- Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

The media of cyberpunk:
An analysis of postmodern
science fiction
Eelco Blaauw
Student nr. 1722603
Thesis supervisor: Dr. Corey Gibson
Date: June 18th 2015
Word count: 16136
Master’s Dissertation, English Literature and Culture
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Table of contents
Introduction
3
Chapter 1 – 1984: The Cyberpunks Are Here
7
1.1 The 1980s and the rise of cyberpunk
7
1.2 The postmodern poetics of cyberpunk
10
1.3 Artistic claims and criticism
16
Chapter 2 – Postmodern eclecticism in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
19
2.1 Setting and style: the postmodern world of Neuromancer
20
2.2 Narrative, characterization and cyberspace
23
2.3 The dilemmas of William Gibson’s legacy
26
Chapter 3 – Gonzo, cyberpunk and history in Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan (1997-2002) 30
3.1 Context: comics
31
3.2 Transmetropolitan: Gonzo, the City and history in postcyberpunk
32
3.3 Commodification, technology and satire
37
Chapter 4 – Cyberpunk fantasies and gaming: Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)
39
4.1 Cyberpunk poetics in Human Revolution
40
4.2 Cyberspace and the gaming subject
43
Conclusion
48
Works cited
51
Appendix A: Illustrations
54
2
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.
In the past several decades it has become apparent that the tropes of cyberpunk literature,
epitomized by Gibson’s Neuromancer, continue to flourish in various contemporary visual media,
such as cinema, graphic novels and video games. The main argument of my thesis is that the
relevance of this science fiction subgenre, in particular its conception of the idea of cyberspace, is
based on a sustained capacity for critical reflection on the posthuman subject in late capitalist
society, especially in the context of the interactions between technology and the human body.
3
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 mid1980s, 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?
Considerations of cyberpunk’s claims about the shifting of borders between high and low culture
4
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
historical awareness. Human Revolution actualizes the immersive experience of cyberspace in its
apparatus – the interface between the computer and the gamer – while appropriating the
cyberpunk aesthetics and dealing with ideas associated with cyberpunk in the content matter
(most notably the figure of the cyborg). Throughout my thesis, I present an account of the
continued relevance of the cyberpunk poetics through literature’s influence on other media.
There are some contradictory aspects of cyberpunk fiction however, such as the tension between
its commercial modes of production and its claims of social criticism, as well as the tension
between its supposed rejection of late capitalist society and its technofetishist tendencies. These
5
issues need to be addressed as well before any productive statements about cyberpunk’s influence
can be made.
6
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
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)).
2 Based on Carl Malmgren’s ‘Worlds Apart: A Theory of Science Fiction’, 1988: 30-34.
1
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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).
Robert Latham is able to point out a number of similarities in the conditions prior to
both the New Wave’s appearance in the mid-1960s and cyberpunk’s arrival in the early 1980s.
First, there was a noticeable ‘sense of malaise among writers and fans owing to economic
8
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
hallucinatory vividness the desperate, exhilarating feel of life in our new urban landscapes’ (263).
The novel seemed to have struck a nerve in the contemporary zeitgeist of the Western world in
9
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
Cyberpunk, Sabine Heuser states, has come to mean the tension or ‘shock value’ between ‘high
tech’ and ‘low life’, accounting for the flavour of a subgenre that is ‘easily recognized, but rarely
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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
of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such
automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system’ (quoted in Heuser 20).
The legacy of this theory provided the scientific logic behind the metaphoric processes that
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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
ammunition to attack Sterling’s claims of cyberpunk’s new-found relevance and innovative
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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
3
See Easterbrook (1992): 392, and Freedman (2000): 196.
13
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
materials’ (McHale 10). Transmetropolitan and Human Revolution are also clearly indebted to
cyberpunk’s fascination with urban spaces as literal instances of the postmodern conception of
space.
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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
5
McHale mentions high modernist examples of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf and Gidé (13).
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), for instance, has devoted his entire career to the ontological problems of selfhood.
15
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
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
http://www.stelarc.org), Steve Mann (http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/steve-mann-my-augmediated-life), Orlan
(http://www.orlan.eu/), Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas (http://www.cyborgfoundation.com/).
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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
integrated into the profit-making and highly ideologized cultural industry’, or as ‘macho cynicism’
in the face of fast-paced technological developments in the 1980s (364). Or was it ‘something
17
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
movement’s unqualified success in gaining markets, awards, and readers, as it became, in essence,
yet another historical avant-garde assimilated as a distinct subgenre of SF’ (43). Moreover, the
impact of the New Wave was greater than cyberpunk’s, mainly because the latter’s attempt to
mount a successful campaign for transforming the genre became increasingly difficult due to the
ever diversifying and segmented marketplace of SF (43). For all of its successes and failures
however, cyberpunk’s poetics have remained a vivid force outside of the science fiction genre,
and even outside of the medium of literature. The basis for this force is the great accomplishment
of Gibson’s Neuromancer. Working from the understanding that the novel is the epitomization of
the subgenre’s interplay between hard and soft traditions of SF, as well as the birthplace of the
highly influential notion of cyberspace, I will discuss the novel in the next chapter and analyze its
role in developing and spreading the cyberpunk poetics. The effects of this particular style of
science fiction on contemporary culture and different media will subsequently be explored in
chapters three and four.
18
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
Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein. The similarity is based on the inclusion of popular images, mass-produced
culture and advertising into the tradition of fine arts and – in this case – the blending of science fiction pulp, pop culture and high
literature.
19
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 onedimensional 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
contemporary world, presented as a near-future with heavy dystopian elements. It is a future
where technology has encroached upon society up to the point where the human subject
becomes highly unstable and decentred by its environment. This is the most significant of the
many blurred boundaries in Gibson’s fiction: the increasingly troublesome distinction between
20
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:
There were countless theories explaining why Chiba City tolerated the Ninsei enclave, but
Case tended toward the idea that the Yakuza might be preserving the place as a kind of
21
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
backgrounds that recall Burroughs’s concept of the interzone, where people use ‘high tech’ only
for profit and survival and not for higher knowledge or transcendental experiences.
22
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).
In order to complete Armitage’s heist, Case must ‘jack’ into cyberspace and hack the
security protocols of the Tessier-Ashpool clan, a decadent, aristocratic family of dehumanized
clones, secluded in cryogenic stasis in the orbital Villa Straylight. At the same time, Molly
infiltrates the Villa physically as an enforcer, performing the necessary physical steps of the plan
that Case cannot accomplish from cyberspace. The goal is to release the artificial intelligence (AI)
Wintermute, programmed by the Tessier-Ashpools, enabling him to merge with his AI sibling
23
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).
The chronotope is Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin 84).
8
24
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 CsisceryRonay, 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
misogyny), Csicsery-Ronay is able to draw a powerful comparison between the aggressive
25
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
Gibson’s accomplishment is uncontested as far as setting and style are concerned. Sponsler
however, presents a critical analysis of the dilemmas that Gibson struggles with in Neuromancer.
26
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
is no sense of wonder over its workings. More important: he is still Case at the end of the story,
dealing with the same old epistemological questions rather than ontological. Perhaps it is better to
assume – explained in part perhaps by Gibson’s self-proclaimed ambivalence about technology
(McCaffery 274) – that the basic premise of most cyberpunk fiction is not the shock and
amazement over wonderful feats of high technology, but a neutral acceptance of cybernetic
27
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
as possible, leaving no traces behind. Moylan identifies this division with the reader being ‘trapped
28
in the thrilling dead-end of cynicism, left with fashionable survival or displaced rebellion’ (83).
The two extremes on this spectrum of living in a techno-social world were explored in more
contemporary forms of cyberpunk fiction, which I analyze in the next two chapters.
29
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.
Whereas most of the major postcyberpunk titles went for dramatic action or romantic nostalgia
in their appeal, Transmetropolitan combined these with cyberpunk’s rather unexplored possibilities
for satire. And while most cyberpunk authors present us with futures where global corporatism
has supplanted governments and national borders have subsequently faded, Warren Ellis digs
into the areas of society that are supposedly rudimentary in these visions of the future –
30
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
In issue 46 (‘What I Know’) Spider learns that he suffers from degenerative ‘I-pollen-damage’, a potentially fatal condition
caused by information pollen – an illegal technology that enables microscopic clouds of data to be inhaled for immediate
knowledge. Spider’s symptoms increase over the course of the series, as it turns out he was already infected in issue 9 (‘Wild In
The Country’).
9
31
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
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
structured, as explained by Julian Darius (94-97). The story unfolds over five years of narrative time, that are divided over five
blocks of 12 issues. While the main narrative deals with Spider’s war with Callahan, there are numerous episodal sidestories that
10
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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
hatred towards the former president. It can be read integrally at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/hewas-a-crook/308699/. Thompson referred to Nixon as ‘scum’, ‘a swine of a man’, and wrote that his casket should have been
thrown into an open-sewer canal.
33
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)
Ellis makes a concerted effort to present the city as a product of history, that has been
largely forgotten – wants to be forgotten – by its inhabitants. By including numerous references
to history and culture of the twentieth century, he warns us against the potential of transhumanist
discourse for cultural amnesia. Some amusing examples are likenesses of some of the city’s
figures to cultural icons such as Marlon Brando as the avatar of an appliance (fig. 2a), Charlie
Brown as a bodyguard (2b), and 2001: A Space Odyssey’s evil computer HAL as e-mail software
(2c). Some more serious homages and references are a highly disfunctional, military secured
school named after American terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh (2d), Spider sitting in a
reinterpretation of the cafe from Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks (fig. 2e), and several
remarks by various characters completely oblivious of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust (one of
Callahan’s political advisors at one point wonders who this ‘Joseph Goebbels’ was). The most
34
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)
The importance of the past to the present is also reflected by Ellis’s use of pacing, for which he
makes very deliberate choices throughout the series. Baetens and Frey point out a number of
advantages of the reading of ‘layout and panel design in combination with the storyline and the
visual representations inside (and sometimes outside) the panels’, one of which involves speeding
up and slowing down (132). Readers’ interest in the story is held in place by driving the plot
forward, working towards the satisfaction of narrative closure; at the same time, their interest in
the images and the tableau – the look and feel of the world presented to them – is maintained by
slowing down and abandoning the narrative for a while, in order to lose themselves in surface
detail. Ellis is aware of these effects of pacing and Robertson matches the narrative needs with
fitting page layouts accordingly, mostly through the conventional and rhetorical modes (where the
narrative is dominant over the composition) when the story needs to be driven forward to satisfy
35
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).
Benoît Peeters, in ‘Four Conceptions of the Page’ (1983), formulated the most widespread taxonomy of reading a comics page.
It was based on the relation between the narrative and the composition, proposing that the basic relation between the two can be
either interdependent or autonomous, and that one of the two aspects is more dominant in any given page layout. This results in
four different modes of panel utilization: conventional, decorative, rhetorical and productive (Baetens 108).
13
36
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.
In conclusion, Ellis’s satire is an attack on the technofetishism of the hard SF tradition,
reminiscent of the New Wave. It represents a shift in SF’s involvement with technological
37
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’,
celebrated by modernist utopianism. It has led however to the explosion of technologies on a
smaller scale that affect peoples’ lives in mundane, but no less critical ways. Especially the role
mass media technology plays in Transmetropolitan is significant in this way. Spider’s only defense
against the political terror that opposes him is the speed and immediacy of digital broadcasting
and publishing. The estrangement of Transmetropolitan’s representation of bizarre technologies and
their commodified uses by fragmented subcultures, is the culmination of an explicitly political
form of postcyberpunk which was less imaginable in the street-level individualism of Neuromancer.
What Spider Jerusalem shares with Case however, seems to be the conviction that technology is
meaningless without application. And as long as that application does not erase the past and
allows the truth to be revealed when it is most valuable – when it is at its ugliest and ripe for
satire – there should be no limits to the imagination of the high tech consumerism.
38
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 roleplaying game (RPG). The sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003) was less praised for its
interpretation of the cyberpunk style, but was relatively successful in its own right. The third
instalment however, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), was considered one of the best games of
its generation. The massive appeal, not only of its intense gameplay but especially of its design,
complex narrative and dark, brooding vision of the near future, are a clear indication that the
poetics of cyberpunk lends itself supremely well to the video game industry.
39
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
gameplay choices (solutions to problems), the more a game becomes a ‘quasi-game’ (a story that
simply uses the technological properties of the computer to relate a linear static narrative). Even
when players are presented with a number of possible solutions to solve the problems that
prevent the story from unfolding (the ‘beating’ of the game), the storyline is actually already set
and choice is merely limited to the ways of reaching closure (Aarseth draws a comparison here to
Edward Packard’s Choose Your Own Adventure playbooks (1979-1998)). Even when the possible
40
outcomes are numerous, they are still set and not the result of the player’s own fantasy. Human
Revolution is similar in this regard. As Arthur Gies wrote in his IGN review of the game:
Human Revolution incentivizes everything, as everything you do yields a reward, more or
less. Whether that means playing the part of cold cyborg or tortured, empathetic ex-cop,
or choosing between stealth and direct action, your choices define your experience (1).
The game’s replay value, one of the leading consumer criteria for contemporary video games, is
based then on the variations of gameplay that it offers. Being and doing in the virtual world of the
game, is more important than solving the game. Placing the game’s narrative aside then, we should
examine the way Human Revolution places itself in the tradition of cyberpunk aesthetics and look at
what Heuser had already singled out as the most important aspects of cyberpunk: style and
setting (xviii, 9). In this context, a special role is reserved for the functioning of the avatar – as a
prosthesis of the gaming subject – in exploring the digital space of the game. In Human Revolution,
as is common in cyberpunk fiction, this space is predominantly urban.
A short summary of the game’s story however will serve as a useful context for my
analysis. Human Revolution is set in the year 2027 and follows the quest of Adam Jensen, a cyborg
security specialist working for one of the leading multinational companies in biomechanical
engineering, referred to as ‘human augmentation’ in the game. The gameplay premise of joyfully
experiencing the possibilities of the cyborg body is established right at the outset, as Jensen is
heavily wounded in a violent terrorist attack and his life can only be saved by way of cybernetic
augmentations. The element of choice is thereby transferred to the user in gameplay possibilities,
most notably in upgrading Jensen’s cyborg body (the prosthetic augmentations affect all his
important motor skills and mental capabilities, enabling the gamer to choose from different
playing styles, roughly divided in slow-paced stealth and high-paced combat). Ultimately, as
Jensen uncovers the conspiracy behind the attack and tracks down the culprits, the gamer is
presented with four possible resolutions, that will decide the fate of the global human
41
augmentations industry. This is uncharacteristic of most cyberpunk fiction. While the majority of
the subgenre features characters that live on the lower end of the foodchain, the choice offered
to the gamer here represents great political and moral power. ‘Saving the world’ is rarely the goal
of cyberpunk protagonists – they mostly struggle to save themselves.
The urban environment we get to see, as Jensen’s journey takes him through sprawling
cities such as Detroit, Shanghai, Montréal and Singapore, immediately evoke the cyberpunk
aesthetics and motifs in which the game is rooted. If anything, Jensen is an explorer. The game
world is divided into major ‘hubs’, representing sprawling urban environments than can be
roamed freely, and what I would call ‘enclaves’, secured stand-alone levels that must be infiltrated
and ‘solved’ by Jensen in order to drive the plot forward. The hubs are clearly inspired by Blade
Runner’s epic vistas of futuristic Los Angeles (see fig 4.1), with an emphasis on verticality,
unnatural lighting and rampant advertising, as well as Gibson’s descriptions of the Sprawl in
Neuromancer, especially in their presentation of commodified technology affecting all aspects of
social interaction. Human Revolution is set in a time in which cybernetic technologies are in their
first stages of commodification, unlike Neuromancer’s world which is engulfed by them.
Subsequently, technology is not yet leading a life of its own in ‘unsupervised playgrounds’
(Neuromancer 11), but is still regulated by multinational corporations, dominating peoples’ lives as
consumers. Neuromancer’s sense of decay and entropy is clearly present however, reminding us of
their roots in historical reality, as well as the cultural mingling of subcultures and high tech. Also
present is the fascination for the growing importance of East-Asian cultures on the world-stage,
which we see in almost every major work related to cyberpunk (Neuromancer, Blade Runner and The
Matrix are the most obvious examples). Finally, Michael McCann’s soundtrack is a mix of
ambient electronic trance, that reminds us of Maelcum’s zion dub in Neuromancer, and dramatic
overtures of string violins and angelic chanting that evoke an atmosphere of both nostalgia and
transcendence.
42
Jensen’s appearance is quintessential cyberpunk: his implanted mirrorshades are the latest
in a long line of cyberpunk-references to those of Neuromancer’s Molly, and his long trenchcoat
reminds us of The Matrix’s Neo, but also Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard and Roy Batty (see fig 4.2).
His hoarse voice, provided by voice actor Elias Toufexis, and neutral facial expressions add to
the impression of Jensen as a stern, cool-collected, yet dangerous loner – the recognizable male
protagonist of much cyberpunk fiction. His heroic quest for truth and redemption is similar to
the mission of Spider Jerusalem, but the difference lies in the subtext. Spider functions by way of
communication (in sly, satirical columns); Jensen’s function is physical: his actions speak louder
than his opinions (and those actions are dictated by the gamer, not by Jensen). Accordingly, it is
important of course to realize that Jensen cannot function as a character in the literary sense of
the word. As an extension of the gaming subject, his personality and feelings are undermined by
the gameplay possibilities of his cybernetic body. Although there is no equivalent in the game for
the cyberspaces of early cyberpunk fiction, the aura of cyberspace – by virtue of the computer’s
apparatus and the user’s investment in it – is clearly present and reinforced by the atmosphere
that the game creates. In this space, Jensen is not a character – he is an avatar.
4.2
Cyberspace and the gaming subject
Since Gibson’s introduction of the term in 1984, ‘cyberspace’ has become the colloquial term to
describe the discourse surrounding the internet. Moreover, I would argue, digital gaming
represents on some important level the kind of experience cyberpunk’s ‘console cowboys’ have
when they are ‘jacked in’ to the matrix. Heuser has remarked that ‘we need to develop [...] a
science fiction-specific model of genre, in order to situate cyberpunk in a historical context, and
in order to account for the concept of novelty that it contributes to the genre as a whole’ (xiv).
This can be equated to Aarseth’s identification of the problems of categorizing game genres,
which are remnants of the early days of gaming distribution (division into genres such as
adventure, puzzle, strategy, etc.). He states that we need a new typology to account for the
widespread overlapping of genre in contemporary games, offering the shooter Halo (2001) as an
43
example (363). Keeping generic problems in mind, we should think about the capacity of
cyberspace as a platform for various alternate realities (and thus, genres). As Heuser states:
Above all, the new chronotope of 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. [...] Cyberspace thus becomes a staging device for the
psyche and the representation of personalities and roles, as well as a typical mise-en-scène
which can function in turn as a structural mise-en-abyme, an inset narrative universe
reflecting back on the primary narrative (xiv).
This adequately describes the gameplay experience of many contemporary games, the Deus Ex
series included, that seek high levels of mimetic realism in three-dimensional space and at the
same time present alternate realities that can be categorized into various, overlapping genres.14
Additionally, Heuser claims that
Cyberspace almost allows the hero to forget the reality of his own flesh. It comes close to
creating and sustaining the illusion of transcendence, of infinity, even of eternal life. But it
always remains linked to the human body, since the perception of cyberspace is
impossible without it’ (37).
The last point is crucial, as is discussed by Jonathan Boulter and Sherryl Vint. In his analysis of
Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), Boulter states that ‘digital gaming instantiates (...) a celebration of
both subjective extension and cancellation’ (135) and (...) ‘materially what may be the primal
posthuman fantasy of cyberpunk: to transcend the limits of human space and subjectivity, of
subjectivity conceived as singular interiority’ (136). ‘[B]ecoming the avatar (...) speak[s] to a
fetishized, posthuman, desire for transcendence’ (135). Along with this, a re-aligning of the
The finest example of this is the Assassin’s Creed series (2007-2014), in which the player’s avatar can upload his consciousness
into the digitized memories of ancient assassins and relive the histories of their lives in virtual space. The premises of the game are
highly science fictional, yet the game is widely perceived (and sold) as an historical action game, which accommodates many
gameplay experiences and genres.
14
44
experience of space occurs, Boulter states. I would argue that the ‘forgetting’ of the real that
occurs in this process does not entail a full transfer of belief to or full suspension of disbelief in
the fictional world presented to us in cyberspace. Rather, by temporarily forgetting the real, being
pulled into the framing of the computer screen and identifying with the gaze of the ‘camera’
(which is passive in cinema, yet active in first-person shooters such as Human Revolution), the
difference between fiction and reality no longer carries any meaning, by lack of a binary
opposition. The game, which has to refer to its own fictional status constantly in order to
accommodate gameplay (by using overlays, interfaces, option menus, unrealistic/impossible
premises), is no different in this regard from certain practices of the novel, cinema or the theatre.
Is a literary character directly addressing the audience or relating old memories with impossibly
accurate details, essentially not the same as Jensen carrying unrealistic amounts of items in an
invisible inventory or respawning after a violent death? The user, just as the reader of the novel,
will have no trouble ‘believing’ in the space that is virtually presented, even when it has to expose
its own artificiality.
Game worlds are a means of escape and spaces to escape from at the same time. Vint and
Boulter insist on the importance of one aspect of the gaming experience, in order to understand
its correlation to cyberspace: a melancholic attitude towards the body that is ‘left behind’. Vint,
following the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Janet Sayer, summarizes that ‘cyberpunk appeals to
the (impossible) desire to escape the vicissitudes of the body and occupy the place of selfmastery’ (Bodies of Tomorrow 104). She appropriately quotes (104) Neuromancer’s passages of Case
experiencing Molly’s body through simstim: ‘Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks
he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating’ (56).
Gamers find in video games a way around the passivity while still escaping their own bodies.
Boulter notes that ‘there is a fundamental irony in the way digital games explicitly thematize
bodily transformation: if at one level the extension into my avatar is an escape, it is always already
a melancholy reminder of the physicality of the real body that must be left behind’ (136). The
45
desire to escape the body ‘is a compelling and precisely compulsive fantasy for the gamer, one
that approaches the often thematized addiction to cyberspace that we see in cyberpunk fictions’
(136). Vint however, points out (108) that at the ending of Neuromancer, Case rejects the
possibility of transcendental existence inside the matrix, offered by Neuromancer, and chooses a
reality of bodily existence (Neuromancer 244), despite his contempt for ‘the meat’. It leads to the
suggestion that the freedom of cyberspace only has value if it is temporary, something to be
anticipated and craved, in an oscillation between freedom and captivity. The thrill of the escape is
more valuable than the freedom that it might offer: the eventual return to the body is crucial in
the exhilarating experience of cyberspace (note that Neuromancer’s ROM construct Dixie Flatline,
a former hacker unable to return to his deceased body, wishes to be erased at the end of the
novel).
What makes the Deus Ex series so pertinent in all of this is of course the way its apparatus
literalizes the notion of the human-machine interface, while dealing with it as a theme in the
game’s narrative. Heuser’s mise-en-abyme (xiv) can be recognized in the player’s use of a virtual
prosthesis in the avatar Adam Jensen, who uses cybernetic prostheses of his own (see also
Boulter 137-8). In this context, it is easy to recall Gibson’s famous opening of Neuromancer: ‘The
sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (1), conveying the sense
of a reality that is simulated and inescapable. In fact, many games use a two-dimensional
backdrop behind the three-dimensional foregrounding of the action, masking the lack of a three
dimensional vanishing point. Many gamers in open world games such as Human Revolution, where
travelling and exploring are rewarded, try to see what is actually behind the backdrop.
In conclusion, Human Revolution represents a commercially succesful branch of
postcyberpunk that borrows the aesthetics of earlier cyberpunk fiction, albeit with less historical
sensitivity than Transmetropolitan and less involvement with the postmodern pastiche seen in
Neuromancer. What it shares with the other texts analyzed in this study, is an interested
46
engagement with the postmodern experience of urban space. As stated above, Human Revolution’s
setting consists of an oscillation between open urban environments and closed off enclaves, both
of which are constructed to be explored. The way architecture functions in the game’s level
design links it to Jameson’s observation
that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis in other
fields, and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual
narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are
asked to fulfil and to complete with our own bodies and movements (Postmodernism 42).
Accordingly, the architecture of the postmodern hyperspace, as opposed to that of high
modernism, ‘stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs to expand our sensorium
and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions’ (39).
The cyborg abilities of Jensen’s body then, become joyful fantasies to be played with in a digital
urban environment that mimicks the cyberspace experience of many cyberpunk protagonists. It
should be noted that, if we were to draw comparisons between Neuromancer’s Case and the
gaming subject, the narrative linearity that limits the gamer’s agency (as well as the borders of
three-dimensional virtual space) is also experienced by Case. Although he is the one pushing the
buttons, it is the godlike qualities of the artificial intelligences that determine the outcome of the
plot. The investment of the gamer in the game’s premise consists of a certain technofetishism
however, of which Gibson was ambivalent and Ellis was critical. As such, the game takes a
stronger step back towards the hard tradition of SF than Neuromancer and Transmetropolitan do,
namely as an extrapolation of historically real developments in cybernetic technologies.
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Conclusion
Sabine Heuser characterized cyberpunk literature by referring to the ‘shock value’ between ‘high
tech’ and ‘low life’ (5) that it represented – the cybernetic premise of making everything
representable as digital information (even, or especially, human beings), clashing with an almost
nihilist rejection of the social structures that dictate how technology should be used. I have
investigated the development of the interplay between these position from cyberpunk’s inception
with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, to its postcyberpunk offspring in Warren Ellis’
Transmetropolitan and Eidos’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The main conclusion that can be drawn
from my analysis is that cyberpunk’s development represents the silencing of this shock value. It
has been levelled to a mundane acceptance as the pace of current technological developments has
caught up with the speed of William Gibson’s technojargon. Western contemporary culture has
become accustomed to the neutral presence of technology that surrounds us in everyday life.
Subsequently, few if any high tech commodities made available to us causes shock, amazement or
wonder for any extended period of time. We fly airplanes, communicate instantly across the
globe, have instant access to limitless databases of knowledge and improve the capabilities of our
bodies by augmentation. As Sherryl Vint recognizes, the tropes of cyberpunk ‘have never been
more germane, as technologies related to computer communications, virtual reality, and
human/machine interfaces (…) suggest that the aesthetic of cyberpunk may become a literal
reality’ (Bodies of Tomorrow 103).
Neuromancer is the bridging text that connects earlier traditions of the novel, as well as
tropes from other cultural media, to the science fiction of contemporary culture. Drawing from a
wide range of influences, Gibson appropriated the past in order to predict the future - a future
that consists of a reality that feels like a simulation. It is no coincidence that in Neuromancer,
cyberspace is represented as a cityscape and urban sprawls as cyberspace:
48
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single
pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to
pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go
nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million
megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan,
outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta... (43)
Cyberspace is a virtual metaphor for urban space, the place where Western society will continue
to be socially organized in the future. A sense of technology encroaching upon the human subject
is made apparent through the artificial intelligences themselves becoming human in their desires,
as well as godlike in their abilities. Where does that leave a down-and-out loser like Case? He is
faced with either living for the moment in a nihilistic embrace of technological hipness – cool
and untouchable behind the reflection of implanted mirrorshades, like Molly – or with
romanticized nostalgia over the irretrievable past. The only immediate cure for the decentred
subject in an unstable world is the experience of speed, which is stressed by Gibson’s fast-paced
prose and storytelling. Whether by travelling the world as urban nomads, exploring the
‘consensual hallucination’ of cyberspace as a console cowboy, or by experiencing different
realities through drug use – technology also offers a fast-paced, exhilarating escape from the
dystopian realities of urban life: loss of affect, entropy and fearful contempt for the body’s own
limitations.
The greatest challenge for cyberpunk authors following up on Gibson has been the
search for an adequate form with which to express its content material in a way that explicitly
mirrors its postmodern metaphors, in the sense that readers are made to identify with the
dehumanizing effect of technology. Especially in its use of narrative techniques, cyberpunk
fiction has had difficulty in finding a balance between addressing audiences of a variety of cultural
media in marketable ways on one side, and experimenting with narrative forms that facilitate the
49
intended cognitive estrangement of its content on the other. Transmetropolitan is relatively
successful in this attempt. Ellis appropriates the cyberpunk aesthetics into a comic books series
and uses them to address issues that were left mostly implicit in Neuromancer: the need for political
freedom and historical consciousness in our posthuman society. As long as society does not
forget to make fun of itself, technological commodification will not be a threat. Human Revolution
on the other hand, assumes a critical position towards cybernetics and the control exerted by
multinational corporatism. There is a tension at work here though: the melodramatic narrative
questions discourses of technological utopianism, while it also promotes a certain
technofetishism – previously associated with the hard tradition of mainstream SF – through the
premise of the user’s enjoyment of the abilities of Jensen’s cyborg body.
In any case, cyberpunk lives on. Recent films like Elysium (2013), Transcendence (2014),
Chappie (2015) and Ex Machina (2015) show that the poetics of the human-machine interface are
alive and well in popular media. Also, another sequel in the Deus Ex series will be published in
2016. Whether future fictions like these engage with the uncertainty of human identity, the
simulation of the urban environment or conspiracies of multinational corporatism, I will look
forward to cyberpunk’s developments into the future.
50
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Appendix A - Illustrations
Fig. 1 – Issue 8, p. 6.
Fig. 2a – Issue 1, p. 20.
Fig. 2b – Issue 13, p.17.
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Fig. 2c – Issue 53, p. 7.
Fig. 2d – Issue 49, p. 5.
Fig. 2e – Issue 32, p. 14.
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Fig. 3a - Issue 3, p. 20-21.
Fig. 3b – Issue 23, p.11.
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Fig. 4.1 – Concept art of the Sprawling vista of Hengsha, China (divided into lower and upper levels).
(Source: http://www.vogelius.se/culture/deus-ex-human-revolution)
Fig. 4.2 – Adam Jensen as the prototypical cyberpunk hero.
(Source: http://pixgood.com/deus-ex-3-adam-jensen.html)
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