothic texts not only borrow Gothic tropes, but that their involvement with the sublime and the uncanny is also an aesthetic manifestation of an underlying engagement with posthuman developments and the anxieties created by the growing integration of human bodies and machineries. Cyberpunk texts highlight the dystopian consequences of posthuman becomings just as cyberpunk aesthetics present gritty techno-futuristic spaces. The chapter draws on the Netflix series Altered Carbon to show how beyond its superficially entertaining engagement with the Gothic, notably in the figure of a goofy Edgar Allan Poe A.I., the series also draws attention to posthuman questioning of the human, personhood, bodily autonomy, and the necropolitical exploitation of bodies in capitalist systems, as well as various other contested boundaries like life and death, nature and culture, organism and machine, that are also central to the Gothic’s negative aesthetics.
