Neuromancer & Company: Cyberpunk, Cowboys, and Cyborgs

William Gibson's Neuromancer is hailed as the book that brought about a significant change in Science Fiction in the '80's, ushering in what would be known as "cyberpunk." Dr. Elisa Sparks, in her online class notes defines cyberpunk as "* A form of science fiction developed in the mid-80's which envisions a near-future world dominated by information technology. * Especially ways that tech is integrated into human body * usually involves people on the lower end of society who are rebelling against authority..."

Cyberpunk was praised by some critics as being a return to "hard" sci-fi, and an escape from a dark period of sci-fi malaise. What was this period of malaise? Nicola Nixon, in her article "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" points out that the sci-fi of the '70's was, in part, feminist utopian literature. She references Jean Pfaelzer as she explains, "the feminist utopian text represents two worlds, the flawed present and the future perfect, which contradict and comment on each other. One world is feminist and egalitarian. The other world is not. And the world that is not utopian derives from the author’s representation of contemporary gender inequality, sexual repression, and cultural malaise."

Nixon goes on to explain that:

rising on the heels of the ’70s feminist SF writers, however, was another SF "movement," one loudly proclaiming its "revolutionary" status: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk—slick, colloquial, and science-based—represented a concerted return to the (originary) purity of hard SF, apparently purged of the influence of other-worldly fantasy, and embracing technology with new fervor.
Sterling’s desire to represent cyberpunk as a radical subgenre within SF... prompts him... to dismiss all of ’70s SF as "not much fun," as in "the doldrums," "dogmatic slumbers," or "hibernation" The political (or even revolutionary) potential for SF, realized so strongly in ’70s feminist SF, is relegated in Gibson’s cyberpunk to a form of scary feminized software; his fiction creates an alternative, attractive, but hallucinatory world which allows not only a reassertion of male mastery but a virtual celebration of a kind of primal masculinity...

So, it would seem that the arrival of cyberpunk, with its re-beatification of the macho cowboy hero, threatened to push aside the feminist political force of earlier sci-fi works. Reflective of the "tiredness" of the age of the '70's - and the embracing of the new silver screen political cowboy hero in the form of Ronald Reagan - a post-feminist zeitgeist seemed to encroach on both the sci-fi and political fronts.

Would this new form totally exclude the socialist-feminist, post-modern impulse form science fiction? Where would such impulses find space for treatment? Dr. Elisa Sparks indicates such a space in her notes on the themes of cyberpunk:

What are the crucial themes (of cyberpunk)?
* A society that is shaped by computers
* A central theme is the relationship between man and machine-- specifically, what makes us human as we interact and depend on machines at a more and more personal level
* cyborg is a central issue here-- humans become part machine

It is the cyborg that gives space for treatment of the issues presumably excluded from the conversation of science fiction. Donna Haraway, in "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," describes this opening as such:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction… The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.
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. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse...

The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies - teehnologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics - that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.

The influences of cyberpunk, and particularly of Neuromancer, can be seen in a number of places in pop culture, ranging from Star Trek:The Motion Picture to TRON to The Matrix. The theme of alternate realities and existences, rebellion against the system, rage against/negotiating with the machine, embracing the "other," re-examination of human identity, in(tro)spection of computers and technology in everyday life, and other themes - these all keep science fiction open to interrogation by many theoretical approaches, including the socialist-feminist approach.

Donna Haraway notes that, "In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse." Even in such "cyberpunk cowboys" as Neo (in The Matrix), there exists a re-telling of Western culture's muthos, but also, an interrogation of that myth, and the potential for its subversion and, possibly, the establishment of a non-myth (which becomes a myth itself.)