ABSTRACT
Bruce Sterling claims in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology that cyberpunk fiction issued “a clarion call for a new SF aesthetic” that would overthrow the “wrongheaded” colonialist attitudes of earlier SF. This chapter argues that in much cyberpunk fiction, and specifically in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, the colonial ideological fantasy of “empty land” is not overcome but rather re-stylized and recirculated in a form updated for the neocolonial economy and geopolitics of neoliberalism. As this chapter argues, cyberpunk’s contribution in the following decades to the cultural struggle over the direction and meaning of our collective transformation by information processing technology is complex, heterogeneous, and ongoing.
