English 192 Science Fiction ENGL 192 - Summer (B) 2003, Elizabeth Freudenthal
Mon, 9/1
Week 5: Cyberpunk
"The Gernsback Continuum" General Background: Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), born in Luxembourg and immigrated to the U.S. in 1904. Most famous for founding the U.S.'s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, Gernsback was also an early radio enthusiast and founded a host of magazines for electronics, radio adn early TV enthusiasts. He was also a prolific, if mediocre, inventor. SF's coveted Hugo award is named after him. Here's Life Magazine's 1963 profile of him, hosted by hugogernsback.com. Frank R. Paul (1884-1963) did the illustrations for most Amazing Stories covers. Click here to see a page of this cover art.
?: What does 1930's U.S. industrial design have to do with these ideas of utopia and dystopia?
?: What are semiotic ghosts?
William Gibson General Background
Born 1948, Gibson is considered by many to be the "father" of cyberpunk. His works established the norm for many characteristics of the genre and remain the best known cyberpunk works. Most famous for establishing the subgenre in novel form is his book Neuromancer (1984), which for posterity described "cyberspace," a term coined first by Gibson in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome." Here's an official-type Gibson Web page with pretty good lists of links, bibliography, interviews and general information.
History of Personal Computing and Networking
1966-1971: The ARPAnet, (proto-Internet,) is developed. (ARPA = Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the U.S. Minsitry of Defense, founded in 1957 after USSR launched Sputnik). The research was done independently by multiple teams, and by 1971 23 computers were linked together in a wide-area network (WAN).
1972: ARPANET goes "public," launched for use by 40 university, military and research host computers. ** Various WANS were in development all over the world, but through the 70s they were all based on mainframe, host computers. (See Richard Griffith's history for full details, from the 50s-90s).
1973: Ethernet, high-broadband cable, is invented.
1975: The first microprocessor computer, Altair 8800 is developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. They form Microsoft that year, develop Basic to program the Altair 8800 and by 1980 have the MS-DOS operating system.
1981: The first personal computer, the IBM PC, is released for commercial use.
1982: ARPANET, plus multiple other WANS, adopt the same protocol (TCP/IP -- transmission control protocol/internet protocol) so all computers on all networks can communicate. Thus the Internet is born.
1984: 35% of the workforce uses PCs for their business tech.
Cyberpunk and Its Forebears
Remember our post-industrial business lecture: Post-WWII companies grew increasingly reliant on information technology to facilitate growing beaurocratic management structures. Along the way, work become "knowledge work":
* Throughout the 1970's, 80's and 90's, manufacturing facilities in U.S. urban centers shut down and moved to other countries with cheaper workers. Blue-collar workers all over the country lost their jobs and back the U.S. more jobs went to managers, computer technicians, service workers, etc.
* Thus in the 1980's companies "downsized" to afford to compete with global manufacturers.
* in the period from the late 60s to late 80s, the average American employee added the equivalent of an extra month of work per year and lost 40 percent of leisure time. (from Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic, 1992) -- knowledge workers work longer, in office labor.
* 1980's Japanese economic boom: replacing economically crumbling USSR as the U.S.'s "other" till its 90s recessions.
All this leading to cyberpunk: Cyberpunk General Background:
* A self-styled band of "fringe" SF writers started departing from "mainstream" science fiction in the early 80's. Key influences include Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, based (loosely) on P.K. Dick's do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as well as work by Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, and James Patrick Kelly. Later notables include Neal Stephenson.
* Non-literary influences include the maturity of digital technology. The first desktop computer was released in 1981, which in some ways marks the transfer from mainframe computing to networked computing. Subgenre characteristics:
* The hacker as hero AND anti-hero: the most able to negotiate the new technological corporate terrain, and the most able to reject it.
* Programmers tend to be white men; think about the women and non-white people in these works.
* New globalized multinational corporations, plus corporations being more culturally dominant than political entities, leads to a new view of racial difference. Race tends to be more external and explicit than in previous works like "High Weir," in which it's coded as alien/Martian.
* Media and pop culture: see the presence of pop culture types in cyberpunk: noir, gangster films, Westerns, music television; their cast of cowboys, molls, hard-boiled detectives, mainstream boob, punk, rasta, anime fan; their aesthetics of shadows and lights, burnt-out or deserted terrain, neon.
* Technology is increasingly personal in real life, with pacemakers, aorta stents, etc.
"The Cyborg Manifesto," Donna Haraway, 1991
This highly influential essay establishes the cyborg as a potentially ideal form of subjectivity, one that can eliminate social, economic and political hierarchies while acknoledging human dependence on machines, animals and other humans. "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end" (150).
Here's the essay in full text, from Stanford University's Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
Applying This to "Johnny Mnemonic" and "(Learning About) Machine Sex":
* Which characters are cyborgs, and how do you make that distintion? Does their cyborg nature give them power in this environment, or reduce their power?
* How do Molly Millions and Angel relate to the world of machines and technology? Is there something female about thier relationships to machines? Are they different from Johnny's, Whitman's, Ralfi's, or the thumb-assassin's relationships?
* Specifically about "(LA)MS", is the body hackable, digital and binary? How are bodies different from abstracitons/theories/programs in the story? Do you think the body is hackable?
Please see next week's course notes for information on eXistenZ.
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