ABSTRACT

What is cyberpunk, anyway? The question itself is wrong-headed, presupposing as it does that cyberpunk “is” some one thing or other, that it is some kind of “object” about which demonstrably true or false statements could be made. Nevertheless, wrong-headed though it may be, the question “What is cyberpunk?” does admit of an answer-or rather several answers, all different, none of them necessarily reducible to any of the others. No doubt cyberpunk is, as its critics within the science-fiction (SF) com-

munity insist, a barefaced marketing device of SF publishers. But, if it is anything more than that (as I believe it is), then cyberpunk SF must, first of all, be a generational and “school” phenomenon. It has its own “school” institutions-manifestoes and literary polemics, group anthologies, fan magazines, panels at SF conventions, etc.—and its forms of “school” solidarity; e.g. cyberpunks write jacket blurbs for one another’s books and otherwise promote the careers and reputations of fellow members of the school.1 There does exist (as I shall undertake to demonstrate below) a shared cyberpunk poetics, but this is to some extent a consequence of membership in the cyberpunk group rather than the other way around. That is, the initial question to be asked about cyberpunk SF is not so much “What is it?” as “Who are the cyberpunks?” As with other school phenomena, we can identify an inner circle of “hard-core” cyberpunks-including Bruce Sterling, its leading propagandist, William Gibson, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, and Lewis Shiner-and a more fluid outer circle of writers who have at some point or to some degree affiliated themselves with the cyberpunk group, or have had such an affiliation thrust upon them by others. This outer circle might include, among others, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Tom Maddox, Lucius Shepard, Michael Swanwick, and Walter Jon Williams.