The media of cyberpunk: An analysis of postmodern science fiction

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The media of cyberpunk:

An analysis of postmodern

science fiction

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Introduction

On the first of June, 1984, a young American writer named William Gibson published his debut science fiction novel. The novel was Neuromancer and it would soon prove to be revolutionary, not only for science fiction but for literature at large. Neuromancer’s dizzying prose and colourful characters, its captivating description of a strange yet familiar near-future, and – most importantly – Gibson’s introduction of the concept of cyberspace would all be studied and discussed for years to come. Six months after Gibson’s debut, a survey on the notable science fiction works

published that year appeared in The Washington Post. In it, Gibson and a number of writers associated with him were singled out in a group that was then referred to in the underground SF scene as the ‘cyberpunks’ (Dozois 9). The term stuck, as the style introduced by this group of writers became a subgenre that saw a short-lived stint as SF’s most popular literary production, a speedy downfall at the end of the 1980s, and a longer period of intermediary cross-breeding over the last twenty-five years, enjoyed by a generation of science fiction fans across the world. In spite of science fiction’s reputation – the genre has always fought against its image of low-brow entertainment – it is hard to envision the world we live in without a literary genre that deals explicitly with the social implications of the ways in which technology affects all aspects of our lives. The basic assumption from which I have studied this subject, is that science fictional narratives actually try to tell us valuable things about history and our present world, and that this constitutes a – sometimes – underestimated opportunity for academic research.

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Cyberpunk literature was considered avant-garde at the moment of its arrival. As the subgenre was heavily criticized over the course of the 1980s, it became accepted that cyberpunk’s spearheading had little to do with innovative formal, narrative experimentation. What was innovative however was that it represented a literary attempt to deal with the implications of technologies that were barely visible at the horizon for the consumer (the computer was not yet a household commodity) yet were approaching us with terrifying speed. Mobile cell phones, the internet or any of the high tech gadgets that continue to flood the marketplace in the twenty-first century seemed to appear and take over our lives within a matter of years. In a sense, those who read cyberpunk fiction were prepared. And in hindsight, it is no surprise then that cyberpunk employed other media as soon as the technology caught up with the fiction of Gibson and his peers. After all, is there a better way to reflect on the human-machine interface than by using the narrative possibilities of exactly such an interface? Cyberpunk also remains interesting as

literature however, because it is the bridge between older traditions of modernist and

postmodernist literature and the newer traditions of contemporary culture and visual narratives. What then are the issues involved in the reflection on the effects of technological development? First of all, the cyberpunks responded to the growing sense that the human social environment continues to shift from the countryside to the city. What then are the effects on human identity when everything surrounding us becomes artificial and commodifiable? What are the effects when the artificial and the natural start to converge in our own bodies? My

investigation starts with an analysis of where it all began: the rise of the genre in the early to mid-1980s, spurred by Gibson’s Neuromancer. Cyberpunk is credited with bringing science fiction and critical theory together in a postmodern literary form. I examine the various ways in which this fusion could be understood and interpreted. I define the characteristics of the subgenre as it became popular in the mid-1980s and trace its sporadic, yet continuing development over the following decades: what are its motifs and tropes, its recurrent themes and metaphors?

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tie into this discussion as well. What is central in my opening chapter however, following Sabine Heuser and Brian McHale, is the idea that cyberpunk played a pivotal role in the blurring between the so-called traditions of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ science fiction in a postmodern hybrid, that resembled both by literalizing metaphors commonly used on a formal basis by postmodern mainstream literature.

Central notions in my analysis are the technological intrusion of the human body and the urban environments in which this functions. A special place is reserved however for cyberspace – cyberpunk’s long-lasting metaphor for the virtual representation of data in space. This notion plays a large role in the second chapter, where I investigate the centrality of Neuromancer within the subgenre and the way Gibson set the tone for artists in various media that sought to engage with comparable ideas. Two of such works are the focus of the second part of my research: Warren Ellis’s comic book series Transmetropolitan (1997-2002), a colourful and elaborate attempt to explore cyberpunk’s potential for satire; and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), a commercially successful video game that brought cyberpunk aesthetics to a broader audience in a mainstream medium. Although sharing a common ancestor in Neuromancer, these two works represent highly different interpretations within the cyberpunk tradition.

Transmetropolitan is a conscious effort to use cyberpunk poetics to reflect on the importance of

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Chapter I

1984: The Cyberpunks Are Here

Since Gardner Dozois coined the term ‘cyberpunk’ in The Washington Post in 1984, it has become a number of things all at once: a label, a subgenre, a style, a movement and a concept. As Brian McHale puts it, it is ‘wrong-headed, presupposing (…) that cyberpunk “is” some one thing or other, that it is some kind of “object” about which demonstrably true or false statements could be made’ (3). In any case, for a few years during the mid-Eighties, cyberpunk as a subgenre became recognized as the avant-garde of science fiction writing and approached, according to a number of critics, a postmodern fusion of various traditions of science fiction that had not been witnessed before. In this opening chapter I examine the literary phenomenon known as

cyberpunk by describing its short, yet controversial history, the context in which it arose, its major authors and titles, and evaluate the praise and criticism that it garnered over time within a postmodern critical context.1

1.1 The 1980s and the rise of cyberpunk

Any accurate description of cyberpunk’s influence within the science fiction genre, of what sets cyberpunk apart as a subgenre, must begin by introducing science fiction’s state of affairs at the time Gibson and co. exploded onto the scene. Cyberpunk, according to McHale, is the latest in a line of distinct waves or phases that tie science fiction’s relatively short history together (4). It is not uncommon to understand the genre’s twentieth-century history as ‘the oscillation between two modes or types of science-fiction world-building’ – ‘extrapolation’ and ‘speculation’ (4).2_The

difference between these two modes can be loosely equated with the division between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ SF, respectively, although they are not mutually exclusive in any text or period. The former

1_{This study works from a chronological understanding that divides the subgenre into proto- (before 1984), post- (after 1990) and}

proper cyberpunk (1980s). Protocyberpunk fiction is understood as any formative influence on the proper cyberpunk poetics (J.G.

Ballard’s Crash (1973), for instance), while postcyberpunk constitutes fiction that was influenced by either proto- or proper cyberpunk (The Matrix (1999)).

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is more informed by the natural sciences and concerns itself with autonomous technological advancement. The latter is informed by the humanities and concerned with the moral

implications of scientific novelties, and less so with rationalized representations of technology. McHale explains:

Extrapolative SF begins with the current state of the empirical world, in particular the current state of scientific knowledge, and proceeds, in logical and linear fashion, to construct a world which might be a future extension or consequence of the current state of affairs. Speculative world-building, by contrast, involves an imaginative leap, positing one or more disjunctions with the empirical world which cannot be clearly extrapolated from the current state of affairs. (4)

During the 1960s, the science fiction genre was shaken up when the traditional extrapolative brand of SF, the Golden Age of science fiction pulp magazines, was supplanted by a highly speculative form of literature known as the New Wave. The New Wave, named after French cinema’s Nouvelle Vague, considered itself a higher form of literature, standing out from the generic writing of pulp fiction SF of the 1940s and 1950s, and propagating a highly self-conscious experimental style in narrative prose. Against the backdrop of ‘generational dissent of the young against the Establishment’ (Luckhurst 141) a younger generation of science fiction writers such as Alfred Bester, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard sought to explore the inner space of the human subject, as opposed to the outer space explored in intergalactic travels. By many proponents, as well as opponents of the movement, the New Wave was experienced as an ‘explosive desublimation, a release of libidinal energies that seemed to threaten SF’s core

commitment to the technoscientific world-view’ (Latham 35).

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developments impacting the publication and dissemination of SF’, along with a ‘dawning sense of possibility linked to the arrival of new markets’ (31). Second, there was the ‘retirement or obvious decline’ (31) of a number of established authors who for a long time had dominated the field. And third, Latham recognizes an ‘inchoate but growingly palpable influx of fresh thematic material, partly inhibited by prevailing orthodoxies and thus awaiting mobilization by talents less beholden to SF traditions’ (31). Taken together, these conditions ‘contributed to a climate that was favorable to calls for a radical refurbishment of SF’ (31). In the case of cyberpunk, the early 1980s provided an environment that was aesthetically depraved after a decade of poor writing – in fact, in the nine years between Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1975) and Neuromancer, science fiction had hardly produced literary works of major significance.

Under these circumstances the soon-to-be-cyberpunks were kicking off their careers in the late 1970s, albeit with little to no initial success. Bruce Sterling’s early novels Involution Ocean (1978) and The Artificial Kid (1980), as well as John Shirley’s Transmaniacon (1979) and Three-Ring

Psychus (1980) all suffered similar fates as – mostly – paperback issues yielding little praise and

gaining little attention. Through John Shirley, who had immersed himself in the underground scene of punk rock, Shiner and Sterling became acquainted with William Gibson in 1981 (Brown 175). Through Omni Magazine, a prominent example of the corporate takeover of SF, the

cyberpunks were provided with the best-paying, highest-profile market before 1984. In it, Gibson was able to publish his ‘Sprawl’ stories in 1981: ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, ‘Burning Chrome’ and ‘New Rose Hotel’, which proved to be the major breakthrough for cyberpunk (Latham 39). Three years later, Neuromancer’s success opened up the field for Gibson’s associates as well, as cyberpunk rapidly became the most popular subgenre in science fiction. Larry McCaffery in Storming the

Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (1991) described Neuromancer as

‘dense, kaleidoscopic, fast-paced, full of punked-out, high-tech weirdos’; it depicts ‘with

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the 1980s. In a time when Reagan and Thatcher’s conservative policies had enabled the rise of multinational corporatism, when the development of faster communication technologies were speeding up human social interaction, and global pop culture gave urban life a face that matched these developments, Neuromancer offered a vision of a near-future that seemed to be a hyper-real extrapolation of this image of life in the Western world.

The ease with which Gibson’s fellow cyberpunks were ‘picked out against the backdrop of a glutted market’ led opponents of cyberpunk to dismiss it ‘as mere marketing hype’ (Latham 39). SF critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay expressed his ‘suspicion (...) that most of the literary

cyberpunks bask in the light of the one major writer who is original and gifted enough to make the whole movement seem original and gifted.’ (269) Nonetheless, cyberpunk fuelled the

increasing interaction between science fiction and critical theory in the 1980s, most notably in the works of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Fredric Jameson, who in Postmodernism, Or, the

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) called cyberpunk ‘the supreme literary expression if not of

Postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’ (419). Cyberpunk propagated its claims aggressively, most notably in Bruce Sterling’s preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), which is considered as the most important manifest of the movement. In it, Sterling presented cyberpunk as the ‘definitive product’ of the ‘Eighties milieu’ (vii), a hybrid form that combined the recognition of ‘the technical revolution reshaping our society’ with ‘the

underground world of pop culture (…) and street level anarchy’ that forged an ‘unholy alliance of the technical world with the world of organized dissent’ (x). However, before digging into the controversial debate about cyberpunk’s artistic merits and the claims put forth by proponents like Sterling, it is wise to give a clear description of what cyberpunk writing actually consisted of. 1.2 The postmodern poetics of cyberpunk

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defined’ (5). This clash is represented by some variation of the concept of cyberspace – or virtual reality – through which a ‘romanticized, usually male, hacker or cowboy’ (xviii) travels, thereby approximating nothing less than a ‘virtual sublime’ (xxi), fighting against ‘the conspiracy of multinational capital and their corporations, perceived as life-forms in their own right’ (xix). Csicsery-Ronay laments the lack of originality in cyberpunk fiction’s body of work, ironically providing us with a wide and useful overview of the staple narrative of most cyberpunk novels, which actually comes across as a rich pool of tropes, themes and motifs for writers to work with:

[H]ow many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a self-destructive but sensitive young protagonist with an (implant/prosthesis/telechtronic talent) that makes the evil (megacorporations/police states/criminal underworlds) pursue him through (wasted urban landscapes/elite luxury enclaves/eccentric space stations ) full of grotesque (haircuts/clothes/self-mutilations/rock music/sexual hobbies/designer

drugs/telechtronic gadgets/nasty new weapons/exteriorized hallucinations) representing the (mores/fashions) of modern civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with rebellious and tough-talking (youth/artificial intelligence/rock cults) who offer the alternative, not of community/socialism/traditional values/transcendental vision), but of supreme, life-affirming hipness, going with the flow which now flows in the machine, against the spectre of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence/multinational corporate web/evil genius)? (‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism’ 268)

‘Cyber’ in the portmanteau ‘cyberpunk’ refers of course to cybernetics, a scientific theory developed by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. In The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and

Society (1948), Wiener defines cybernetics as a ‘new theory of messages’ that includes the ‘means

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enable everything to be represented in terms of information (29). On a textual level, it refers to the construction of variations of cyberspace that ‘entail implicit assumptions about the nature of human and machine, about the existence of a common code or language, and about the nature of reality’ (5). ‘Punk’ in cyberpunk refers to the rebellious attitude with which cyberpunk’s

antiheroes – ‘typically urban adolescents, skilled in the manipulation of data’ (5) – immerse themselves in cyberspace, using the technology of the Establishment against its own masters, thereby practicing a kind of digital self-mutilation – giving up the integrity of their own bodies (the ‘meat’) by allowing this technology to diffuse the boundaries between their own humanity and the artificial. ‘Punk’ can also be understood in the context of shifting paradigms within the SF genre, whereby cyberpunk is regarded as a ‘deconstruction of the science fiction tradition “with as much ardent noise as possible”.’ (30) The attitude of breaking conventions and the revolutionary overthrowing of the status quo originates in the punk rock scene of the 1970s, with controversial bands such as the Sex Pistols. The rebellious attitude of cyberpunk can be equated with the ways in which the New Wave set itself against earlier traditions of SF, but what sets cyberpunk apart from the New Wave, according to Heuser, is the former’s synthesizing effort to integrate hard and soft science fiction elements (xi).

McHale admits that the cyberpunk poetics is to some extent based on authors’

membership of the cyberpunk movement rather than their fiction itself (3), but he is nonetheless able to identify a number of shared traits among the writers associated with the genre. Significant here are the similarities of these traits with those of postmodern literature – McHale stresses that it is nearly impossible to describe cyberpunk’s innovation without taking into account its motifs’ relations with both the SF repertoire and the mainstream postmodern repertoire (5). From a purely science fictional standpoint, ignoring the intersection with postmodern literature, most of the motifs used in cyberpunk have earlier precedents, which has given SF critics ample

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capabilities (see also section 1.3).3_{McHale, on the other hand, recognizes one important novelty}

in cyberpunk, which he formulates as a ‘shift of dominance or center of gravity reflected in [a] combination of components and their relative conspicuousness in cyberpunk texts’ (6). He goes on to explain that ‘what typically occurs as a configuration of narrative structure or pattern of language in postmodernist fiction tends to occur as an element of the fictional world in cyberpunk’ (6). In other words, cyberpunk turns metaphors used in postmodern fiction into literalized phenomena in the diegetic world. Examples of this will be provided in the following description of three categories of motifs that McHale identifies within both cyberpunk fiction as well as postmodernist fiction: motifs of ‘worldness’, of the ‘centrifugal self’ and of death (6).

McHale points out that the underlying basis for the overlap shared by postmodernist literature and science fiction in general – cyberpunk in particular – is a repertoire of strategies designed to raise and explore ontological issues, as opposed to epistemological issues in modernist fiction. The difference can be explained through the types of questions that are being asked: epistemology concerns itself with what there is to be learned about the world, who learns it, how

reliable this information is; ontology asks questions about the nature of these worlds: what is a

world, how is it constituted, how are alternative worlds different from each other? (7) From this ontological basis, the motif of ‘worldness’ relates to the fictional presentation of virtual space, which has its literary roots in the romantic genre. This worldly category becomes the object of representations ‘through [...] metaphorical use of enclosed spaces within the romance world’ (7), that point out and reflect upon the ‘worldness’ of this world. SF does this by presenting

microworlds, such as space ships, space stations, cities in flight and other isolated environments of high technology. The ‘worldness’ reflected upon in the three texts analyzed in the present study – Neuromancer, Transmetropolitan and Deus Ex: Human Revolution – share a common

cyberpunk trait in the way in which the high-tech microworlds of conventional SF are brought down to a lower, mundane level, ‘in a revisionist manner or even as parody’ (8). McHale states

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that ‘[w]here space-stations and space-colonies of traditional SF are glamorous showcases of high technology (…), those of cyberpunk SF are likely orbiting slums – shabby, neglected,

unsuccessful, technologically outdated’ (8). The differences between these various sleazy microworlds are explored by protagonists that have their literary roots in the romantic figure of the knight errant or the hero-adventurer, freely crossing boundaries (9) – a trait shared by the protagonists of this study’s primary sources: in Neuromancer, Case crosses the boundaries between the physical and the virtual as he experiences the dimensions of cyberspace juxtaposed to ‘the real’; Spider’s urban life within the confinements of hypercapitalist commodification of highly advanced technology only makes sense to him when he ‘walks the streets’ of the City in

Transmetropolitan; Jensen, finally, as a virtual prosthesis of the gaming subject, explores the abilities

of the cyborg body in traveling quests as the ultimate cybernetic fantasy comes full circle in

Human Revolution.

Alluding to notions of multiple-worlds spaces in postmodernist texts, cyberpunk authors tend to take up and interact with ideas such as Pynchon’s ‘Zone’ in Gravity Rainbow (1973) and Burroughs’s ‘interzone’, as McHale points out (9). What is crucial in the distinction of one of cyberpunk’s novelties is McHale’s contention that the postmodern literary representation of what Foucault calls heterotopia – ‘the impossible space in which fragments of disparate discursive orders (...) are merely juxtaposed, without any attempt to reduce them to a common order’ (McHale 9) – are literalized in cyberpunk, primarily as urban spaces. Neuromancer’s representation of the

American East Coast as the ‘Sprawl’ is the most notable example, where the reader is confronted with a ‘maximally intimate juxtaposition of maximally diverse and heterogeneous cultural

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Postmodernism’s preoccupation with ontological issues results in the problematizing of plural and unstable worlds, which would lead us to believe this has implications for the

corresponding subject of the ‘self’ as well. The perspectivism of modernist literature multiplies the offered points of view of the world without ‘undermining the underlying unity of the self’, but puts ‘centrifugal pressure’ on the self that could only be fully explored by the poetics of postmodernist fiction, according to McHale (13).4_{The motif of this centrifugal self, shared by}

postmodernism and cyberpunk, is explored on a formal basis by the former (through linguistic, structural or visual metaphors), but on a literalized basis in the latter (through the fictional phenomena of the diegetic world) (14). McHale claims that traditional SF has mostly avoided this problem of selfhood and that cyberpunk is the first brand of SF that presents us with a wide variety of phenomena that embody and illustrate the problems of selfhood that arise from the ontologically unstable spaces of postmodern literature. I would propose however that cyberpunk is not SF’s first effort in this regard, but that it is a concentrated continuation of the New Wave’s tradition of dealing with similar themes, such as the exploration of inner space.5_{What is however}

typical for cyberpunk in this regard, as McHale points out as well, is its problematizing of the selfhood through the literalizes exploration of the boundaries between the human and the artificial: ‘through human-machine symbiosis, artificial intelligences [and] biologically-engineered alter egos’ (14). According to McHale, ‘the image of a human being coupled with a machine (…) recurs in many variations throughout cyberpunk’ and is ‘the most characteristic piece of

cyberpunk iconography’ (16). It could be argued that this is the single most important

contribution of cyberpunk to Western visual culture at large – the iconography of the cyborg has found a large audience in contemporary cinema (think for instance of films like The Terminator saga (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2002,

4_{McHale mentions high modernist examples of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf and Gidé (13).}

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2003), Elysium (2013) and many others). Also, cyborgism is a subject that has been thoroughly and critically investigated by artists and academics over the past three decades.6

The supposed ontological dominant in cyberpunk fiction also accounts for its preoccupation with death, the third motif McHale identifies in both cyberpunk and

postmodernist fiction. He claims it could be argued ‘that no generation or group of SF writers has made the exploration of death its special province until the emergence of the cyberpunk “wave” in the 1980s’ (21), with the lone exception of the treatment of the theme of nuclear holocaust. ‘Death,’ McHale explains, ‘not space, is the final frontier of the imagination, beyond which only the most innovative adventurers boldly go’ (26). It could be argued that death is an ontological category, whereas space is better understood in an epistemological context. By bringing the two together in Gibson’s conception of cyberspace, where characters like Case experience digital data as space in a state of limbo – somewhere in between dead and alive – cyberpunk ties together the hard and soft traditions of SF: the ‘hard’ technology of cyberspace decenters the definition of the ‘soft’ self, as the boundaries between the human and the artificial become increasingly problematic in literalized postmodern metaphors. As Darko Suvin notes: ‘In a world where people increasingly function, literally, as software, the distinction between hard and soft sciences is difficult to maintain’ (353).

1.3 Artistic claims and criticism

Regardless of all the attention and praise cyberpunk has gotten over the years, its relevance and importance to the SF genre as a whole is far from uncontested. Latham states that attracting attention ‘by drawing invidious distinctions was a major tactic of the cyberpunk polemics’ (41). Sterling was the most important (loudest) of the polemicists – his celebrations of the movement

6_{Donna Haraway published the highly influential essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’ in 1985, in which she defined the cyborg as ‘a}

hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’ (Simians 149). According to Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius, ‘performance art has emerged as a site of contestation, an aesthetic space wherein artists have exposed, examined, and critiqued the impact of emerging technologies on the body in order to gain political and creative agency within contemporary culture’ (334). Notable performance artists that have engaged with notions of cyborgism are Stelarc (see

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and of Gibson in particular had a clearly stated intention to urge SF writers to ‘transform’ the genre as a whole. In the preface to Gibson’s Burning Chrome (1986) Sterling states that ‘from now on things are going to be different’ – ‘[r]oused from its hibernation, SF is lurching from its cave into the bright sunlight of the modern zeitgeist’ (xi). He heralds Gibson as the new messiah of 1980s SF: ‘the triumph of [his stories] was their brilliant, self-constituent evocation of a credible future. It is hard to overestimate the difficulty of this effort’ (xii). A number of critics were less impressed by cyberpunk’s transformative claims. Neil Easterbrook went as far as stating that by 1989, ‘[cyberpunk’s] pretensions had become embarrassments’ (378). In his analysis of Sterling’s

Schismatrix Easterbrook came to the conclusion that it was as orthodox and conservative as the

traditions attacked by Sterling himself (386). Darko Suvin offered similar criticism, stating that the novel recirculated ‘some of the hoariest clichés of 1940s and 1950s SF’ (360).

Cyberpunk’s classification as postmodern literature is also not uncontested. Easterbrook counters Jameson’s praise of cyberpunk as the ‘supreme literary expression of postmodernism’ (Postmodernism 419), claiming that ‘Sterling’s and Gibson’s absolute dedication to dialectical models – of reasoning, of evolution, of political struggle – reveals cyberpunk as the apotheosis of the Modern’ (392). Carl Freedman concurs, stating that ‘[i]n any event, there is, (...), nothing in particular that makes cyberpunk, in merely aesthetic terms, a decisively new postmodernist moment within science fiction’ (196). Rather, cyberpunk’s radically postmodern quality is to be found not in any aesthetic style, but ‘in the use of generally well established literary techniques – some derivative of classic modernism and others as old as Homer – to capture with remarkable vividness the socioeconomic-technological horizons of postmodernity,’ according to Freedman (197). Suvin was rather sceptical of cyberpunk’s future, wondering whether the movement was proclaiming itself to be ‘another extravaganza to dazzle society in head trips (...) and to be

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more’? The ‘cognitive poetry’, as Suvin calls it, of a certain science fictional readership which was actually ‘important for all of us?’ (364)

Latham concluded that ‘the furor over cyberpunk was eventually resolved by the

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Chapter II

Postmodern eclecticism in William

Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)

Although he is often considered as the champion of cyberpunk fiction, William Gibson was actually never interested in making a name for the movement and felt that labels were

constricting (McCaffery 279-280). Although he and Bruce Sterling had developed a friendship as cyberpunk was catching pace in the early 1980s, Gibson never shared his literary partner’s enthusiasm over the movement’s turning into a subgenre. His motivation for starting to write in the style the subgenre would become famous for was rooted in what he himself called an ‘aesthetic revulsion’ toward the fiction he himself was reading at the time, referring to the SF of the 1970s (McCaffery 274). He had trouble identifying with the New Wave’s pessimistic stance on technological progress, felt a resistance to the ‘didactic, right-wing stance’ of hard SF (275) and was bored by mainstream SF, which seemed only interested in finding the most profitable market segments (mostly targeting adolescents). Gibson’s stance on technology was highly ambivalent – he saw it as a ‘useful source for images that supply a certain atmosphere’ (270). Taking advantage of disappearing distinctions between high art and pop culture, he set out to create a fictional space where concepts of highly advanced technology and images of

contemporary counterculture were able to fuse.7_{This culminated in his debut novel Neuromancer.}

Gibson cites a great number of influences on the book, that make it a literary expression of a time marked by fragmentation, commodification, globalization and something Gibson referred to as ‘cultural mongrelization’ (266). Just as electronic music and visual arts were finding ways of appropriating fragmented elements of earlier work into new forms (think of the sampling used in 1980s hip hop), so was Gibson finding ways of mixing a wide range of literary methods and

7_{Gibson’s authorship is in this sense a continuation of the Pop Art of the 1950s and 1960s, made famous by figures such as Andy}

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cultural references into the world presented to us in Neuromancer. He cites not only authors such as William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester and Thomas Pynchon, but also musical figures such as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, film noir and the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett as important influences (269-281). Claire Sponsler describes Gibson’s fiction as a ‘pack-rat eclecticism’ that marks it as a form of

postmodern collage: ‘a web of allusions’ (Sponsler 269).

For the present study this chapter serves to describe how Neuromancer was instrumental to the formation of the cyberpunk poetics, what innovative tropes and metaphors the book offered and how Gibson dealt with the predicaments presented to postmodern SF. From the

understanding that the novel is characteristic of global cultural developments since the 1980s, and that the notion of cyberspace presented a new way of looking at human consciousness in the age of the computer, I will present an account of how Gibson’s fiction functions within the greater domain of SF and how it helps us to, as Luckhurst formulates it, ‘[generate] a powerful sense of what it means to live in a ‘technosocial’ world, amidst ‘social beings for whom technology is nature’ (206).

2.1 Setting and style: the postmodern world of Neuromancer

Heuser points out that in science fictional narratives such as in Neuromancer, the analyses of setting and the fictional world are more important than those focussed on the often one-dimensional characters that inhabit them (xviii). Although I agree with this in principle, I will offer an analysis that takes both into account, as the world of Neuromancer comes alive only as the characters interact with it. In the novel, Gibson offers us a look into his vision of the

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the human and the artificial. Gibson presents us with a warped version of humanity’s unqiue technological capacities – in Neuromancer, technology no longer serves to make life safe or easy, but is integrated into our bodies and into the way we are socially organized, notably as a form of commerce.

If postmodernism is characterized by a distrust of master narratives, the one being questioned here is that of the technological utopianism associated with modernism and early science fiction traditions; the ‘confidence that scientific humanism exerts a degree of moral and ethical control over technology’ (Novotny 103-4). Gibson’s fiction works from the critical premise that technological advancement will not be paralleled by social progress. The commodification of advanced technologies in Neuromancer has led to a future ‘in which multinational corporations control global economies, urban blight has devoured the country-side’ and ‘crime and violence are inescapable events of urban life’ (Sponsler 626). Human relations and interactions are mostly represented as part of transactions, impersonal and detached, yet graceful, as ‘dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market....’ (Neuromancer 16) The sense that this is a world dominated by global corporations is enforced by Gibson’s frequent use of brand names in the narrative: Case smokes Yeheyuan cigarettes, jacks into the matrix on an Ono-Sendai console and drinks his coffee from a Braun coffee maker. By persisting in using the brand names to identify the objects after their initial introduction makes even the most advanced technological devices strangely quotidian: even the guiding drone in the Villa Straylight is

identified as a Braun, as if it were a mere household commodity.

As we are introduced to the protagonist Case in his early predicaments in Chiba City and the Sprawl, the urban environment is represented as a sprawling jungle, where technology leads a life of its own, appearing sleazy and organic:

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historical park, a reminder of humble origins. But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself

(Neuromancer 11).

They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic (48).

Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places (72).

These quotes recall McHale’s claim for cyberpunk’s practice of turning metaphors common to postmodern fiction into literalized phenomena in the diegesis (see section 1.2). A number of critics (Luckhurst 209; Novotny 100; Grant 43) refer to Gibson’s use of what the Situationist International formulated as détournement: the ‘appropriation of existing cultural fragments in such a way as to alter and invert their meaning’; ‘the politics of subversive quotation’ (Novotny 100). In

Burning Chrome (1986), Gibson wrote that ‘the street finds it own use for things’ (199). The

principle of détournement is literalized here in the representation of technology, which is

appropriated by all different social strata of Gibsonian society, and used against the corporate and legal systems that enable the spread of these technologies in the first place. The quote epitomizes how high technology is brought down to street level, to melting pots of various cultural

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2.2 Narrative, characterization and cyberspace

Heuser points out that technology in Neuromancer is equated with organisms (and thus, the human body) in the sense that they both become quickly obsolete (110) – just as technologies are always replaced by updated versions of themselves, so is the body updated in order to prevent the inevitable decay of ‘the meat’. In the face of this rapid decay, the answer is to keep moving, which accounts for Gibson’s relentless narrative: speedy prose, full of clashing, disorienting details, never allowing the reader to get comfortable or centred. As far as the narrative structure and characters are concerned, Gibson falls back on the tradition of the hard-boiled detective novel, influenced mainly by the fiction of Dashiell Hammett. The protagonist Case, a down-and-out expat hustler, a ‘console cowboy’, is recruited by a mysterious man named Armitage to take part in a ‘run’, a heist of which the ultimate goal becomes gradually clear over the course of the plot. He is assisted by Molly, a femme fatale ‘street samurai’ with biomechanically enhanced reflexes, retractable weaponized fingernail-blades and implanted mirrorshades. Her name is a clear reference to the figure of the ‘gun moll’ – the gangster-girl assisting male criminal protagonists – but also to the more independent, manipulative title character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). Minor characters are hybrids between posthuman cyborgs and those found in film noir cinema and detective stories – sleazy, fast-talking lowlifes and hustlers. The quick dialogue and use of collage argot adds to the overall impression of speed and disorientation. Gibson stated that what appears as futuristic jargon may well be inspired by ‘1969 Toronto dope dealers’ slang, or biker talk’ (McCaffery 269).

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Neuromancer and become a super-consciousness of the matrix – an artificial god. Cyberspace is where transcendence is at stake: an escape from the body, from the decay of the ‘meat’ that Case dreads. It is defined as

" (...) A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . 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...." (Neuromancer 51)

Gibson stated that the idea for cyberspace was based on children playing video games in an arcade, their concentrated enthusiasm convincing him that while they were playing they actually believed in the virtual space existing behind the screen (McCaffery 272). Heuser states that, as a new chronotope, ‘cyberspace can accommodate a great number of plot devices and can be used to incorporate other genres such as fantasy, detective fiction, the gothic, romance, and mystery’.8_It

becomes ‘a staging device for the psyche and the representation of personalities and roles, as well as the typical mise-en-scène which can function in turn as a structural mise-en-abyme, an inset narrative reflecting back on the primary narrative frame (Heuser xiv). This effect is achieved by the

technology of simstim: by ‘flipping the switch’ while jacked in, Case can alternate between the matrix’s vastness and Molly’s sensory experience. As she performs her part of the plan, Case sees and feels what she does:

The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color.... She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. [...] For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes (56).

8_{The chronotope is Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are}

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Alternating between the orbital tug ship where his physical body is jacked in, the matrix and Molly’s sensorium through simstim, Case is able to experience multiple realities and switch between them just by pushing a button, like flipping TV channels. The ecstasy of speed and light in the agoraphobia of the matrix is juxtaposed with the claustrophobia of Molly’s tactical

manoeuvres within the terribly disorienting interior of the Villa Straylight. Its labyrinthine, organic building style reminds Case of an episode from his teenage years, in which he tried to burn down a wasp nest. Wintermute, acting as a Machiavellian deus ex machina, reveals that he was the one responsible for the nest (171), one of many instances when he was covertly and

omnisciently fuelling Case’s life-long anger, needed as a driving force for his hacking mastery. As Heuser pointed out, cyberspace as a staging device is here able to switch to a gothic style, the Villa represented as a futuristic horror vacui enclave: ‘(...) a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. (...) In Straylight, the hull’s inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, (...)’ (172).

Cyberspace’s potential for artificially constructed transcendence is confirmed by Csiscery-Ronay, and it is central in his understanding of Neuromancer’s world as one in which art is ‘the only solution’, since cybernetic technology has converted ‘the real into a traffic of information that the circulation itself has become the ground of reality’, thereby relegating all human activity to ‘using excess and excessive information – for decoration, (...) self-supplementation, (...) [and] pleasure’ (‘Sentimental Futurist’ 226-7). He proposes that Gibson wants us to see every character as an artist of some sort (227), stating that we should rather not read Grant’s interpretation of Gibson’s use of détournement as a social-political strategy in service of cyberpunk’s generic claims, but as an artistic one. Gibson’s world depicts ‘the problem of individuals’ imaginative vision in a hyper-real world of signs’ (229). The direct artistic lineage to this form of cyberpunk, for which Csicsery-Ronay makes a compelling case, is to be found in Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Manifesto

for Futurism (1909). Apart from the proto-fascist tendencies (favouring militarism, patriotism and

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aesthetic principles of futuristic collage and Neuromancer: it is ‘saturated with the aesthetic of energy and audacity, of insomnia and aggression, the exaltation of the machine (...) and the virtual cyborg, like Case, part computer and part man, and Molly, part fighting machine, part woman’ (230). The novel’s ‘technosphere is a neofuturist collage in its own right’, where technology ‘invites the language of interpenetration, of high speed traffic between zones, of bodies (...) constantly in the process of becoming obsolete, and needing upgrades, to make them sleeker, quicker, less inert’ (234). Within this understanding, we are to see Case as a sentimental futuristic artist fuelled by anger and fear of decay, yet grieving for the affects and relations lost in the process of transformation (230-1). Not only do humans become artificial, the artificial intelligences take on human traits as well: we are to assume that Neuromancer, empathically sensing Case’s grief over the death of his girlfriend Linda Lee, at the end of the novel has copied Case’s consciousness into a fictional space within the matrix, where he can ‘live’ forever with the digital memory of Linda.

What is missing in Csicsery-Ronay’s reading is an account of the audience, without which there is no art. I propose that we see Case as a metaphor for that audience, mirroring our own reading experience in simstim, synchronizing his focalization with that of Molly’s, creating the illusion that we are looking at the world through her eyes. Mysterious and detached, Molly is unreachable: no matter from which side Case is looking, he will always see her mirrorshades – either reflecting his own image back to him in the physical world, or looking into that world from behind the shades in simstim – but never into her real eyes. The only thing she gives back is a quick kiss on her own palm, thereby kissing Case through cyberspace – and perhaps the reader – before she jumps into the final violent scrimmage in the Villa Straylight (Neuromancer 211). 2.3 The dilemmas of William Gibson’s legacy

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The difficulty, she states, is that of ‘finding a way of treating plot and agency so as to mesh with the implications of his postmodern aesthetic’ (639). The surface of Gibson’s world, where technology calls for ‘a radically different formulation of human agency and action’ (639-40), is met with one-dimensional agency, stuck in traditional narratives and cause-and-effect plots. In fact, she states, as cyberpunk aesthetics lay claim on postmodernity (just as earlier SF traditions did with modernity), Gibson’s failure at the level of plot and agency ‘illustrate the aesthetic

ideological dilemmas experienced by all postmodern fiction’ (642). The problem, she states, lies in Gibson’s postmodern handling of surface, the collage used in setting and dialogue, combined with the realist narrative handling of plot and agency. She proposes that ‘at first glance, this postmodern preoccupation with object and surfaces would seem to be matched by a similarly postmodern diminishing, flattening, and decentering of the human beings who move across this object world’ (631). However, at the level of plot and agency, Gibson fails to problematize the adventure-detective narrative because the epistemology of realism privileges cause-and-effect plot and the unified human subject, according to Sponsler (636). The reader, she states, is unable to identify with the threat of dehumanization, because the ‘free-willed, self-aware, humanist’

subjectivity of the main characters reaffirms that of the reader (637-8). This seems to be in accord with McHale’s insistence on cyberpunk’s correlation with postmodernism (6), as far as its

investment in ontological issues is concerned (see section 1.2). The different planes of reality, juxtaposed by cyberspace as a metanarrative device, would seem to imply ontological insecurity for the characters’ selfhood. And yet, I propose that these questions are actually rarely raised in

Neuromancer. Case accepts cyberspace as a given, because he is a master at manipulating it – there

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technology as the next, logical step in technological revolutions, stripped of all subliminal power in its commodified form. As such, it is – as Heuser stated (xi) – a convergence of the soft and hard traditions of SF: the reader’s attention is drawn away from technofetishism to the

predicaments of human urban life, yet technology is not to blame: it is simply there all around us, like a sky ‘the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (Neuromancer 1). Dehumanization then, does not originate in technology. It is found in human systems themselves: crime, poverty and the loss of history.

Tom Moylan offers criticism similar to Sponsler’s, yet in a slightly different context. He states that Gibson’s choice for recognizable plot structure and characterization represents ‘a tactical compromise at the onset of cyberpunk that stymied’, here following Samuel Delaney, ‘a discourse through which the very form of SF can chart and challenge the ideological constructs and structures of the prevailing social system’ (Moylan 83). Also, he claims that Gibson’s fictional world ignores the decreasing economic and social well-being of social groups in 1980s America: his world indeed offers no voice or gaze for women, gays and lesbians (even the gaze of Molly, who plays out a traditionally male role, is actually Case’s in simstim), and racial minorities are demoted to playing out sidekick roles, never gaining any agency of their own (the Rastafarian zionite Maelcum, for instance, has no stake in the plot – he is only there to help Case) (Moylan 89-90). ‘Cyberpunk,’ Moylan states, ‘cannot be uncritically praised as the cutting edge of opposition that Bruce Sterling spoke of in his cyberpunk manifesto’ (91).

It seems to me that Gibson is caught in between two attitudes that reflect his ambivalence towards the – sometimes – terrifying speed at which technology develops. One position is that of sentimentalism over a lost ‘first’ nature, combined however with a fear for one’s own body in the face of unavoidable change and rapid decay. The other position is that of the radical punk rebel, who hides his or her fear behind mirrorshades and cybernetic prostheses, trying to live life as fast

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Chapter III

Gonzo, transhumanism and

consumerism in Warren Ellis’s

Transmetropolitan (1997-2002)

As the core group of cyberpunk writers went their separate ways and distanced themselves from the Movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the genre seemed to have run its course. A number of literary works that appeared during the 1990s kept the tradition somewhat alive – one of the few cyberpunk writers who proved able to make a rather successful leap from the previous decade into the next was Pat Cadigan. She published Synners in 1991, as well as a great number of short stories in the following years. At the same time however, cyberpunk started to inspire artists in non-literary media and began a new life as a style appropriated by a wide range of works in both mainstream media and marginal subcultures. Cinema was inspired by the possibilities that the poetics of cyberpunk offered, resulting in films of varying commercial and critical success such as Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992), Robert Longo’s adaptation of William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel (1998). More fruitful was cyberpunk’s influence in Japanese anime, most notably in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), and ultimately the best known postcyberpunk title: Lana and Andy Wachowski’s The

Matrix (1999). This chapter looks at one of the more unusual, yet highly accomplished works in a

medium that was left mostly untouched by the advent of cyberpunk: the comic book series

Transmetropolitan (1997-2002), written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson.

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nationalism, politics and journalism – thereby offering us a new flavour of cyberpunk that is consciously looking into a present world that is rapidly turning into the Gibsonian future.

The goal of this chapter is to position Transmetropolitan in the literary tradition of

cyberpunk and explore how it makes use of graphic narrative techniques as the subgenre makes an intermediary crossover. Transmetropolitan addresses a variety of themes that ultimately deal with social identity in a world where technology is literally in the air we breathe, its effects inescapable and encompassing the way we live.9_{Sherryl Vint proposes that life in the twenty-first century is}

an exteriorization of cyberpunk motifs, stating that ‘technology is one of the chief ways in which capitalism expands to fill all previously non-commodified spaces in private life and this is

nowhere more apparent than in personal technological devices and the cultures that have arisen around them’ (‘Afterword’ 229). It is not surprising then, that in a world where companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Samsung continue to increase their influence on both private and public space, cyberpunk continues to be a relevant stylistic source for cultural reflection on the ways commodified technologies give meaning to our lives. Ellis explores the role in this process of what he clearly sees as the root of Western democracy: plural media and freedom of the press. In his grim, yet refreshing vision of the present-as-future, he satirizes technological advancement as a utopia tracking off course, refusing to become dystopia at the same time. In this chapter I analyze Ellis’s use of parody, pastiche and satire – and Robertson’s accompanying illustrations – and describe how Transmetropolitan, as an instance of postcyberpunk, presents a new way of understanding SF as postmodernist fiction.

3.1 Context: comics

Comics represents a relatively new and somewhat inchoate field of academic study, that picked up pace as a form of literary studies in the 1980s, after the great success of a number of graphic

9_{In issue 46 (‘What I Know’) Spider learns that he suffers from degenerative ‘I-pollen-damage’, a potentially fatal condition}

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narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen (1986-7) and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knights Returns (1986).10_{These works showed us how rich}

the possibilities of comics can be in self-reflexively dealing with historical and gender-related topics. I understand Transmetropolitan as a comic book series functioning in this tradition of works that have been labelled ‘graphic novels’. At the same time, I must realize that the aspects of the series that are relevant for the present study are only marginally commensurate with properties of the literary novel. The properties of comics present different challenges and possibilities to authors in terms of story-telling than to authors of non-visual narratives such as the novel. ‘Graphic novel’ is a term that is used primarily in a marketing sense, and as such it is often a misnomer (Chute 453) – it is used to describe visual narratives that have the length of a novel and employ comics techniques in terms of panelling and drawing. While this chapter’s intention is not to inform an argument about nomenclature, it is important to note that graphic novels are more personal projects for their authors than comic books, which are produced according to more industrial guidelines and switch authors and draughtsmen more frequently in between issues. Also, graphic novels focus on more adult themes and subsequently, on more mature audiences than comics (462). When discussing Transmetropolitan I will use the terms comics, graphic novel and graphic narrative freely and interchangeably, while keeping in mind that the series’ narrative and visual design are produced by individual artists that have a strong sense of their work as a personal artistic statement.

3.2 Transmetropolitan: Gonzo, the City and history in postcyberpunk

Transmetropolitan was published by DC Comics and appeared initially, mostly under the Vertigo

imprint, as an extended finite series of 60 issues between 1997 and 2002, which were later bundled and republished in 10 trade paperback volumes.11_{The series relates the story of Spider}

10_{Following Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, the noun ‘comics’ is ‘plural in form, used with a singular verb’ (9). It serves to}

distinguish comics as a medium from the plural of ‘comic’ (a comic here being a single comic book text).

11_{One of the best qualities of Transmetropolitan, besides the terrific design and memorable characters, is the way the series is}

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Jerusalem, a radical journalist in twenty-fifth century-America, seeking to bring down the terror reign of the corrupt president Gary Callahan. Spider is one of the more colourful characters in comics, resulting from the many contradictions in his personality and actions. Spider’s only allegiance lies with ‘the truth’, and although he fights for an apparently good cause, he is a rather despicable character at the outset of the story. His drug-induced abusive behaviour, vulgarity, violent sadism, selfishness and untrustworthiness make for an interesting, yet unlikable personality. Over the course of five years however, Spider overcomes most of his darker sides and becomes a more likeable hero, a champion of the free press, ultimately forcing Callahan out of office and even building up meaningful friendships in the process. Spider is loosely based on the persona of journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), one of the founders of gonzo journalism. Spider is an over-the-top exponent of this, taking journalism as far away from objective neutrality as possible. His job is a vocation and a highly personal matter, just as

Thompson developed a personal relation to his subjects, often letting the former overshadow the latter. In Spider’s case, this is literalized into a personal, often violent vendetta with the country’s politicians (not unlike Thompson’s famed feud with Richard Nixon).12

Spider’s adventures take place in ‘the City’, a futuristic interpretation of New York, where the intrusive presence of technology in everyday life has resulted in a sprawling spectrum of extravagant, unusual people in various ethnic groups and subcultures that continually clash and transform themselves. Robertson’s colourful art work brings the City alive: beautiful in its diversity (see fig. 1), ugly in its social realities (fig. 3b), alluding to both utopia and dystopia. As Sean Witzke points out, ‘the social commentary that often appears as an element of the dystopia

complement and sometimes tie into the main plot. The only weakness is that the main plot loses some pace as the years go by, but the overall symmetry of the narrative is set up to make sure that narrative closure is achieved after every block of six issues (one paperback volume), which is divided into segments of three issues that cover one continuous storyline (of which there is at least one in every volume) or three separate episodal sidestories to complement the block of three. This perfectly calculated system enabled Ellis to keep a terrific balance between main narrative and side stories and close off every single narrative line by the end of the series.

12_{Thompson wrote the infamous obituary ‘He Was A Crook’ (Rolling Stone, June 16 1994) after Nixon’s death, explaining his}

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is best used for satire, of extrapolating modern problems to their terminal futuristic points.

Transmetropolitan is, at its core, a work of social satire in the same way it is a work of science

fiction’ (8). This is the function of the City: it is a satirist reflection on contemporary urban life in America. And while the setting is science fictional, the story matter is not. ‘The City’, according to Witzke, ‘even at its most “science fiction”, is based on an understanding of the way that cities behave in the real world’ (11); ‘[u]nlike nearly all of the cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk cities, the City of Transmet isn’t based on architecture and design. It’s based on people’ (13). Indeed, in contrast to some of the metropolitan inspirations for cyberpunk’s conceptions of urban life, notably Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the SF comics of Moebius and Bilal, this city is not collapsing into itself. As Spider makes clear, already in the first issue:

This city never allowed itself to decay or degrade. It’s wildly, intensely growing. / It takes

strength from its thousands of cultures. And the thousands more that grow anew each day. /

It isn’t perfect. It lies and cheats. It’s no utopia and it ain’t the mountain by a long shot – but it’s alive. I can’t argue that. (#1 ‘The Summer of the Year’ 14)

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striking example of history being neglected, rejected even, is issue number 8, ‘Another, Cold Morning’. It is a sidestory episode that tells the story of Mary, who was cryogenically frozen in the twentieth century, coming back to life in the City centuries later. She is not welcomed by the people of the future, immediately sentenced to life as a refugee. The fact that Mary is ultimately the one helping Spider to bring down Callahan in the final issue, by delivering photographic evidence in a murder case, is Ellis’s affirmation of the importance of historical consciousness in SF. As Spider tells us:

Save your City in your memory, because tomorrow some of it will be knocked down and rebuilt to match its own new moment. This place is constantly being remade. We ran out of new land a while ago. / So we reuse and reinvent and revamp and lose track of time because we’re so busy trying to inhabit this single second of now as fully as we can. / The past is in the way of the present. Kick it down, make way for right-the-fuck-now. (#42 ‘Spider’s Thrash’ 16)

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our interest in the plot.13_{In the rhetorical mode for instance, the narrative is dominant in an}

interdependent relation with the composition – the latter serves the former. Ellis and Robertson employ a number of different modes of course, and the way they alternate between them ties into important themes associated with cyberpunk – technology, capitalism and history. Layouts like those employing rhetorical modes are usually combined with close-ups of extreme facial

expressions and action-filled panels (see fig. 3a). When he wants to slow down and have us look attentively at the world of the City however, he switches to decorative (see fig. 3b) and productive modes (where the composition is dominant over the narrative). The episodes of Transmetropolitan that are mostly dedicated to decorative layouts are usually the ones where Spider breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly, sometimes taking us with him ‘walking’ the streets, to go and have a look at the world he lives in. It is at these times specifically when the

significance of history is brought to our attention. This slowing down while ‘looking around’ was an unusual trait in cyberpunk during the 1980s. Gibsonian space is exhilarating, confusing,

decentred – the rush of cyberspace drove the plot of Neuromancer to its conclusion, with little time to focus on details. In managing the pace of the layout, Ellis (as well as Spider who, as a gonzo journalist, is a living allusion to a figure that is rooted in the twentieth century) fight against what Jameson identifies as

the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve

(‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ 125).

13_{Benoît Peeters, in ‘Four Conceptions of the Page’ (1983), formulated the most widespread taxonomy of reading a comics page.}

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Ellis wants us to stop and notice the thousands of urban details – not as a blur in perpetual motion, but as fragments that testify to a past that cries out to be remembered. Ellis uses the advantage visual narrative has over literature to reflect on the present as part of something greater, making a stronger statement about the social implications of cybertechnology in a hypercapitalist society.

3.3 Commodification, technology and satire

One of the cornerstones of transhumanist discourse is the notion that presents technological development as the final answer to human pain and suffering. This discourse is hilariously

attacked by Ellis in his representation of technological folly. Spider’s apartment is outfitted with a ‘maker’, a device that can turn refuse into over 25,000 objects (clothes, Spider’s cybernetic

glasses, etc.). The only thing preventing this machine from proper functioning is the fact that it has gotten addicted to the drugs it makes for itself, bringing the scientific brilliance of the machine down to a sobering, absurd, all too human level (#6 ‘God Riding Shotgun’ 3-4). Another technology created and then subsequently mocked by Ellis, is the ‘downloading’ of humans. In an early issue, Spider’s assistant Channon is worried her boyfriend might be cheating on her. After some investigation, it turns out he is getting himself downloaded, transporting his mind into billions of ‘foglets’, that turn him into a living, immortal cloud of data (tying into one of the pivotal themes of cyberpunk – overcoming the inevitable decay of the body). This

moment of supposedly epic transcendence is immediately ruined by the boyfriend, as his first act after the downloading is committing adultery after all, having sex with another foglet girl (#7 ‘Boyfriend Is A Virus’ 22). Ellis’s satire of technology is also an attack on commodification, implying that no matter how brilliant the device is, people will only use it for their own personal, insignificant desires, and these devices only exist because of consumer demand.

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developments. Ellis, in his fiction, is sensitive towards the fact that the moon landing of 1969 has not led to intergalactic colonization or extraterrestrial contact – the focus of ‘big science’,

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Chapter IV

Cyborg fantasies and gaming – Deus Ex:

Human Revolution (2011)

In hindsight, it should be surprising to see the small extent to which cyberpunk found its way into the world of digital gaming, considering one of Gibson’s explanations of how the idea for cyberspace came to him – witnessing the immersive experience of children playing video games in the arcades of the early 1980s (McCaffery 272). Jonathan Boulter however, states that Gibson’s inspiration ‘clearly indicates that the space of gaming should be a crucial site for those interested in tracing cyberpunk’s various generic roots’ (137). During the 1990s, a few tentative attempts were made to use cyberpunk’s imagery and themes in video games. Titles such as Syndicate (1993) and System Shock (1994) succeeded in gaining considerable cult followings and were followed up by a number of sequels that followed roughly the same formula. There were also some direct adaptations of established cyberpunk and proto-cyberpunk titles, such as Blade Runner (1997),

Ghost in the Shell (1997) and Enter the Matrix (2003). System Shock in particular is seen as a precursor

to a number of high-profile video games in the following years – such as the wildly successful

Half-Life (1998) and the steampunk-styled BioShock series (2007-2013) – but also Deus Ex (2000),

the first instalment of the series that I will discuss in this chapter. Deus Ex was the first game to bring cyberpunk to mainstream gaming culture and be successfully innovative in terms of gameplay at the same time, admirably combining first-person shooter (FPS) elements into a role-playing game (RPG). The sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003) was less praised for its

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As I examine Human Revolution my purpose is two-fold. First, I offer an examination of the way the game has been influenced by predecessors that have its roots in cyberpunk – not only in literature, but also in cinema – and explain how the game is a culmination of cyberpunk’s cultural development over the past decades, as it deals with recognizable issues such as

biomechanical engineering, multinational corporatism and transhumanism. On the other hand, following Jonathan Boulter’s analysis of Deus Ex: Invisible War, I examine the correlations between Human Revolution’s gameplay subjectivity and feedback, and the vision of cyberpunk on the posthuman subject in cyberspace.

4.1 Cyberpunk poetics in Human Revolution

Before looking at Human Revolution as an exponent of the cyberpunk tradition, a few things must be said about the way we should compare video games and fictional narratives, such as literature and cinema. In his analysis of quest games as post-narrative discourse, Espen Aarseth states the following:

Even if we adopt the widest (and weakest) possible notion of narratives – that they could be architectural rather than sequential, enacted rather than related, experienced personally and uniquely rather than observed collectively and statically – an ontological difference would still remain [between games and more traditional narrative forms]. This difference is probably best described with the word choice (366).

Aarseth continues to explain (366-7) that it seems that the less a player is presented with

The media of cyberpunk: An analysis of postmodern science fiction