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James Nicoll wants to know when cyberpunk died, a question that isn’t that easy to answer. Cyberpunk was an eighties movement, but there are still cyberpunk novels being written and cyberpunk inspired movies being made. In one sense then it hasn’t died yet, but in another it’s clear that somewhere when the eighties turned into the nineties cyberpunk was mugged by reality.



As I said in my review of Trouble and Her Friends, that book came out just when the real internet broke into the mass consciousness, which is as good a place as any to mark cyberpunk’s passing, when its visions of what online life would be like were definatively proven wrong. Cyberspace moved from fiction to non-fiction, there was a small boom of silicon snake oil and that was it for the genre.



But that might be too late. Cyberpunk actually might have died early, at the end of the eighties, between 1989 and 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Gulf War made spectacle out of consensus reality and the political systems cyberpunk thrived on and took for granted collapsed. Let’s not forget that one of the casualties of the end of the Cold War was the Reaganite return to a manned space programme. Remember, the Shuttle and the ISS would’ve only been the beginning as America would go to Mars, while the Soviets were methologically working on extending their space programme as well, with Mir and all that. Cyberpunk always had in its background this idea that manned space exploration was not only important, but the inevitable future.



And then it turned out not to be…



Leaving books like Neuromancer (climax set on a space station big enough to have tourism), Frontera (set partially on Mars) and The Schismatrix (set in a Solar System ruled by O’Neil colonies) instantly outdated.

See also.

3 Comments

  • Rich Puchalsky

    November 22, 2011 at 9:16 pm

    I had a post on this here. Short version: a defining element of cyberpunk was that government didn’t matter. Neuromancer has a privately owned space station, Schismatrix stations owned by tiny factions. Bush proved them wrong by screwing up so massively that no one could pretend it didn’t matter any more.

  • James Davis Nicoll

    November 23, 2011 at 12:35 am

    There was never going to be the funding to go to Mars. I remember Fred, the incredible shrinking space station…

  • Menno

    November 23, 2011 at 3:27 am

    The “Cyberpunk” in that first video. Does anyone else go: “Awwww… how cute!” and feel the need to educate him on the crypto-analytical possibilities of, say, a stout piece of wood?

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