Canavan, Gerry

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of3-1-2013Superceding Cyberpunk: Review of Graham J.Murphy and Sherryl Vint's Beyond Cyberpunk: NewCritical PerspectivesGerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (March 2013): 169-172. Permalink. © 2013DePauw University. Used with permission.169BOOKS IN REVIEWSustainability” excerpts Hopkinson, Hairston, Archie Weller, and Vizenor’sBearheart (1978; rev. 1990). Visualizing “Native Apocalypses” provides a powerful means of facing agenocidal past and envisioning an alternate future, as seen in contributions byAlexie, William Sanders, Zainab Amadahy, and Misha. Dillon concludes on theAnishinaabemowin concept of “Biskaabiiyang,” a “return to ourselves”paradoxically allowed by the estrangement effect of sf, not only for indigenouspeoples, but also for descendants of colonizers. While the stories in this sectionmay be dystopian (e.g., Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue”) or utopian (e.g.,Maori writer Robert Sullivan’s “Star Waka”), they all, like the anthology itself,“encourage[e] native writers to write about Native conditions in Native-centeredworlds liberated by the imagination” (11).But Walking the Clouds is not just a book by Natives for Natives; whileDillon may be seen as an activist promoting Indigenous sf, she also seeks toshare it. Precisely because this anthology “confronts the structures of racism andcolonialism and sf’s own complicity in them” (10-11; emphasis in original), thisis a book that all of the sf community should read. Conversely, Walking theClouds can also teach those in Native literatures about the potential of sciencefiction; the book’s approach—including excerpts as well as self-containedstories, along with a scholarly, but not inaccessibly jargon-filled,apparatus—makes it a perfect course text. While not all readers will find thischallenging writing a walk in the clouds, it is nonetheless a necessary walk forus to take.—Amy Ransom, Central Michigan UniversitySuperseding Cyberpunk. Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint, eds. BeyondCyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2010. xviii +263 pp. $125 hc; $39.95 pbk.What was cyberpunk? We seem to have a reached a critical moment whereit can be safely declared that cyberpunk is a thing of the past, a historicalsubgenre (aesthetic? form? movement?) and not a living one. Of course, manyof its writers are still alive and writing, and its specific tricks and tropes live onin various successors such as steampunk, atompunk, dieselpunk, biopunk, and(most vexingly) something called “postcyberpunk”—but nonetheless it seems asthough some imperceptible threshold has been finally crossed, some bit flippedfrom 1 to 0. In “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981), William Gibson famouslywrote of the glittering unrealized techno-utopia that haunted his dingier, dustierpresent. That future—spaceships, hovercars, robot butlers, food pills—neverhappened (alas). But in 2007 interviews promoting his novel Spook Country, hefrequently noted that the opposite had happened to cyberpunk: it was supersededby events. Somehow, instead of preempting the cyberpunk future, we hadovertaken it, raced right past it; Gibson said he had given up trying to predictthe future at all and was instead resigning himself to trying to predict “the yearbefore last.” In a Facebook, drone-war world in which everyday life has beenso utterly transformed, networked, and virtualized by information technology,that loose collection of texts once called “cyberpunk” seems at once totallyThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:31:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions170 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 40 (2013)triumphant and utterly superfluous—simultaneously the realism of our time andthe literary equivalent of phlogiston, predicting everything and nothing.Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint take up this dialectic betweenascendency and obsolescence in their recent edited collection BeyondCyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. Cyberpunk, they and their authorsrepeatedly find, was always dead—the announcement of its obituary more or lesscoinciding with the moment of the genre’s first emergence. The collectionbegins by unpacking this very paradox, framing it (as the “–punk” of“cyberpunk” might suggest) as yet another instance of a marginal movementquickly being captured, commercialized, and banalized by the mainstream.Their introduction even finds the cyberpunks eulogizing themselves in preciselythis fashion; Lewis Shiner in his 1991 “Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk” findsthe second wave of cyberpunk authors formulaic, while Bruce Sterling, in his1998 essay “Cyberpunk in the Nineties,” mournfully declares that thecyberpunks are an erstwhile Bohemian underground undone by their ownincreasing respectability. The punks sold out, in other words, and themovement’s vitality was quickly sapped. Indeed, in his contribution to thecollection, Rob Latham persuasively identifies this asserted rise-cooptation-and-fall as the dominant Ur-narrative of all sf historiography: sf critics repeatedlycast the genre as a “recurring cycle of messianic avant-gardism and old-schoolintransigence,” simply substituting each new movement in each position in turn(30).Alongside the white elephant of respectability, Murphy and Vint find asecond explanation for the passing of cyberpunk that is somewhat more specificto its cultural and historical context—its basic thematic indistinguishability fromglobalization. “Perhaps one of the reasons cyberpunk seems both so dated andyet paradoxically so relevant,” they offer, “is that the ideological assumptionsof neoliberalism have become so ubiquitous as information technology” (xvii).Cyberpunk, they suggest, no longer feels vital precisely because its cognitivemapping of global capitalism has become so universal and inescapable. I cantrack the iPad I bought on Amazon on my iPhone as it leaves its factory inShenzhen to arrive via FedEx on my doorstep in Milwaukee, before the chargehas even shown up on my online account at citicards.com—so what good isNeuromancer to me? We all know damn well we are in the Matrix, and we seemto like it just fine. Indeed, as multiple contributors to the collection note, debatesover cyberpunk have long judged the form to be far too comfortable with theworld it depicts, typically locating its spirit of utopian jouissance not inresistance to informationalized capitalism but rather in programmatic,celebratory mastery of it. After a decade of surveillance-state nightmares,economic disasters, and environmental catastrophes, perhaps we are hungry fora bit less “cyber-” and a bit more “-punk.”Going further, there is a third “death of cyberpunk” focalized by Murphy,Vint, and their contributors, and this is the sheer prevalence of literaldeath—and its posthuman transcendence—within and across cyberpunk fictions.Reorganizing the subgenre with the benefit of retrospection, Murphy and Vintmake visible a preoccupation with death and dying that becomes in this tellingThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:31:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions171BOOKS IN REVIEWcyberpunk’s overarching but unacknowledged central theme. We see this fromthe collection’s first essay (Brian McHale’s analysis of biopunk’s zombies)onwards, but the argument receives its clearest articulation in Andrew M.Butler’s reading of Jeff Noon, “Journeys Beyond Being,” in which cyberspacebecomes not only an “escape from the body, from the meat” but also anunderworld visit to “the realm of the dead” (77). The very next essay, TomMoylan’s on the post-Neuromancer writing of William Gibson, goes furtherstill, suggesting that cyberpunk originates precisely from a perception of globalthreat realized in the various disasters of the 1970s:we now face a more fragile natural world and social environment, an unstableworld economy (despite the extensive restructuring), a weakened nationalgovernment (unwilling to exercise its own capacity for popular service), anincreasingly subordinated population of women and people of color (facingincreasing official and popular terrorism), a declining middle class (seen moreclearly in the current recession as managers as well as skilled workers are laidoff), a reduced and impoverished work force (deprived of the power of its ownorganizations), and a growing number of dispossessed who have been deniedbenefits of meaningful work and nurturing social services. (82)My own recent interest in the ecological science fiction of the 1970s has left mesimilarly convinced that cyberpunk emerges primarily in response to the twindisillusionments that destroyed the fantasy of a happy Jetsons future, à la “TheGernsback Continuum”: the realization that the space program was a bust andthere is nothing for us out there, and the realization that “progress” intechnology was not perfecting human civilization but instead actively destroyingthe planet. Trapped, then, on a murdered Earth, we fantasize about escapinginto the computer, the last place where we can still have all the untold riches sfof the Golden Age once seemed to promise. And this is of course precisely theimaginative space in which cyberpunk themes remain most vital and alive in thepresent moment—the fantasy of the Singularity, as popularized by Vernor Vingeand Ray Kurzweil, the so-called “rapture of the nerds” that has convinced somany of our students that as long as they can make it to 2040 or so they’ll getto live forever. Perhaps cyberpunk is always already “dead” because it is theneurosis of a dying civilization that cannot think about anything else.The web comic Pictures for Sad Children once characterized the Singularity,and its fantasy of immortalized privilege, as “the nerd way of saying ‘in thefuture being rich and white will be even more awesome.’” The essays at the endof Beyond Cyberpunk take up this very question of the richness and whitenessof cyberpunk sf, adding maleness and straightness for good measure. Anotherkind of death hangs over cyberpunk, after all, a metaphorical death related tobut distinct from the other “deaths” associated with economic postmodernism:the death of certain kinds of privilege historically associated with the socialdominance of rich, straight, white males. Much as aesthetic postmodernismbecame culturally important precisely in the moment when the canon began tobecome more diverse—thereby returning its predominantly white, malepractitioners to the unchallenged position of literary and artistic supremacy theyhad briefly risked losing—and much as the abstruse view-from-nowhere ofThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:31:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions172 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 40 (2013)“Theory” emerged as the overriding concern in the academy precisely at themoment of a revolutionary demand for racial and sexual equality, cyberpunkitself can be read against the grain as an unconscious and ultimately doomedattempt to preserve white, male hegemony in the face of sf’s increasinglydiverse authorship and fandom. Karen Cadora makes this case most forcefullyin her contribution to the collection, “Feminist Cyberpunk,” which notes firstthe masculinist tendencies of much early cyberpunk writing and then asks,sardonically, why it is that cyberpunk itself is declared dead “just at the momentwhen women writers begin to explore the connections between race, gender,sexuality, and cyberspace?” (172). Murphy’s essay finds cyberpunk in Harlem;still others find it in Japan, China, and beyond. In its exploration of cyberpunk’scritique of embodiment, the final third of Beyond Cyberpunk suggests that thelong-awaited death of cyberpunk may yet have to wait—that what has happenedis not death but democratization, that the hacking of our various consensualhallucinations has only just begun.—Gerry Canavan, Marquette UniversityThe Evolutionary Imagination. Michael R. Page. The Literary Imaginationfrom Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology.Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. viii + 224 pp. $99.95 hc.In the Advertisement to The Loves of the Plants (1789), the poet ErasmusDarwin, grandfather of Charles, described his project as one of “enlisting theimagination under the banner of science.” Difficult though it is to sum upMichael R. Page’s invigorating book, we might say that in him science hasfound its latest literary recruiting agent. Erudite and well-informed, irrepressiblyopinionated, and, frankly, often repetitious, Page offers a bracing mixture ofliterary history, textual analysis, and world-saving polemic. Surveyingnineteenth-century British literature from The Loves of the Plants to H.G. Wells,he sets out to bring together sf scholarship and the strain of contemporaryecocriticism known as “green Romanticism.” This book, therefore, begins withscience fiction’s emergence from the “conversation of literature and science”that Page finds in the Romantic poets (9), and ends by presenting the genre asa necessary source for the “visionary and forward-looking thinking that willdetermine the survival of the human species” (197). The result is a much moreembattled study than the rather bland title suggests. While Page openly lets flyat the literary-critical establishment, which, he says, continues to denigrate sf,other groups more actively threatening to human survival—creationists, climate-change deniers, and the like—are surely within his sights.The most influential statement of the claim that sf’s origins lie inRomanticism and, specifically, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) comes inBrian Aldiss’s history of the genre, Billion Year Spree (1973; rev., with DavidWingrove, as Trillion Year Spree, 1988). Aldiss, accordingly, is one of thechorus of sf critics (including I.F. Clarke, Darko Suvin, W. Warren Wagar, andany number of regular contributors to SFS) whom Page tends to cite at everyopportunity in support of his own argument. The Literary Imagination is asnotable for its orchestration of the existing body of sf and Romantic-periodscholarship as it is for setting out an original point of view. That suchThis content downloaded from 134.48.29.181 on Wed, 2 Oct 2013 14:31:03 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Superceding Cyberpunk: Review of Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint\u27s \u3cem\u3eBeyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives\u3c/em\u3e

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Superceding Cyberpunk: Review of Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint\u27s \u3cem\u3eBeyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives\u3c/em\u3e

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