Sidebar VI: The Root of the Tree, Cyberpunk

Sidebar VI: The Root of the Tree 

“How did I actually create the word? The way any new word comes into being, I guess: through synthesis. I took a handful of roots—cyber, techno, et al—mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right.”

Bruce Bethke 

Before we can really examine Solarpunk, I feel we need to go back a bit and look at where it sprang. Having looked into it, that would be the Cyberpunk movement for my money. Cyberpunk was the first “punk” genre and was an evolution in how science fiction stories were told and who they were told about and that created in many ways the space that Solarpunk operates and the themes it carries forward. Many supporters of Solarpunk have adopted opposing themes and ideas to the ones common in Cyberpunk but I found on digging that what goes in a Solarpunk novel, of which there aren't many is often more complex but we'll get to that. First let me discuss Cyberpunk. A quick note, this is not exhaustive by any means but should serve to give everyone an idea of where Cyberpunk came from, what it does and let us observe it's donations to Solarpunk.

Cyberpunk has it's roots in the New Wave Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which was a subversive movement in fantasy and science fiction. It was a reaction to the Golden Age of both genres where stories were honestly at times limited in their themes, characterizations and plots. The new generation of writers wanted to attempted stories that would feature things that were rather taboo at the time. Like drug use by protagonists, or protagonists that were deeply flawed or even rather sinister, the exploration of counter culture values and ideas and a rejection of the idea that new technology is always the solution to our problems along with the suggestion that new technology might bring its own problems. Underlying this was a rejection of things like Joseph Campbell's idea of the monomyth, the idea that the hero should always be upholding society and deferring to proper authorities and the utopian views of the future science fiction often provided. Now that's not to say all of this was never happened in the stories of the 1940s and 50s but it wasn't common and definitely wasn't the accepted tone of either genre. It was here that a number of proto Cyberpunk novels would be written like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” which led to the movie Bladerunner. The New Wave grew throughout the 1960 but by the 1970s, it seemed that it's high water mark was behind it. With the closing of the magazines that provided the main voice many were declaring the New Wave dead and gone and were debating if it had any real lasting impact. Enter the 1980s.

In the 1980s the seeds for the massive changes still taking place in our society were being laid and while the average citizen had no damn clue what was coming. There were an increasing number of people who realized that technologies like the home computer, the ability to network them and create things that only existed on those networks were going to make a big noise in the world and soon. This combined with the increasing deregulation in the United States, the increasing inequalities in wealth and economic anxiety that there simply wasn't room in the wondrous future for the American worker. In California the Hardcore Punk movement was eating up the music scene and was seen as overly violent, anti-intellectual and downright anti-social. Interesting it's the outside view of the punk, as opposed to the musicans themselves that seems to have influenced the early writers of Cyberpunk. Despite that, the punk themes of rebellion against authority and social convention and an embrace of what some folks called anti-social behavior would fliter into the behavior of the protagionists of Cyberpunk works. It was Bruce Bethke, an American writer took the word punk and combined it with Cyber, for computer creating the term. By his own admission he was combining terms until he created a word that sounded right to him, but there's a reason the word gelled with the public. While Mr. Bethke gave us the word Cyberpunk, it was William Gibson who gave us the meaning of the word and almost single handly defined the genre for almost a decade and he did with a little book called Neuromancer.

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” 

Written in 1984, it was Gibsons first full length novel and according to him was written a state of barely controlled terror and he was sure everyone would think he was ripping off Bladerunner, the film being released while he was a 1/3rd of the way into the novel. But write it he did, in the space of a year and when it was released... There was no fanfare but Gibson had hit a cultural nerve. It became an underground hit, spreading by word of mouth. Honestly if you were born after 1995, I'm not sure you realize how hard that was back then. There were no youtube personalities to help the book become viral, no reddit for fans to spread the word, or twitter. No amazon, so every copy of the book had to be hunted down in book stores or libraries (we also had to read books upside down, in the snow back then, especially in summer!). Word of the book was spread face to face, books passed from hand to hand. It would become the first book to win a Nebula, a Hugo and a Philip K Dick Award for paperback original. It would also become the landmark work of Cyberpunk throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s.

It's from here we get mercenary hackers slipping into Cyberspace to do battle with ICE programs, while Razor Girls and Street Samurai (cybernetic mercenaries who do their work in realspace) guard their inert bodies or seek to find and kill them. The archetype of the Cyberpunk protagonist, an isolated loner alienated from his or her community emerges here as well. This archtype is an enduring one, we see it in Snowcrash and we also saw it in Altered Carbon. What also appeared in the 1980s was a heavy Japanese influence as Japan's economy grew larger and larger at increased speed. Interestingly enough the Japanese themselves would pitch into the growth and development of the Cyberpunk genre through manga and animes like Bubblegum Crisis, Akira and of course Ghost in the Shell, which would in turn heavily influence Anglosphere writers in the future (the state of entertain between the Anglo sphere nations and Japan is something in and of itself that I could happly blather on for hours but we'll stop here). A lot of this would change over time but the themes and core setting ideas of Cyberpunk have remained very carefully nailed in place.

First and most likely the core idea is that technology doesn't actually fix things for everyone, or even most people. The worlds of Cyberpunk are often more high tech ( at least when they don't get tripped up by the writers own assumptions, for example Gibson's suggesting that in the future people would find 3 whole MBs of RAM worth killing over) then our own. That doesn't mean that the majority of people in those worlds are living better then us or even as well as us. Technology in a Cyberpunk world tends to excessively favor the elite and make it easier for them to dominate everyone one else. Second is the idea of alienation, which is the state of being isolated from a group or activity that you should be involved in. Hiro Protagonist (Snowcrash) should be involved in the greater community of programmers and hackers but he plants himself on the margins and refuses to move. Takshi Kovacs (Altered Carbon) is alienated from pretty much his entire species, as a result of the training that the United Nations put him through and the results of constantly moving from world and world, due to the re-sleeving technology Kovac is even alienated from his own body! Which is a profound escalation in the theme if you ask me. This has allowed Cyberpunk works over time to be more and more diverse in their characters and plots, allowing for variation in race, gender and more to expand over the genre. Lastly Cyberpunk also hosts a number of works that are critical of modern society, sometimes ferociously so. Of these a good number of Cyberpunk books have veiled or not so veiled criticisms of capitalism in general and corporate practice and life in specific. I haven't run into any Cyberpunk critical of socialism but that may be because most of the Cyberpunk I'm aware of is written in nations where a style of deregulated and unfettered capitalism is practiced. I suppose it's possible that Denmark for example may have Cyberpunk stories that criticize socialism, as Cyberpunk books also criticize the idea of authority at some level, but I haven't seen any. Additionally, with the fall of the USSR and the PRC turning to capitalism, there's a certain feeling of why bother criticizing ideologies and economic methods that failed so spectacularly and completely? Capitalism is currently the last man standing in the economic debate club in a lot of ways. Even those who champion more nordic styles of government and management are really just arguing for a different style of capitalism. That doesn't mean new ideas and models won't emerge but it's hard criticize something that hasn't been thought up yet.

Cyberpunk is almost 40 years old with precursor works lurking about as far as a half a century ago, so in this it has been more successful then more experimental movements like the New Wave Science Fiction I discussed earlier. It's also spawned a vast number of offshoots and subsets, one of which is the subject of this month. However, children have more then one parent and Cyberpunk did not bring Solarpunk into the world alone. So next week, we're going to take a look at eco or climate fiction and then we should be on a solid footing to look at the emerging genre.




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