Literature of the Future: scenarios & styles

Hi-Tech / Virtual Reality w/ Cyberpunk style

slick, cool, unreal, easy with power

Appeals:

"hard science" sf (or at least a hard edge)

virtual reality = a computer-simulated environment (as in online fantasy games, video games, animation)

Cyberpunk identification:

linguistics: "portmanteau word" created by combining parts of two other words

cyberpunk < cybernetics + punk

cybernetics = artificial intelligence, computer systems

punk = street style, semi-outlaw, walking line between in and out

Cyberpunk style and content markers / "signatures" or conventions:

body enhancement and transgression: implants, extensions

neon (from Film Noir?)

Why Cyberpunk broke through to literary prestige

Background: sf often dismissed as popular lit

Why Gibson is considered "literary"

Inverted millennialism

That is, cyberpunk is *not* millennial, despite sense of general decline and munginess

Rather, people survive, even beauty survives or is remembered amid general decay of overpopulated, hustling world

JM 19 sound . . . like a world ending

JM 21 she'd killed him with culture shock

BC 177 Half the skylight was shadowed by a dome they’d never finished, and the other half showed sky, black and blue with clouds.

 term "cyberpunk" first used in 1983-84, 80s phenomenon

Style or sub-genre of science fiction

previous examples: "Stone Lives," "Gernsback," "Mozart in Mirrorshades"

films: The Matrix, Blade Runner, Dark City, Videodrome, RoboCop, Johnny Mnemonic, 

Austin TX as one center of cyberpunk movement (Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, authors of "Mozart in Mirrorshades" etc.)