Defining Cyberpunk
Technology: Metal Is Better Than Meat
Technology is perhaps the key aspect of the genre, for without any science in the fiction, cyberpunk stories lack power ; they become stories about helpless people trapped in a depressing society. It is the technological aspect of the genre which gives the punks and outcasts of cyberpunk fiction their power, often in very physical ways. One common sight in cyberpunk literature and film is the cybernetic limb, be it an arm, hand, or leg. Often, cyberpunk authors extrapolate from current technological advances in prosthetics in developing "new" technologies. For example, the Myoelectric Institute of Texas has developed some extremely advanced prosthetic plastic and metal arms, able to crush objects with seemingly inhuman strength. Cyberpunk authors sometimes grant these "enhancements" to their characters, even the minor ones. In Gibson's Neuromancer, for instance, we are introduced early in the opening scene of the novel to a bartender with a cybernetic arm, "a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic" (4). In this case, as in others, cybernetics are prevalent even among minor characters; neither the bartender nor his cybernetic arm are mentioned again in the novel.
Sometimes the cybernetic enhancements are within one's limbs, making them even more deadly and devious. The Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 game has "catalogues" that sell things such as rocket launchers, laser pointers, detachable fingertips, and finger blades ranging from surgical and carpentry tools to the tools of a different trade. Take, for example, the character of Molly Millions, who appears throughout Gibson's Sprawl trilogy under different guises, adopting different names in each book. An acknowledged assassin and mercenary, the cybernetic tools that Molly uses in Neuromancer are for killing:
"...My name's Molly...nobody wants to hurt you."Although William Gibson may have introduced these ideas to the genre, they are not limited to his writings alone. Indeed, it seems that as the genre develops, writers seek new ways to incorporate technology into the human body, and these developments seem to get more strange, more powerful, and even more devious. They become almost one with the body they are attached to, metal bonding with flesh, becoming "visceral" (Sterling xiii). Guns and knives get smaller, eventually fusing with the hand and arm; contact lenses become one with the eyes, and eventually replace them; portable computers and stereo walkmans become fused with their users.
"That's good."
"'Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired..."
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. (25)
In Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired, for instance, one of the main characters lacks razor sharp fingers, but has a far more deadly tool. This "cybersnake" is a half-meter long robotic snake, hiding deep inside her chest, lashing out when she needs to assassinate someone:
Her tongue retracts into Weasel's implastic housing, and the cybersnake's head closes over it. She rolls Danica entirely under her...feeling the flutter of the girl's tongue, and then Weasel strikes, telescoping from its hiding place in Sarah's throat and chest...Sarah's fingers clamp on her wrists, and Princess gives a birth- strangled cry as Weasel's head forces its way down her throat. (37)Other cybernetic enhancements take us very far away from what the Six Million Dollar Man once was - examples from various novels and stories, to list only a very few, include artificial eyes (one of Gibson's favorite ideas, appearing throughout his novels); cybernetically-enhanced hearing; adrenaline boosters; neural computer processors, built into one's own brain; video cameras linked to one's optical nerves; armor plating over the skin and underneath it; metal wings; etc. Such a list could seemingly go on forever - the point of this is that in all cyberpunk novels, technology is introduced and then fused with the characters in the story, eventually becoming one with them. Many of these characters embrace the changes, seeing them as enhancements to the human form. For these characters, "metal" (a cyberslang term for "cybernetics") is better than "meat," another slang term for the human body. In the end, the differences between man and machine are entirely lost, the line between flesh and chrome wiped entirely away.
That same indistinction is carried over into the virtual world of cyberspace, a world present in virtually (pun intended) all cyberpunk novels. The term, coined by Gibson in Neuromancer, was originally described as:
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. (51-2)Although the term used to describe "cyberspace" varies, at times being called the "Matrix," the "Net," "Metaverse," "Cyberia," or even being compared to today's Internet, the appearance of the virtual landscape is always similar. A three-dimensional grid of neon lines marking distances and boundaries, with colored blocks and structures marking virtual "buildings" and domains. People who enter cyberspace normally do so by means of a link, essentially little more than an audio/video wire. One end is connected to a cyberdeck, a cross between a computer and a video game which generates the images and allows the user to actually travel around in cyberspace. The other end is plugged into the person's head by means of an electronic link in that person's brain - often this is called a "Neural jack," and the process is called "jacking in" or "facing into the net".
The idea of actually plugging yourself into a computer is intriguing, and it is not entirely a work of science fiction and the imagination. Wearable computers, virtual reality video games, and widespread use of the Internet today are all leading to the beginnings of a very real "cyberspace". This blurring of the distinction between fiction and reality mirrors the same blurring we get in cyberpunk fiction, where often the physical world is made to seem as technical as the virtual world of cyberspace. The opening sentence of Gibson's Neuromancer, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (3) is oft-quoted for more than one reason. The main reason, it seems, is that the differences between the natural world and the technical world are constantly compared with each other in cyberpunk fiction. Expressing the natural world in technical terms "blurs the distinctions between the organic and the artificial" (Hollinger 205). It is this blurring of "real" and "virtual" which demonstrates the nature of technology in cyberpunk fiction.