Cyberpunk Is What?
by Charles Carreon
It is perhaps late in the day to be saying what Cyberpunk is or isn't. In fact, the arbiters of cool have probably tried to diss the cyberpunk moniker as depictive of a genre that came and went before it left an impression on the public mind. Far from it. The Matrix, the Keanu Reaves vehicle of choice for innumerable young would-be first-person shooters, would not be but for cyberpunk authors like William Gibson, who invented the term “Cyberspace” to suit the needs of his first novel, Neuromancer. Now everybody knows what cyberspace is, and in hip culture, the “cyber” prefix is about as popular as “the Zen of” once was. Zen, of course, has been discovered to be nothing more than a stalking horse for self-hypnotism with a radical haircut.
Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is an evolving lifestyle that people don't need to have described in order to emulate it. Cyberpunk is a road map for a future that has barely been imagined yet. It is infinitely optimistic, and unabashedly technophiliac. It combines can-do philosophy with fuck-you attitude, which is of course, the way humans survive not only what Nature throws at us, but the pile of shit that our own species piles in the path of its own evolution. Here's a snippet from Gibson's great shorty story, “Red Star, Winter Orbit,” that gets the idea across. In this story, Korolev, a Russian cosmonaut, has been abandoned on a dying space station that his countrymen have abandoned to crash back into the earth, because there's no funding to get it boosted back into orbit. His erstwhile lover, Tatjana, and her new boyfriend have poisoned him with some dope that brings on “the Fear,” and left him to die. He's not expecting visitors.
[quote="William Gibson“]
When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well.
The hatch wheeled open.
In the bluish, flickering light from the old film, he saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head. She wore goggles, a silk aviator's scarf twisting behind her in free fall.
”Andy,“ she said in English, ”you better come see this!“
A small, muscular man, nearly bald, and wearing only a jockstrap and a jangling toolbelt, floated up behind her and peered in. ”Is he alive?“
”Of course I am alive,“ said Korolev in slightly accented English.
The man called Andy sailed in over her head. ”You okay, Jack?“ His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. ”We weren't expecting anybody.“
”Neither was I,“ said Korolev, blinking.
”We've come to live here,“ said the woman, drifting closer.
”We're from the balloons. Squatters, I guess you could say. Heard the place was empty. You know the orbit's decaying on this thing?“ The man executed a clumsy midair somersault, the tools clattering on his belt. ”This free fall's outrageous.“
”God,“ said the woman, ”I just can't get used to it! It's wonderful. It's like skydiving, but there's no wind.“
Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth. ”But you don't even have a launchpad,“ he said.
”Launchpad?“ the man said, laughing. ”What we do, we haul these surplus booster engines up the cables to the balloons, drop 'em, and fire 'em in midair.“
”That's insane,“ Korolev said.
”Got us here, didn't it?“
Korolev nodded. If this was all a dream, it was a very peculiar one. ”I am Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev.“
”Mars!“ The woman clapped her hands. ”Wait'll the kids hear that.“ She plucked the little Lunokhod moon-rover model from the bulkhead and began to wind it.
”Hey,“ the man said, ”I gotta work. We got a bunch of boosters outside. We gotta lift this thing before it starts burning.“
Something clanged against the hull. Kosmograd rang with the impact.
”That'll be Tulsa,“ Andy said, consulting a wristwatch. ”Right on time.“
”But why?“ Korolev shook his head, deeply con- fused. ”Why have you come?“
”We told you. To live here. We can enlarge this thing, maybe build more. They said we'd never make it living in the balloons, but we were the only ones who could make them work. It was our one chance to get out here on our own. Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier want it in your bones, right?"[/quote]
If you're a true Cyberpunk, this passage may move you to tears. I'm all choked up right now, just writing this. Because if the human race is going to survive, it'll happen just like that, with crazy cowboys in jockstraps blasting through outer space, with kids in tow, and Tulsa not far behind.
If you haven't read the story yet, you can access it for nothing more than your promise to be a good libarary patron at AMERICAN BUDDHA ONLINE LIBRARY if you want to read the whole thing.