Defining Cyberpunk
Descent Into Hell: The Cyberpunk World
What exactly does a typical cyberpunk setting look like? Exactly why are the characters so grim and immoral? Perhaps this description from the Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 game will give some insight into the setting of the cyberpunk character:
The Cyberpunk environment is almost exclusively urban. Its landscape is a maze of towering skyscrapers, burned out ruins, dingy tenements and dangerous alleyways... Taxis won't stop in the combat zones. There are firefights at the street corner as the local gangs slug it out... And it always rains... The stars never come out. The sun never shines. There are no singing birds, no laughing children... The ozone layer decayed, the greenhouse effect took over, the sky is full of hydrocarbons and the ocean full of sludge. (Moss 176)
Though the cyberpunk world is dark, grim, and depressing, the actual setting of a cyberpunk novel varies greatly in time and place. Cyberpunk stories have been urban; set in the late 1990's/early 2000's (Virtual Light); set hundreds of years in the future ("Petra"); or set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (Hardwired). Because of this wide variety, we cannot tie these novels together by place or time. Even the attitude of cyberpunk novels is a bit unstable - at one point, it appeared that all cyberpunk novels were dark and depressing, full of death and despair. There are cases where this does not hold, however - Gibson's recent novel, Virtual Light, ends with a somewhat happy ending, and Pat Cadigan attests to the fact that she thinks "cyberpunk stories can have happy endings" (Interview). The world of the cyberpunk is not, thus, cut and dried, and even the moral of the story changes, depending on the author. Setting, though depressing and grim, is not the dominant unifying factor.
In his introduction to Mirrorshades, Bruce Sterling sets forth a manifesto which suggests two motifs prevalent in cyberpunk novels, motifs which apparently link most, if not all, cyberpunk fiction. For Sterling, cyberpunk is "An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent" (xii). His statement suggests the two topics which he then discusses very briefly, technology and punk underculture, motifs which have been present in every cyberpunk novel or short story I've yet encountered. As I will suggest a bit later, these two motifs are especially important to "early cyberpunk." Although I realize that the genre has only been around for eleven or twelve years, it is already possible to draw a distinction between early and late cyberpunk. As any literary genre evolves, so does cyberpunk.