A Potted History of Cyberpunk: Part 2

Part 1.

Neo-Tokyo is About to Explode

The backstory to Akira has Tokyo destroyed by an unknown phenomenon in 1992. Hours later, World War III begins and devastates the world, leading to the annihilation of most of the world’s major cities. Thirty-eight years later, the city of Neo-Tokyo has arisen out of the ashes of the old world, a city of gleaming mega-skyscrapers surrounded by the desolate ruins of the old city. The story follows a biker gang led by the charismatic Kaneda and backed up by his best friend Tetsuo. Tetsuo becomes afflicted by strange abilities, the result of a government experiment into psychokinetic energy, and loses control, going on a murderous rampage that attracts the attention of the government. Kaneda’s attempts to help his friend are complicated by the growing danger that Tetsuo presents to his friends and to innocents, and by a government conspiracy to cover up their culpability for these events.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira was a cyberpunk epic, more than 2,000 pages long, (both drawn and written by Otomo) serialised in Young Magazine over eight years. It began in 1982, attracting immediate critical acclaim and attention, with Otomo soon being courted to develop a film adaptation. Otomo rejected initial overtures, insisting on having full creative control and being allowed to use a fluid animation style far beyond that seen in most anime productions, which necessitated a massive budget. The rising fame and acclaim of the manga saw his requirements eventually met and the feature film version of Akira (featuring a hugely compressed version of the manga’s storyline, with many subplots and characters omitted) was released in 1988, more than two years before the manga itself concluded. A phenomenon at home and in the West, Akira played a key role in the rise in popularity of anime outside Japan and also the rise of the cyberpunk genre in Japan.

The manga even improved real-life technology: a colourised version of the comic was the first comic to ever use digital colouring techniques, which would later become standardised in the industry.

Akira was hugely influential and important in the development of cyberpunk, but its influence was not felt outside of Japan for some years.

The Cyberpunk Visionaries at…Disney?

Disney were an unlikely choice to produce the second movie to expand on cyberpunk’s visual identity. As it happened, the development happened almost by accident. Animator-director Steven Lisberger had grown fascinated by computer graphics in the late 1970s and had become intrigued at the idea of creating a film completely based around them. Computer graphics were increasingly used in films – such as the targeting computers and simulation of the Death Star trench run in Star Wars (1977) – but the hardware was simply not up to the task of rendering an entire movie in anything like a reasonable time frame, or at an acceptable level of detail.

Lisberger was frustrated, but decided that traditional forms of animation could be used to simulate computer-generated imagery, in particular the use of backlit animation, which was seen as a bridge between the disco aesthetics of the late 1970s and the computer-driven effects that started coming into more widespread use in the 1980s. He took the idea to several studios, but none bit apart from Disney. Disney wanted to make more daring and interesting films, and took a chance on the idea after being impressed by test footage. However, Lisberger quickly discovered that Disney was incredibly cliquey. The animation division was less-than-friendly to outsiders and he was unable to recruit any Disney animators to work on the project, having to outsource to a Taiwan studio instead.

The resulting film, released in 1982, was TRON. An oddball film, it features a man who is literally teleported into a computer system controlled by a hostile AI. Inside the computer system he finds programmes trying to “rebel” against the dictatorial control of the AI and helps them in their struggle, eventually succeeding despite incredible odds. The film was a modest success and its dazzling visuals – particularly the lightcycles and tanks – were acclaimed. The story wasn’t entirely coherent and perhaps a tad too fantastical to be hugely influential on the nascent subgenre, but it did overcome the perception that cyberpunk could be more cerebral than visually spectacular.

In the meantime, it fell to a batch of American literary authors to bring the idea to a wider audience…and give it a name.

Enter Cyberpunk!

In 1980, American SF author Bruce Bethke wrote a story about a young man, Mikey, who is a troublemaking computer hacker who has online friendships and interfering parents. Mikey uses his skills to overcome interference from his parents in his life. Bethke pondered various titles for the story but settled on “Cyberpunk” – or, in the novel-length version, Cyberpunk! – as a name to sum up his rebellious protagonist.

“Cyberpunk” did the rounds of various magazines and collections before being finally published in 1983 in Amazing Stories. Though the story was delayed before being published, the title became known in editorial circles and started being used more widely; editor Gardner Dozois is credited with helping spread and normalise the term in discussing an increase number of stories utilising the same approach: near future, computer-heavy, usually involving an interface between human and machine and featuring rebellious protagonists. A key moment came in 1984 when Dozois wrote an article for The Washington Post which popularised the movement to the masses for the first time.

Cyberpunk had a visual and audio aesthetic, thanks to Blade Runner. It had a name, thanks to Bruce Bethke. But what it was still lacking was a work that codified and summarised the movement, a Lord of the Rings which everyone could point to and say, “Yes, that’s what this is all about.”

Dead Televisions

William Ford Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, in 1948. Mostly raised in Virginia, his family moved around a lot when he was young. After the abrupt death of his father, he found his home town confining and small-minded, and escaped by reading a mixture of science fiction and Beat literature. He moved to Canada in 1967, ostensibly to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War, but he later noted he wasn’t in much danger of being drafted after he spent an interview with the draft board talking about an ambition to imbibe every “mind-altering substance in existence.”

In 1977 Gibson published his first story: “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.” The story relates the experiences of a jilted lover who relies on artificial dreams to sleep in a polluted, enigmatic story. Gibson’s output was limited and his discontinued writing for several years, until he attended an SF convention and met author John Shirley, who shared his interest in punk music. Shirley introduced Gibson to Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. All four were interested in the idea of fusing science fiction with postmodernism to bring more contemporary ideas to the genre, a furthering of the “New Wave” of the preceding decade but on a greater scale. Inspired and fired up, Gibson wrote a short story called “Burning Chrome,” a story of two freelance hackers who fall in love with the same woman. They undertake various crimes using advanced software called “icebreakers” to operate in “cyberspace” – the first time the term ever appeared in print – against the backdrop of the Sprawl, a massive mega-city that has accumulated out of the Eastern Seaboard metropolises. Gibson had preceded that story with “Johnny Mnemonic,” a story about a man with a cybernetically-enhanced brain carrying password-protected information, the contents of which he has absolutely no idea.

A key moment came at ArmadilloCon, a science fiction convention held in Austin, Texas in late 1982, when Gibson, Shiner, Sterling and Shirley appeared on a panel called “Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF.” On the panel and in discussions in rooms and in bars afterwards, the foursome and assorted other writers and fans thrashed out the idea of a new form of SF which mixed fashion, drugs and politics, whilst embracing some of the new, cool aesthetics of the time: Japan, MTV and early experiments in CGI.

The development of Gibson’s writing abruptly curved upwards in 1982 when editor Terry Carr of Ace Books offered to publish Gibson’s first novel, an offer which Gibson was both awed and slightly confused by, as he didn’t have a novel in development. In fact, he considered himself to be at least five years away from being capable of writing a novel, but scrambled to meet Carr’s request, recognising that the opportunity was not to be squandered. Gibson continued to develop ideas from his short fiction, setting the novel in the Sprawl which both “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” had inhabited, but expanding a story across a grander scale. Gibson suffered reversals of confidence during the writing process – panicking after a viewing of Blade Runner that he’d be accused of ripping the film off – but ultimately completed the novel after rewriting it a dozen times.

The novel, published in July 1984, was entitled Neuromancer, the title being a play on “necromancer,” a term for someone able to raise the dead. The novel follows computer hacker Henry Case, a washed-out computer hacker hired for one last case – heavy shades of noir fiction – and encounters mysteries and events culminating in the discovery of a powerful AI straining to overcome the limitations placed upon it by humanity.

Neuromancer was an immediate critical success, winning the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards on publication, and Gibson was encouraged to write a sequel (despite trying to sabotage the prospect during the writing of Neuromancer itself by closing down narrative avenues for the story to continue). Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive(1988) were almost as well-received as Neuromancer itself, the three books becoming collectively known as The Sprawl Trilogy. A collection of Gibson’s short fiction, Burning Chrome, was published in 1986 as an addendum to the trilogy.

No sooner had Gibson completed the work, then he distanced himself – somewhat – from the subgenre he’d helped popularise and moved into the realm of alternate history, joining forces with Bruce Sterling to write a novel set in an alternative, more advanced Victorian setting. The result was The Difference Engine, which helped give rise to the “steampunk” genre.

Dicing on the Edge

In 1986, Walter Jon Williams released the novel Hardwired. Williams was an author in the right place at the right time: he was halfway through writing his novel about futuristic rebels equipped with neural interfaces fighting corporations based in Earth orbit when Gibson dropped Neuromancer, and the book was well-placed to capitalise on the booming interest in cyberpunk that followed. Whilst cash-in books in the wake of cyberpunk of were not uncommon, Williams found that Hardwired garnered a much more positive reception, with strong sales and critical praise.

Williams was also a tabletop gamer, and for some years had been playing in a postmodern superhero roleplaying game run by his friend George R.R. Martin and also including members of an informal Albuquerque-Santa Fe SFF author collective: Melinda Snodgrass (who was about to start work on Star Trek: The Next Generation), Victor Milan, and John J. and Gail Gerstner-Miller. Martin had the brainwave of turning the roleplaying game into an anthology series, resulting in the Wild Cards series, with a number of authors from the nascent cyberpunk movement getting involved, including Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner. Wild Cards wasn’t cyberpunk, but used some of the same literary languages and weaponry to invigorate the superhero genre (across the Atlantic, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had the same idea in a new comic series they were writing for DC, Watchmen) in the same way that cyberpunk had done for science fiction.

Influences extend backwards and forwards, and even as Williams took part in the direction of moving from a tabletop game to writing fiction, another group of writers took the ideas he had put forwards in Hardwired and translated them into a tabletop roleplaying game. Most notable in this group was Mike Pondsmith, who had worked in board games and tabletop roleplaying games for many ears. Pondsmith had played Dungeons and Dragons (1974), which he was cool on, and Traveller (1977), a space opera roleplaying game which he was much more enthusiastic about, going as far as rewriting the rules to his own specifications as a game called Imperial Star (which he kept to himself for legal purposes).

Pondsmith’s first solo-developed game was Mekton (1984), which replicated anime-style mech combat in an original setting (albeit one based, in aesthetics at least, on Mobile Suit Gundam). The game was a success and he founded his own company, R. Talsorian Games, to exploit it further.

Pondsmith had heard news about the growing cyberpunk movement but had not read any of the work coming out of it. As well as working on his own games, he was providing support to TSR on their Forgotten Realms adventure line and was also consulting with West End Games on their Star Wars licence. However, a group of friends and co-designers (including Mike Blum, Colin Fisk, Dave Friedland, Will Moss and Scott Ruggels) suggested they work on a cyberpunk game and encouraged Pondsmith to read Hardwired. Impressed by the novel, Pondsmith and his friends set about re-engineering it into an original setting: a futuristic Californian metropolis called Night City in the improbably distant future of 2013. Perhaps a tad cheekily, they realised the genre name “cyberpunk” had not been trademarked and snatched it up for their game.

Released in 1988, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future (the first edition of the Cyberpunk RPG line) was an immediate smash hit success in the world of roleplaying games. Whilst tabletop roleplaying games had expanded from their fantasy origins to incorporate a number of different genres and ideas, Cyberpunk’s emphasis on a near-future setting, complete with familiar (if enhanced) weapons and politics was refreshing. The rules for hacking and cyberspace also added a different feel to the game.

Cyberpunk was a hit and numerous expansions and supplements followed. Pondsmith repaid Walter Jon Williams for the original idea by licensing Hardwired for a series of supplements incorporating its setting and ideas into the game. The second and arguably definitive edition of the game, Cyberpunk 2020, was published in 1990. The fourth and more recent edition, Cyberpunk Red, was published in (appropriately) 2020.

Cyberpunk’s success inspired other games to dive into the same genre. The popular universal rules system GURPS (1986) developed several cyberpunk spin-offs, but arguably the biggest and most successful derived game was Shadowrun (1989), which somewhat bizarrely fused Cyberpunk with Dungeons & Dragons.

By the start of the 1990s, cyberpunk had become more widespread and popular, but also seemed to be running out of steam. Gibson had moved on to other genres, and space opera was making a resurgence. Articles and thinkpieces asking if cyberpunk was dead started appearing. It was clear that cyberpunk was not dead, but it was going to have to evolve to survive.

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A Potted History of Cyberpunk, Part 1

Cyberpunk 2077

Thanks to the high-profile release of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and its attendant controversies, more people are talking about cyberpunk as a genre and concept than at any time since the 1980s, and probably even more than then.

Defining the genre was tricky even thirty years ago, with the letter pages of SFnal magazines and fanzines occasionally descending into heated battles as people debated what was part of the genre and what was not, who was part of the movement proper and who were its progenitors. There was also a long-running argument – still hashed out today – about works that truly embodied the spirit of cyberpunk versus those merely borrowing its aesthetics for commercial purposes, or perhaps those who held that cyberpunk was a more tightly-defined literary genre as opposed to a setting.

 

Netflix's Altered Carbon

What’s in a Name?

At its simplest, cyberpunk is a portmanteau of two works: cyber – referring to computers – and punk – referring to anti-authoritarianism and rebelling against the established order. In his Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995), SF critic John Clute offers a bald summary of the term: “stories set in a computer-dominated environment with a streetwise, anti-Establishment culture.” In Burning Chrome (1986), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson (two of the genre’s most notable figures) defined it as “low-life and high tech.” In the titular short story from that collection, originally published in 1983, Gibson coined the phrase “the street finds its own uses for things,” which has become a widely-quoted aphorism for the street-level use of advanced technology.

However, when the term “cyberpunk” is mentioned, it also brings up certain images. Usually a vast, futuristic city, sometimes a future version of an existing location like Tokyo or Los Angeles or a completely new conurbation, such as California’s custom-built Night City, or a new urban mass that amalgamated out of previous cities, such as Mega-City One or the Sprawl, two separate ultra-cities which both formed out of existing US cities along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. A lot of people wear sunglasses, even at night. Chrome is everywhere, and is cool. Virtually everyone is a cyborg, from extreme techno-fetishists who have replaced limbs with weaponry or techno-enhanced prosthetics to the everyday people who look just like we do, but might have bionic eyes or a computer interface port behind their ears.

A key complaint and criticism of cyberpunk is that whilst “cyber” shows up in almost all examples of the genre, the “punk” element may or may not be present. Punk usually refers to low-level, “street” kids and people who are non-conformist, anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate, who work for themselves and despise the idea of selling out. In cyberpunk works, the protagonists are often idealistic, seeking to bring down the supercorporations who now wield unfettered power, or sometimes the government which has become enhanced by corporate power.

Cyberpunk is also generally held to be Earth-based, or at least planet-bound. Space travel is often available in a cyberpunk setting but is not a key part of the genre; offworld colonies are sometimes used as a place of escape or refuge for the ultra-rich, leaving the poor masses behind. Sometimes space operas visit Earth or other planets to find vast, semi-dystopian cities and people integrated with technology, such as Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy with its vast, cyberpunk-ish arcologies on Earth or even those instalments of Star Wars which dwell on events on the city-planet of Coruscant, but generally these are held to be space operas first and foremost, with cyberpunk elements of secondary interest.

The genre is often held to be inherently a dystopian vision of the future where technology has run amok and been used to solidify the power of corrupt governments, corporations and other elites at the expense of the masses, who use what technology they can to fight back. Utopian cyberpunk is an oxymoron, with some holding that the closest would be something like Star Trek, in which advanced technology is available to everyone and is genuinely used to improve the lifestyles of all humanity, which in this setting has abandoned capitalism and the acquisition of wealth and power as personal motivations.

Cyberpunk is also often said to be a direct successor to the noir thriller genre, often employing a detective – either a traditional gumshoe, a police officer or a hacker analogue – as the main character or in a supporting role. If the main character is a police officer, they frequently become disillusioned by the corruption exposed during their investigation and quit in disgust, or come into conflict with the system and go rogue. Director James Cameron in fact proposed “technoir” as an alternative name for the genre in his 1984 film The Terminator, but it never really caught on.

 

Doctor Who's Cybermen in their 1966 debut appearance, in The Tenth Planet.

Protocyberpunk

Antecedents of cyberpunk are numerous and arguable. A key early ancestor is Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (1956), better-known under its revised title of The Stars My Destination. The novel predicted a world where corporations would become more powerful than governments and that the human body would be enhanced by machine implants. The protagonist is, unusually for science fiction of the era, an antihero, a ruthless man named Gully Foyle who is driven arguably sociopathic after he is left to die, marooned in space. His unwavering commitment to destroying his enemies leads him to commit numerous crimes under the justification of his own righteousness; his faith wavers at key moments but at the end of the story he has become a religious icon for his commitment and his revelations about the nature of reality. Foyle is not a laudable figure – he is a rapist and murderer – but his status as an antihero and one-man force of destruction has made him something of a progenitor of later cyberpunk protagonists (or antagonists).

Other works contain elements of later cyberpunk without perhaps fully committing to them: William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (1961) features cyberspace-like rationalised hallucinations, albeit achieved through drugs and biological means (a theme revisited in Jeff Noon’s popular 1993 quasi-cyberpunk work Vurt). Isaac Asimov’s Robots saga, beginning with I, Robot (1950), asks hard questions about the morality of creating artificial intelligence and what limitations should be put on them, whilst Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968) features cyborgs hanging out on the street. British SF TV series Doctor Who several times addressed the issue of merging biological and machine life, with first the Daleks (debuting in the serial The Dead Planet in 1963) and then, more relevantly, the Cybermen (The Tenth Planet, 1966) addressing what happens when man becomes more machine than biological.

 

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), a key cyberpunk progentior.

Early and Semi-Cyberpunk

The first work which is often cited as cyberpunk is Philip K. Dick’s 1968 short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel revolves around a bounty hunter named Deckard who is contracted to terminate six androids who have escaped from the offworld colonies and fled to Earth to live normal lives among the population. Deckard pursues them across a post-apocalyptic, semi-dystopian North America where the populace huddles in futuristic cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. A common pastime is using “empathy boxes” to link to a communal virtual reality centred around suffering and martyrdom. It is also revealed that almost all animals have been wiped out in a nuclear war, leading to people acquiring robotic animals as pets, with only the ultra-rich able to afford real animals.

The status of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – and its later loose film adaptation, Blade Runner (1982) – as cyberpunk remains contentious as many elements of the genre are missing, such as the role of ultra-powerful corporations. Deckard is also very much not a punk hero, lacking idealism at all and in fact suffering existential ennui which he hopes to assuage by acquiring a real goat to replace his robot sheep. He later has an affair with an android, and experiences doubt over whether he himself is an android or a real human. The novel has a somewhat surreal ending where he finds himself performing the same tasks as the martyr in the empathy boxes’ virtual reality and finds a wild toad, which later turns out to be a robot.

Some of Dick’s later work also employs cyberpunk tropes, perhaps most notably Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Set in a dystopian near-future where the US democratic system has collapsed after a second civil war, it concerns a protagonist, Taverner, who status as a genetically-engineered TV star is abruptly lost when his identity is somehow erased from existence. Trying to desperately avoid being identified as a non-entity, which would reduce him to one of the near-starving, poverty-inflicted majority whose rebellious instincts are only kept in check by television and vacuous entertainment, he goes on the run and eventually is able to restore his identity. The story and background themes, particularly the student-led revolution which is gathering against the technologically superior elite, are at least cyberpunk-adjacent.

Alice Sheldon explored themes which would later be labelled as cyberpunk in her 1973 novel The Girl Who Was Plugged In, published under her pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. The novel takes place in a dystopian future where powerful corporations create genetically-engineered celebrities, who are controlled by operators via a neural interface. These celebrities engage in elaborate games of product placement to get around strict laws on corporate advertising. The book delves deeply into the idea of identity and the idea that the face a person wears is not necessarily their true one, here taken to extremes through technology.

J.G. Ballard explored societal alienation – a common theme in cyberpunk – in numerous works, but a particularly interesting take was in Concrete Island (1974), where a car accident leaves the protagonist stranded on a median strip, the titular concrete island, between several motorway intersections where traffic is constantly moving at dangerous speeds. Unable to leave without being killed, the protagonist joins the subculture of the concrete island, where other rejects from society have gathered, which soon devolves into conflict. The book recalls the spaces outside the city or between the lines of civilisation in cyberpunk, where characters fall and it is questionable if they will emerge again. More directly evoking cyberpunk is Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), where the main character Robert moves into a high-rise apartment block on the outskirts of London. The apartment is a self-contained city in itself, with its own bank, supermarket, shopping mall, gym and school. The high-rise provides so many amenities that its inhabitants can choose to never leave. Some, fearful of reports of crime outside the block, take up that option. Power failures and social and class stratification soon set in, with the richer inhabitants of the upper floors hoarding their wealth against the poorer (but more numerous) inhabitants of the lower levels, leading to a highly localised civil war and revolution (of which the outer world proceeds in apparent ignorance). The novel foreshadows the arrival of the mini-arcology or self-contained “megablock” that becomes a key feature of many cyberpunk stories, whilst thematically the idea of an “ideal society” rapidly devolving in class warfare is pure cyberpunk, with technological warfare (in this case, exemplified by the building’s lifts becoming strategic chokepoints) being a key part of the struggle. The novel was filmed in 2015 by Ben Wheatley with Tom Hiddleston in the title role, to great effect.

In 1976, Doctor Who tackled a key cyberpunk theme in the serial The Deadly Assassin, when it had the Doctor return to his homeworld of Gallifrey to do battle with his arch-nemesis, the Master. At a key point in the narrative, the Doctor has to seek information in the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, the Matrix (a not-uncommon name for such a database). Because the repository is so vast and complex, the best way to use it is via a neural interface to generate a virtual reality through which the Doctor can move in an illusion of the computer system being an actual place. This is one of the earliest examples of such a conflation of computer systems, virtual reality and brain interfaces being used in a manner that would later become extremely common in cyberpunk.

An interesting take on the genre appeared in 1977, when Christopher Priest published A Dream of Wessex. Much of Priest’s work is concerned with layers of reality, doubles, shifting or blurred existences and identity surviving across universes. Given this interest, it is remarkable that only once, in Wessex, he used technology to explore the idea. In this novel an elite group of thinkers create a virtual reality interface which can transport the collective unconscious of some of Britain’s greatest minds into an illusory world where their intelligence and experience can be mined for ideas on how to ensure humanity’s long-term survival. The idea of forcibly transporting people into a cyberspace against their will as a way of extracting information is a common cyberpunk trope, but the idea of doing it stealthily so the target is unaware of what is happening is intriguing.

In 1978, the BBC launched a new science fiction TV show, Blake’s 7. Blake’s 7 is primarily a space opera about a band of plucky rebels trying to bring down the dystopian Terran Federation, but some cyberpunk themes do proliferate. The rebels are a mixture of genuine idealists, profit-driven criminals and career sociopaths (reflecting the often-mixed band of protagonists encounter in cyberpunk fiction). The population on Earth (apparently reduced by atomic war) are kept under constant surveillance and control in domed mega-cities, made docile by drugs and ruled over by corrupt officials. The war with the Federation often takes the form of a game of technological one-upmanship, with Blake’s early advantage of finding an advanced alien starship swiftly matched by the Federation’s improving spacecraft and weapons technology, particularly in the field of AI where many of Blake’s victories are helped by his securing of the ORAC supercomputer. Memory and personality alteration through technology, drugs and brain implants abound. Blake’s 7 is notable for its mature exploration of such themes (as compared to its American contemporary, Star Wars, and its much more superficial and heroic struggles) and also its nihilism: in the final episode the much-reduced crew are betrayed and brutally gunned down by the enemy after their erstwhile leader, the cynical Avon, had effectively had a personality breakdown.

 

John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975), arguably the first novel to fully embody the key themes of cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s Forgotten Visionary: John Brunner

In 1968, British SF author John Brunner published the first of three thematically-linked novels which would effectively set the stage for cyberpunk. The first of these novels is the best-known, Stand on Zanzibar, set in an overpopulated world which is threatened with ecological catastrophe by population pressure. Overpopulation is a key plot point in cyberpunk (often explaining the vast cities where the action tends to unfold), but beyond that Brunner engages with other ideas: a powerful supercomputer forms an important part of the plot, whilst television has become interactive, with viewers becoming part of the programme itself. Genetically-engineered bioweapons proliferate, and nightmarish supercorporations dominate the world.

The Sheep Look Up (1972) explores further the notion of the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to toxic waste, pollution and climate change. The declining quality of the environment sparks societal collapse and war. Attempts to regulate ecological damage are watered down for economic reasons. Ecological protestors turn to violence when their peaceful protests are ignored, eventually sparking a terrorist campaign against the US government. The "cyber" is missing from the argument, but the "punk" is very much present, and the novel's depiction of ecological catastrophe would become a familiar cyberpunk trope.

The third of the three works is The Shockwave Rider (1975), a novel which is less proto or early cyberpunk, but actually just proper cyberpunk. The book takes place in a near future dystopian city where the protagonist uses his computer hacking skills to escape detection and avoid pursuit. The term "worm," for a computer virus, was first coined in this novel. The book's story is pure cyberpunk, where the protagonist, Nick, is a computer programmer who becomes aware that an education program reported as educating children is in fact indoctrinating them to further the interests of the state (effectively a criminal oligarchy), as well as genetically-engineering children to their own ends. Nick rebels and goes up against the state in an escalating battle that ends with them trying to drop a nuke on him; his response is a powerful computer virus that exposes their schemes and plans and blows open the government's duplicity. The novel, unusually for Brunner and for a lot of cyberpunk, ends optimistically.

 

Judge Dredd (1977-present), a key satire of cyberpunk tropes told from the POV of the fascist enforcers of the corrupt government's laws.

The Anti-Cyberpunk

A strong early example of cyberpunk, or at least an example of anti-cyberpunk (or even a satire of the genre), is the British comic book character Judge Dredd. Debuting in the pages of the 2000AD anthology comic in 1977, Judge Dredd is a law enforcement officer on the streets of Mega-City One, a vast super-metropolis stretching along the Eastern Seaboard of the former United States. The Judges are judge, jury and sometimes executioner all in one, able to dispense summary justice to the half-billion inhabitants of the crowded streets of the city, sometimes getting it right and sometimes (in the case of some Judges, maybe almost always) getting it wrong. Dredd and his fellow Judges are, effectively, the fascist enforcers of a totalitarian, unelected state who are not above using corporations and their latest gizmos and entertainment products to keep the population quiescent. Revolutionary fervour intermittently burns but is expertly redirected by a form of ultra-local nationalism: people are extremely loyal to the mega-blocks they live in, and rather than directing violence against the police state which keeps them cooped up all day (the unemployment rate runs at something between 92% and 98%, due to robots, AI and automation running almost all services), they instead tend to declare war on neighbouring blocks, resulting in psychotic “block wars” which act as pressure valves on the city’s malcontents. Dredd is unusual in that he believes absolutely the propaganda of being an unwavering avatar of the law, sometimes leading to him siding with the people against their oft-corrupt rulers, but more often than not unquestioningly following their orders.

If Joe Dredd is not a cyberpunk protagonist, he at least illuminates cyberpunk themes, and in fact arguably has done so more consistently and more frequently than any other character: the comic and Dredd himself continue to run today, with the timeline advancing in realtime, so forty-four years have passed in the story and for the character. Dredd himself experiments with rebelling against the system, at one point betraying his fellow Judges to support a pro-democracy call for election…which formally elects for the oppressive status quo to continue. Judge Dredd’s relentless cynicism and satire makes for one of the most interesting explorations of the genre, if one that too many readers seem to take on face value as a mindless action story.

Ridley Scott's seminal 1982 film, Blade Runner, which gave cyberpunk both its key visual and musical identities.

Visualising the Genre

In 1982, two major works were released which had a profound impact on the nascent genre, particularly its visuals. Most notable was the film Blade Runner, a very loose adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Like the novel, the film features a bounty hunter named Deckard (here played by a taciturn Harrison Ford, keen to shed the wisecracking image of Han Solo and Indiana Jones) who is commissioned to track down a band of rogue androids. Unlike the novel, the action does not criss-cross the western United States, instead being restricted to just one location, Los Angeles in 2019. Blade Runner’s Los Angeles would become perhaps the most definitive visual take on a cyberpunk city ever: a sprawling urban landscape of endless industrial complexes surrounding a conglomeration of vast skyscrapers emblazoned with familiar logos, whilst the techno-pyramid of a monstrously powerful super-corporation squats menacingly above the poor masses just trying to get by on the streets.

The film’s status in cyberpunk is sometimes disputed. There’s nary a brain/AI interface in sight and if Deckard becomes a rebel against the system, it’s something of a reluctant one. But so much cyberpunk draws on Blade Runner’s aesthetics, and its central question of what it means to be human in the midst of so much existentially-overloading technology is so core to the genre, that such arguments feel forced. Blade Runner is almost the last word in the visual imagery – if only superficially – of cyberpunk. It also had a strong impact on the audio perception of the genre: Vangelis's synth-heavy soundtrack inextricably bound cyberpunk to the sound of synthesisers and any cyberpunk work which suggests that maybe people in the future won't be in love with a 1980s musical fad faces an uphill struggle gaining acceptance with some fans (particularly Cyberpunk 2077 and its apparently controversial idea that people might have a more eclectic and wide-ranging musical taste by the late 21st Century).

The other work would come from Japan. Katsuhiro Otomo had already been playing with cyberpunk forms in his debut manga, Fireball (1979-81). Set in a future city secretly ruled by the ATOM supercomputer though human proxies, the story follows a band of rebels who are trying to expose the truth and inspire a revolution. Otomo quickly realised that the setup was too simplistic and hurriedly wrapped the story up to explore another idea. This resulted in Domu (1980-81), a more contemporary story exploring the psychic link between an old man and a child. Although more satisfied by this story, Otomo realised that there was scope for a much, much more ambitious story combining the two elements into one.

On 6 December 1982, Otomo published the first issue of a new serial in Young Magazine. The story appeared under a very simple, short name: Akira.

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Taika Waititi signs with Lucasfilm to direct and co-write a STAR WARS film

After months of discussion, it's now been confirmed that Taika Waititi will co-write and direct a new Star Wars film for Lucasfilm and Disney.

The film will be co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917, Penny Dreadful). Waititi will begin work on the film once production wraps on his MCU movie Thor: Love and Thunder, which has a tentative release date of 11 February 2022 (pandemic permitting).

Waititi has already dipped his toes into the Star Wars universe, having worked as a director on the first season of The Mandalorian. Waititi is much in demand, also working as a producer and director on What We Do in the Shadows, recently wrapping his latest feature Next Goal Wins and developing an Akira movie for Warner Brothers, although it's likely that this will now move to another director given that this news keeps Waititi busy likely for the next four years or so.

No further information has been provided about the film, such as a setting or timeframe. It's also unclear if this will be the same movie that Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige will be producing, although given Waititi's solid relationship with Feige this is is possible.

Lucasfilm still have a release date of 16 December 2022 pencilled in for their next Star Wars movie, originally the film to be written and directed by Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss. With them moving to Netflix to develop a new television series and both Waititi and Rian Johnson (who had a movie trilogy in development with Lucasfilm) busy with other projects before they can get back to Lucasfilm, it's probable that this date will no longer be hit and we'll be lucky to see a new Star Wars movie much this side of 2024.

Akira fans may be sorry to see Waititi likely depart their project, since he was planning a faithful adaptation of the original manga set in Japan, but can take solace from the 4K remastered set of the original film, which is due to hit shops in Japan any day now.

Taika Waititi to direct THOR 4, AKIRA put on hold

In a surprise move, Taika Waititi has confirmed that his next project will be a follow-up to his 2017 movie Thor: Ragnarok, rather than his live-action take on Akira that Warner Brothers had fast-tracked for a May 2021 release.

Waititi was in the middle of meeting Japanese actors for the key lead roles in Akira (presumably Tetsuo and Kaneda), so the decision to pivot to Thor 4 is surprising. However, according to the Hollywood Reporter's sources there were some concerns over the currently in-development script, and by putting Thor 4 first, Waititi is giving the script more development time. This seems to have been confirmed by the fact that Warner Brothers is still keen on having him direct, so have put the film on hold until Thor 4 is done rather than looking for another director. The power Waititi has over the project is notable in that he apparently convinced the sceptical studio to cast Asian actors, re-set the film back in Neo-Tokyo (several previous iterations of the script relocated the action to a futuristic New York) and mount the film as a multi-part project, all of which seems to remain in play.

Waititi's next projects for release are Jojo Rabbit, a smaller-scale movie starring Scarlett Johansson, which is due for release in October, and several episodes of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars live-action show debuting on Disney+ in November. Waititi may also helm an episode or two of the second season of What We Do in the Shadows, the hit comedy based on his 2014 movie of the same name (he helmed three episodes of the first season), depending on other commitments.

Disney and Marvel likely put significant monetary incentives in front of Waititi to helm Thor 4, especially given that the movie may also function as a stopgap Guardians of the Galaxy film (given the events of Avengers: Endgame) which Disney may find desirable given that James Gunn will not be able to start work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 proper until 2021 (for a likely 2022 or 2023 release at the earliest), given his commitments to the new Suicide Squad movie.

A timeline for Thor 4's release date is likely to be announced this weekend at the San Diego Comic-Con, where Marvel will outline their movie projects for the next few years.

Akira fans don't have too much to complain about, however, as the original creator is working on a brand-new anime adaptation of the original manga for television. Unlike the 1988 movie (which is also getting a Blu-Ray and 4K remaster for release next April), this new adaptation will faithfully cover all six graphic novels and over 2,000 pages of the story. The original film, released before the manga was complete, had to heavily compress the story to fit into two hours.

It is also possible that the new anime - which we'll be lucky to see before 2022 or thereabouts - will further interest in the live-action movie, which Warner Brothers has taken into consideration in the decision to bench the film whilst Waititi is busy at Marvel.

Brand new AKIRA anime in development

Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo is returning to his most famous creation for a new project.

His seminal graphic novel collection is getting a brand-new anime adaptation, this time for television. The 1988 Akira animated movie, although a classic, had to compress six very large volumes totalling some 2,000 pages into under two hours, which resulted in a film that left out very large chunks of the narrative. As the film was also released two years before Otomo completed the manga, there were also some significant differences in the story and ending.

The new adaptation aims to adapt all six graphic novels very closely, so will probably be a multi-season project using the latest animation techniques. The 1988 original movie is still getting some love, however, with a brand-new 4K remaster underway for release in April 2020.

This news comes a few weeks after it was confirmed that Taika Waititi will be helming the long-awaited live-action version of the story, for release in May 2021.

Taika Waititi to direct AKIRA for release in 2021

Warner Brothers have confirmed that Taika Waititi will be directing the long, long-awaited live action version of Akira. The film also has a release date: 21 May 2021.

According to Waititi, he wants to go back to the original manga series (published today as six graphic novels) rather than the 1988 anime film, which truncated the story considerably. This suggests that the film will only be adapting the first part of the story, not all of it. Waititi also wants to return the film to the setting of Neo-Tokyo with Asian actors, whilst previous live-action proposals have moved the film to America or Europe. It is unclear if this is still the plan, but hopefully so.

The 1988 film played a huge role in expanding the influence and popularity of anime in the West, building on the previous success of Voltron and Macross (in its heavily and controversially-adapted guise as Robotech) and kickstarting a huge explosion in the popularity of Japanese animation in Europe and the United States. That said, although the film is rightfully praised for its still-stunning and beautiful visuals, its storytelling (condensing some 2,530 pages of the manga into two hours of screen time) could be very rushed and confused.

Leonardo DiCaprio, a long-term fan of the original movie, is producing the new film.

The news means that Marvel's hopes for Waititi to return to direct a Thor 4 in the relatively near future have been thwarted, putting that potential project off until late 2022 at the earliest.