Cyberpunk and the New Myth
Introduction
I'm stuck in this dream, it's changing me, I am becoming.
The me that you know had some second thoughts,
he's covered with scabs, he is broken and sore.
The me that you know doesn't come around much,
that part of me isn't here anymore.
All pain disappears, it's the nature of my circuitry
drowns out all I hear, there's no escape from this, my new consciousness.
The me that you know used to have feelings,
but the blood has stopped pumping and he's left to decay.
The me that you know is now made up of wires,
and even when I'm right with you I'm so far away...
In 1984, William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer became the first novel to win the "Triple Crown" of science fiction literature, capturing the Nebula, Hugo, and Phillip K. Dick awards. Although there were other "cyberpunk" short stories and novels written before Neuromancer was published, 1984 marks the point at which the genre came into its own, and was finally recognized as an entity unto itself. Cyberpunk literature's earliest days, however, were not filled with all praise and glory. From the start, cyberpunk was ridiculed and denounced by many critics who felt that the genre as a whole was little more than a depressing, hopeless view of a godless, technological near-future world. Some critics refused to accept the genre as serious at all, leading Bruce Sterling and others on a self-proclaimed jihad to stand up for the genre they called their own. Quoted in Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge, Sterling explains quite openly how many critics felt that cyberpunk writers "did this to be cute". He assures us this is not so, insisting that "[t]hey're wrong, very severely wrong. We meant it'" (Rucker 68). Regardless of the opinions of the cyberpunk writers themselves, some critics alleged that cyberpunk literature would mean the end of science-fiction, while others held that the genre would quickly grow unpopular and fade away entirely, leaving science-fiction unaffected.
Their allegations were not entirely without justification, particularly when one looks at the history of literature. In his book Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye alleges that literature has progressed throughout history from stories about the gods and heroes down to the modern anti-hero. It appeared to critics as if cyberpunk literature was mired in the hopeless, depressing world which Friedrich Nietzsche put us in when he declared the death of God. After all, in a world without God, heaven, or morality, can there truly be hope? The critics didn't think so.
I believe there can be.
I intend to demonstrate that cyberpunk novels carry with them something more than nihilism and hopelessness; beyond the black shadows of the city streets and alleyways, there lies a chrome lining, a hope for a better life, a sort of transcendence. Whether that transcendence is accomplished through cybernetic prosthetics, through an escape to an off-planet life, or through a journey into the virtual world of cyberspace, cyberpunk characters do not limit themselves to hopelessness.
Cyberpunk novels do not represent the end of literature. They represent a new beginning, and offer their characters and readers a chance at transcending the limitations of human life. Beyond even the anti-hero, these characters, though they may be lying in the gutters, are definitely reaching for the stars. Faced with the hell that is the future, they reach for heaven, thereby completing the cycle that Northrop Frye suggests to us in Anatomy of Criticism when he declares that "irony [anti-heroic literature] moves steadily towards myth" (42). Cyberpunk strives to create new gods, new divinity, and new myths, and through those new myths, cyberpunk characters are able to escape their ironic, pitiful existences to achieve transcendence and hope.