Huck Finn 2 Țesătorul Academic
Mass-media tehnologizate de la sfîrșitul secolului al douăzecilea si
impactul lor asupra societății globale așa cum se reflectă în literatura
cyberpunk
CAPITOLUL 1: DEFINIȚIE ȘI
AUTORI (1: DEFINITION AND AUTHORS)
CAPITOLUL 2: CONTEXTUL
CULTURAL (2: THE CULTURAL CONTEXT)
CAPITOLUL 3: SCHIMBĂRILE
TEHNOLOGICE (3: TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES)
CAPITOLUL 4: SCHIMBĂRILE
PSIHOLOGICE (4: PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES)
CAPITOLUL 5: SCHIMBĂRILE
SOCIALE (5: SOCIAL CHANGES)
CAPITOLUL 6: DEGRADAREA
ECOLOGICĂ (6: ECOLOGICAL DEGRADATION)
CAPITOLUL 7: EFECTELE
CULTURALE (7: CULTURAL EFFECTS)
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Capitolul 1: Definiții și autori
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Capitolul 2: Contextul cultural
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Capitolul 3: Schimbările tehnologice
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Capitolul 4: Schimbările psihologice
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Capitolul 5: Schimbările sociale
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Capitolul 6: Degradarea ecologică
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Capitolul 7: Efectele culturale
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Acest capitol este în curs de redactare. (top)
Art Not Quite Crime
Late Twentieth-century Technology Media and Their Impact on the Global
Society as Reflected in Cyberpunk Fiction
At
the beginning of the 1980s there emerged in North America a literary genre
focused on information and telecommunication technology, the metamorphosis of
industrial societies, anomie and the rise of crime. The genre was named cyberpunk
by editor Gardner Dozois, but the term itself was created by writer Bruce
Bethke to serve as a title for his first short story, which he published in
1983.
A decade later, when the writers
involved in this movement as well as some newcomers focused away from outlaws
and onto characters with jobs and families, the genre was said to have evolved
into a new stage named postcyberpunk. Since the similarities between the
two stages are much more numerous than the differences, I chose to analyse
various aspects of them under the title (Post)Cyberpunk.
This term covers a wide set of
literary works which are emblematic for the changes undergone by
post-industrial societies. Therefore, after a detailed examination of
(post)cyberpunk's authors (chapter 1) and cultural context (chapter 2), the
thesis focuses in turn on technological, psychological, social and ecological
changes manifest in Western countries in the last two decades of the 20th
century, and on the way in which these changes are identified, extrapolated and
debated in (post)cyberpunk fiction. Finally, it also discusses the genre's
influence on culture and the arts in the 1990s.
But for the time being, let us see
who the cyberpunk authors actually are. (top)
Chapter 1: Definition and Authors
The
term "cyberpunk" was coined by science fiction writer Bruce Bethke in
the early spring of 1980 as a title for a short story about teenage computer
hackers. He attempted to invent a new term that expressed the juxtaposition of
punk attitudes and high technology. He also wanted the title to be short and
easy to remember. Judging by the fact that the "cyberpunk" word has
had a wide circulation for two decades now, Bethke almost feels sorry for not
trademarking it. Later on, as a reaction against the wide use and misuse of the
term, and especially against the proliferation of second- and third-hand imitations
of cyberpunk fiction, Bruce Bethke published the satiric novel Headcrash
(1995) which won the Philip K. Dick Award.
In the
early 1980s, however, Bethke was not the only author to move away from
conventional space-opera and heroic-fantasy material, such as Star Trek
novelizations and Conan the Barbarian imitations. A number of young authors
whose careers were just taking shape at that time focused on visions of a near
future based on a careful extrapolation of trends existing in contemporary
society. Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
argued at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver, 1981, while chairing
a panel called "Beyond the Punk Nebula", that a new literary movement
was about to emerge, pointed out William Gibson in the audience as being part
of it, and used Bruce Bethke's term "cyberpunk" to label it.
Under this label, a number of original authors
and quite a few imitators and latecomers launched successful careers. As the
authors are rather numerous, at this point it would be useful to cluster them
according to criteria of chronology and originality.
First, there is a hard core of
cyberpunk authors that includes William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley,
Lewis Shiner and Rudy Rucker. On the one hand, their early novels and short
stories helped define the subgenre's themes and tone. Such works are Neuromancer
(1984), Schismatrix (1985), Eclipse (1985), Frontera
(1984) and Software (1982), respectively.
On the other hand, they form a tight
nucleus of friendship, manifested among other things in a great number of
stories written in collaboration and mutual appraisal in the media. Bruce
Sterling, the movement's unofficial spokesman, wrote a novel and a short story
in collaboration with William Gibson and novelettes with Shirley, Rucker and
Shiner, among others. He also wrote introductions to collections of short
stories by Pat Cadigan, Gibson and Shirley. Gibson, in his turn, wrote a
novelette with Shirley, as well as introductions to
William Gibson, the movement's
central figure, was born in 1948 near
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina,
Gibson completed the Cyberspace
trilogy with Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988),
published a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome (1986) and a
collaborative novel with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1990),
and then wrote the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996)
and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999). William Gibson also wrote the script
for the motion picture Johnny Mnemonic (1995). He is currently working
on a book entitled Pattern Recognition.
Bruce Sterling, nicknamed by the
other cyberpunk authors "Chairman Bruce", was born in 1954 and lives
in
John Shirley, probably the movement's
most extravagant member, followed several careers as a writer of science
fiction and horror, rock musician, journalist and screenwriter. He was born in
1954, started publishing with "The Word 'Random' Deliberately
Repeated" (1973), and while performing with punk rock bands such as Sado
Nation he wrote the novels Transmaniacon (1979), featuring the typical
Shirley protagonist: punk, anarchic, unconstrained, Three-Ring Psychus (1980),
and City Come A-Walkin' (1980). He also introduced William Gibson to
Bruce Sterling and wrote his finest cyberpunk work in the Song Called Youth
trilogy: Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988) and Eclipse
Corona (1990), set after a realistically conceived World War III and
describing a resistance movement which fights a neofascist regime. His other
science fiction novels include A Splendid Chaos (1988) and Silicon
Embrace (1996). John Shirley published short-story collections such as Heatseeker
(1988) and Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories (1999) and wrote
scripts for motion pictures, most notably The Crow (1994), as well as
for the adult cartoon series Spawn.
If John Shirley is at the punk end of
the movement's spectrum, Rudy Rucker is most definitely at the cyber one.
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, born in 1946, has advanced degrees in mathematics
from
Lewis Shiner, also associated with
the movement's hard core, was born in 1950 and started publishing with
"Tinker's Damn" in 1977. He wrote a great number of short stories,
assembled in Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (1990)
and The Edges of Things (1991). His novels include Frontera (1984),
the magic-realist Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988), Slam
(1990) and the fantasy Glimpses (1993). He co-edited the movement's
fanzine "Cheap Truth" with Bruce Sterlng, and lives in Austin, Texas.
In 1991, Lewis Shiner announced in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times
that he had resigned from the cyberpunk movement, which triggered a variety of
reactions from the other members.
Second, there is a number of authors
who associated themselves with this literary movement for a long time. Such
authors are Pat Cadigan, Walter Jon Williams, Jack Womack, Tom Maddox, James
Patrick Kelly and Richard Kadrey. Except Womack, they all contributed to
cyberpunk anthologies such as Mirrorshades (1986) or Storming the
Reality Studio (1991).
Among these, Pat Cadigan is the only
female writer constantly associated with cyberpunk fiction. Born in
Schenechtady, New York, in 1953, Patricia Oren Kearney Cadigan received a
degree from the University of Kansas. She began publishing in 1978 with
"Death from Exposure" for Shayol, a semiprofessional magazine which
she edited throughout its existence (1977-85). Her novels include Mindplayers
(1987), Synners (1991), Fools (1992), both of which received the
Arthur C. Clarke Award, Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish is
Digital (2000). She also published short-story collections such as Patterns
(1989), Home by the Sea (1992) and Dirty Work (1993). Since
1996 she has lived in London with her husband Chris Fowler.
Walter Jon Williams, born in 1953 and
residing in New Mexico, had started a career in genre SF with novels such as Ambassador
of Progress (1984) and Knight Moves (1985). However, he switched to
cyberpunk with short stories like "Video Star" (1986), a trilogy
comprising Hardwired (1986), Voice of the Whirlwind (1987) and Solip:system
(1989) and the individual novels Angel Station (1989) and Days of
Atonement (1991).
Jack Womack's work parallels some of
cyberpunk's themes and ideas, but his six-volume series of novels is much
darker in tone, and also quite experimental in point of language, which earned Ambient
(1987), the first volume of the cycle, the name of "An American Clockwork
Orange". The other volumes of his New York Series are Terraplane (1988),
Heathern (1990), Elvissey (1993), which received the Philip K.
Dick Award, Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993) and Going, Going, Gone (199?).
Tom Maddox, born in 1945, was
acknowledged by William Gibson as the inventor of ICE, Intruders
Countermeasures Electronics. Maddox
began publishing with "The Mind like a Strange Balloon" in 1985. His
first novel, Halo (1991), expands the universe sketched in a Mirrorshades
short story, "Snake Eyes", and the author made it available for free
on the Internet. He also wrote the novel Walls of Light (1998), and
co-authored with William Gibson the X-Files episodes "Kill Switch"
and "First Person Shooter".
James Patrick Kelly, born in 1951,
was mostly associated with the "Humanists" in the 1980s, but
published cyberpunk short stories and also a novel, Wildlife (1994), an
analysis of the relationship between a child artificially re-engineered each
time he nears puberty and his extraordinary mother.
Richard Kadrey, writer, rock musician
and illustrator, was born in 1957. He published cyberpunk short stories in
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and Interzone, and the novels Metrophage
(1988), singled out by William Gibson for its literary quality, and Kamikaze
L'Amour (1996), as well as the non-fiction Covert Culture Sourcebook: A
Guide to Fringe Culture (1993). Kadrey offered Metrophage on the
Internet for free distribution, and also an extract from Kamikaze L'Amour
entitled "Horse Latitudes".
Third, there are authors with
well-established careers in different genres who at one stage or another
produced (post)cyberpunk novels and short stories. Such authors are Greg Bear,
mostly associated with hard science fiction, Michael Swanwick, usually
associated with humanist science fiction, and Lucius Shepard, who is associated
with magic realism.
Greg Bear, born in 1951, is an
extremely prolific writer who began publishing science fiction wth
"Destroyers" in 1967. Critics consider him to be central to American
genre science fiction with novels such as Eon (1985) and Eternity
(1988). However, he gave an excellent treatment of cyberpunk themes like
nanomechanisms, virtual reality and genetic engineering in Blood Music
(1985), the 1983 novella version of which won both the Hugo and the Nebula
Award, Queen of Angels (1990), Slant (1997) and, more recently, Darwin's
Radio (1999).
Michael Swanwick, who was born in
1950, also wrote short stories with distinctive cyberpunk settings and
characters at the very beginning of the 1980s, when the movement under
discussion had scarcely started, much less had a name. Most of these were
assembled in the collection Gravity's Angels (1991), which was later
followed by A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000)
and Tales of Old Earth (2000). He wrote a variety of novels, including In
the Drift (1985), Vacuum Flowers (1987), Griffin's Egg (1991)
and Stations of the Tide (1991) which won the Nebula Award. In 1993 he
published The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a fantasy novel set in a fairyland
in the grips of the Industrial Revolution.
Lucius Shepard, born in 1947,
travelled widely between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. Quite a lot of his
short stories, assembled in The Jaguar Hunter (1987) and The Ends of
Earth (1991), as well his novels Green Eyes (1984), for which he
received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, Life During Wartime (1987)
and Kalimantan (1990) mix science fiction themes like the near future or
alternate worlds with elements of magic realism in a very stylish manner that
proved quite influential on other writers.
Fourth, there are imitators, authors
who during the mid- and late-1980s, as well as in the early 1990s, decided to
exploit for their own benefit the newly-created literary market. Such
latecomers include Kathy Acker, Wilhelmina Baird and Jeff Noon. It is precisely
due to the latecomers' advent that in 1988 the originators of cyberpunk fiction
tried to declare the literary movement dead, but this enterprise proved
unsuccessful.
Kathy Acker, 1948-1997, writer and
playwright, not so much joined the cyberpunk movement or imitated it as used
extracts from William Gibson's Neuromancer and the William S. Burroughs
cut-up technique to create her own post-modern ironic version of cyberpunk in Empire
of the Senseless (1988).
Wilhelmina Baird is the pen-name of
British writer Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson, born in 1935 and active in the
literary field in the early 1960s. After a long absence, she returned to
writing in the 1990s. Her cyberpunk trilogy comprising CrashCourse (1994),
ClipJoint (1994) and PsyKosis (1995) is set in a 21st-century
Jeff Noon is another British writer,
born in 1957, whose first two novels, Vurt (1993) and Pollen (1994)
are set in a near-future
Last, but not least, there are
second-generation cyberpunks. Younger than the movement's originators,
sometimes dissenting with their ideas, but every bit as brilliant, they emerged
on the literary scene in the early 1990s. They are Neal Stephenson and the
Australian Greg Egan.
Greg Egan, a writer and computer
programmer born in 1961, criticized some stereotypical aspects of cyberpunk
fiction in interviews. In his fiction, however, he gave a brilliant treatment
of cyperpunk themes such as cybernetics and virtual reality, informed by
thorough knowledge of mathematics, physics and computer programming. His short
stories, assembled in Axiomatic (1995), Our Lady of Chernobyl (1995)
and Luminous (1998), as well as his novels Quarantine (1992), Permutation
City (1994), Distress (1995), Diaspora (1998) and Teranesia
(1999) upped the ante for the entire science fiction genre with their
throrough documentation of scientific information and their density of ideas.
Neal Stephenson, born in 1959, was hailed
by both
If Egan took the themes and settings
of cyberpunk into the realm of hard science, pitching them against quantum
physics and multi-dimensional mathematics, Stephenson completed the circle and,
especially with Cryptonomicon, brought (post)cyberpunk where it began,
near the work of predecessors such as Thomas Pynchon. (top)
Chapter 2: The Cultural Context
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
Chapter 3: Technological Changes
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
Chapter 4: Psychological Changes
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
Chapter 6: Ecological Degradation
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
This chapter is currently under development. (top)
This chapter is currently under development. (top)