Origins of Cyberpunk?

kathos

I have a little thing to do for uni about the origins of cyberpunk. I have a few things on it, would anyone have any more information to share? (also it always seems like I have two questions when I post in H/A)

PirateJon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer

mrcheesypants

Didn't William Gibson write some cyberpunk short stories before Neuromancer?

vonPoonBurGer

mrcheesypants wrote: »

Didn't William Gibson write some cyberpunk short stories before Neuromancer?

Yes, most of the stories in Burning Chrome were written prior to Neuromancer, but weren't collected into a book until after that first novel was well-received. The short story for "Johnny Mnemonic" in particular is so awesome, I'm still baffled as to how they it could have been made into a movie that was entirely not awesome.

Feral

Yeah, Neuromancer is definitely the poster child, but it was not the first nor was it the best cyberpunk novel.

You should probably start by looking into the early works of John Shirley, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, and (as previously mentioned) William Gibson. Also, you really can't do an intelligent paper on it without delving into its ancestry, so you'd want to look into new wave sf (notably Sam Delaney, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs) and refer to specific novels that dealt with ideas of artificial intelligence and/or virtual space.

blincoln

Vernor Vinge's True Names is the earliest short story I've felt was really proto-Cyberpunk. Most people seem to consider John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (published in 1975, six years before True Names) to be the real source of the genre, but I tried reading it once and something didn't feel right about it.
Neuromancer was the first real breakthrough into the mainstream, and is IMO still the best overall work of Cyberpunk fiction. In addition to what Feral mentioned, I would recommend checking out the old Mirrorshades short story compilation, which includes (among other things) Pat Cadigan's short story "Rock On" (which was the basis for her later novel Synners). It's basically a who's who of the genre's authors.

Kipling217

The biggest problem with pinpointing the origins of Cyberpunk is that a lot of the authors knew eachother before they where famous. They coresponded and published stories in Fanzines and such making the definitive innovator difficult to see. Gibson is the obvious choice with his coining the word Cyberspace, but that is in it self a continuation of the ideas laid forth in Vernon Vinge's True Names.

What also makes for trouble is that the authors did not really have a name for the genre until later on. It wasn't until the Short story Cyberpunk in 1983 that the name was founded(the authors had a habit of circulating unfinished stories amongst themselves before completion). Other potential names was Techno-punk and New Romaticsism( Gibson refrenced this in the title Neuromancer=New Romantic).

John Brunners Shockwave Riders is considered close but not "quite there yet", while several cyberpunk authors claim both Alfred Bester,Thomas Pychon and William Burroughs as inspiration. (William Gibson is quoted as saying about Burroughs: "this dangerous old literary gentleman who sent many of us out, under sealed orders, years ago.")

In any case the Gibson short story : Fragments of a hologram rose is considered one of the first cyberpunk stories(but not the first). It was published in 1977. the Shockwave Riders was published in 1975. Therefore its usual to place the birth of cyberpunk(as a genre) somewhere around 1976-77.

Of course you dont have to take my word for it. I got much of my info from a roleplaying game published by Guardians of Order Inc! :P The game named Ex Machina for the Tri stat system contains an indept analysis of the whole cyberpunk phenonmen and has a great bibliography. It was published in 2004 and sadly the publisher has since gone bankrupt(or near enough), but if you look around at gameshops(the roleplaying kind) you might be lucky.

Lastly, I read once an interveu with William Gibson that he considers himself and several of his early stories to have a satirical bent and he feels that an overlooked aspect of his literary career. In any case he hates that people uses his books as a guidebook to future technology, because the focus of his stories are how we interact with technology,not what technology we interact with.

My 2 cents worth. hope it helps

Rook

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/history.html

has some good writeups on the topic.

JohnnyCache

blincoln wrote: »

Vernor Vinge's True Names is the earliest short story I've felt was really proto-Cyberpunk. Most people seem to consider John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (published in 1975, six years before True Names) to be the real source of the genre, but I tried reading it once and something didn't feel right about it.
Neuromancer was the first real breakthrough into the mainstream, and is IMO still the best overall work of Cyberpunk fiction. In addition to what Feral mentioned, I would recommend checking out the old Mirrorshades short story compilation, which includes (among other things) Pat Cadigan's short story "Rock On" (which was the basis for her later novel Synners). It's basically a who's who of the genre's authors.

Shockwave Rider is associated with "cyberpunk" mainly because it was the handle of Robert Morris the younger, the creator of the Morris worm. The story itself is more Orwellian, but because it deals specifically with the abuse of the phone system and wiretapping, and because of the psychology of the protagonist - his inability to resist using his abilities - it deserves a definite mention.

I feel cyberpunk is definitively dystopian sci-fi - further, it is dystopian in reaction to projected consequences of modern conditions, rather then hypothetical reactions to proposed societies (reactions to hypothetical societies are the stuff of the immediately preceding movement, included the novel form of blade runner)

Ridley Scott, with Alien and Blade Runner, certainly deserves a mention in your paper.

Kipling217

Yes, yes, Ridley scott without a doubt. Man helped create the visual image people have of cyberpunk to this day.

VisionOfClarity

Did anyone else immediately think of this or just me?

Agrehond

After seeing Blade Runner on the screen, I couldn't help but wish that Ridley Scott would make the movie version of Neuromancer.

I still hope for that.

Would be the best movie ever.

Arch Guru XX

I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which a lot of people think of as a key Cyberpunk book, along with Neuromancer. Although I guess you could say Stephenson isn't primarily a Cyberpunk author, since most of other books don't really fall into that genre. Still, it certainly had a big impact.

vonPoonBurGer

Arch Guru XX wrote: »

I'm a little surprised no one has mentioned Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which a lot of people think of as a key Cyberpunk book, along with Neuromancer. Although I guess you could say Stephenson isn't primarily a Cyberpunk author, since most of other books don't really fall into that genre. Still, it certainly had a big impact.

It's an awesome book, and it certainly had an impact on me. However, it couldn't have had an impact on the origins of cyberpunk since it came out in 1992, fully ten years after the initial wave of cyberpunk in the late 70s and early 80s.

blincoln

Kipling217 wrote: »

Yes, yes, Ridley scott without a doubt. Man helped create the visual image people have of cyberpunk to this day.

...although it should be noted that both Scott and Gibson were influenced by artwork in Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, particularly Jean Giraud (AKA "Moebius") - see The Long Tomorrow. Giraud apparently worked on Alien too.

CFlux

Not sure if this is relevant but there is a book by n. Katherine Hayles called how we became post human. Its not a cyberpunk book but it is a study of the concepts used in a lot of cyberpunk works and it shows how some of the concepts are manifesting themselves in reality now and what the societal implications may be. I wrote a paper on cyberpunk a few years ago and that was one of the books my adviser suggested I include.