A Potted History of Cyberpunk: Part 3

See Part 1 and Part 2.

As with any new movement, it’s barely even started before people start saying it’s over. In the case of cyberpunk, the genre was facing declarations of its mortality before the ink was cool on William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. But through the late 1980s and early 1990s, key works in the genre continued to appear from new talent.

The Queen of Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk had been, at least so far, a male-dominated subgenre. In 1987 Pat Cadigan became the first woman to publish a major work of the genre, Mindplayers. In this novel a young woman faces mental delusions after using a stolen cyber-interface and has to be “cured” by a type of mental hacker, a mindplayer. Cadigan’s novel delved into the interrelationship between technology and identity in a way that recalled Philip K. Dick. She expanded on many of these themes in sequel novellas and the related novel Fools (1992).

Her second novel, Synners (1991), is a more epic exploration of cyberpunk ideas. It is set closer to the present day than most cyberpunk works, in a more recognisable version of Los Angeles, as individuals from both sides of the law get swept up in an impending technological crisis.

Cadigan moved on to explore other types of fiction (ironically just after The Guardian proclaimed her the “Queen of Cyberpunk” in 1994), but in later years returned to the genre thanks to her work on the Alita: Battle Angel franchise, penning a novelisation and an original novel in the setting of the 2019 movie.

Other women writing in the genre soon gained prominence, most notably Lisa Mason for her debut novel Arachne (1990) and Melissa Scott for her 1994 novel, Trouble and Her Friends (1994).

Playing in a Cyberpunk World

Given the technological nature of cyberpunk narratives, it wasn’t long at all before cyberpunk stories started appear in the form of video games. One of the first was The Screamer (1985), a CRPG featuring, unusually for the time, real-time combat. The Megami Tensei and Metal Gear series both began in 1987, having cyberpunk themes even if the settings were not outright cyberpunk.

It wasn’t until the 1990s the technology existed to really do cyberpunk games justice. Captive (1990) was a cyberpunk take on Dungeon Master, a first-person, real-time “dungeon” crawl, with the dungeons now being technologically-advanced bases and the enemies being robots. The game was enjoyable, but a fairly obvious SF remix of an earlier game. Its sequel, Liberation (1993), was vastly more ambitious. Liberation created a huge cyberpunk city in (primitive) 3D where every building could be searched and explored, and the player had to follow a chain of clues to find an imprisoned captive. In a similar vein was the Mercenary trilogy – Mercenary (1985), Damocles (1990) and The Dion Crisis (1992) – the latter two of which featured an entire star system (complete with relativistic effects as you travelled between different worlds), though its cyberpunk credentials were less impressive.

Particularly notable was Flashback (1992), a platform game with an incredibly-animated main character, heavily inspired by Prince of Persia (1989) and Another World (1990). Flashback was a significantly longer game with a much more involved cyberpunk story, featuring the main character having his memory erased by invading aliens and having to fight to retrieve it whilst defeating the invaders. The game was hugely successful, spawning a direct sequel, Fade to Black (1995) and a remake (2013).

Also in 1993, Bullfrog Productions released one of the greatest cyberpunk games of all time. Syndicate saw the player taking control of a super-corporation complete with its own paramilitary force, which the player can upgrade and develop by taking over rival territory. The game casts the player as a morally dubious corporate business leader who can pursue his or her agenda through outright violence, more surgical assassination techniques or using a “persuadatron” to override people’s implants and turning them into unwitting slaves. Syndicate was a huge success and was succeeded by Syndicate: American Revolt (1993) and Syndicate Wars (1996), as well as an uninspired first-person remake, Syndicate (2012) and a superb “spiritual successor,” Satellite Reign (2015), which expanded impressively on the original game’s themes in a massive, open-world cyberpunk city.

Almost as influential was Beneath a Steel Sky (1993), a huge adventure game featuring an epic narrative set in a futuristic city. The game’s visual design was created by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and the game was a big hit. The developers were side-tracked by the Broken Sword series, which was a massive hit, but released a long-awaited sequel, Beyond a Steel Sky, in 2020. In 1997 a similar adventure game was released based on the film Blade Runner, and was a cult success.

That same year Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VII, the first game in their long-running fantasy series to incorporate cyberpunk ideas such as class struggle, industrial squalor and biological-machine interfaces. The game was a colossal success, resulting in a remake in 2020 and additional games in the series exploring similar ideas.

In 2000, Ion Storm released what many consider the ultimate cyberpunk video game: Deus Ex. Set in the near future, the game focuses on augmented humans caught up in a complex global conspiracy. The game allowed for massive, unprecedented and rarely-matched-since amounts of player freedom and influence on the outcome of the plot. Widely regarded as one of the single finest and most important video games ever made, it has enjoyed a sequel, Invisible War (2003) and three prequels, Human Revolution (2011), The Fall (2013) and Mankind Divided (2016). Human Revolution and Mankind Divided delved more deeply into cyberpunk themes of transhumanism, identity and corporate corruption.

Cyberpunk became more of a background setting for video games such as Mirror’s Edge (2008), Hard Reset (2011) and Far Cry: Blood Dragon (2013). More in-depth exploration of cyberpunk themes came in games like Transistor (2014) and the Watch_Dogs series (2014-present), which depicts the transitional period as a more modern world gives way to a cyberpunk future.

The largest and most popular cyberpunk video game of all time – and the most contentious – launched in 2020. Cyberpunk 2077, based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, features jaw-dropping graphics and impressive freedom to explore a futuristic city, coupled with a compelling, rich storyline and memorable characters. However, the game launched with a plethora of technical issues and missing features, which gave the game a mixed reception. Launched a few months earlier, the much smaller, tighter and more focused Cloudpunk sees the player as a sky taxi driver undertaking some very odd jobs over the course of one strange night, set in a beautifully-realised city.

Cyberpunk continues to be a rich genre and source of ideas for future video games to mine.

Satirising the Genre

Heading into the 1990s, cyberpunk was well-established enough for writers to start poking fun at it. Of course, satirical takes on the genre had existed before, with Judge Dredd starting barely after the genre really even got off the ground. But as the genre had evolved, a slight tendency for it to become po-faced and self-serious had developed.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson poked fun at the genre in his seminal work Snow Crash. Main character Hiro Protagonist (a deliberate pun) is a pizza delivery driver and hacker who discovers a computer virus that can affect the human mind in the real world, leading to a dizzying journey of discovery taking in Sumerian history and mythology, political struggle and cryptography (expanded on his non-cyberpunk epic, Cryptonomicon, and its prequel/sequel trilogy, The Baroque Cycle). The novel is part of cyberpunk but also challenges and subverts the genre.

Similarly metafictional is Headcrash (1995), by the genre-namer himself, Bruce Bethke. The novel features a protagonist who sets himself up in an online VR community as a cool, trend-setting guy only to realise he is one of millions of people trying to do the same thing and as a result has just become another kind of anonymous everyman. Bethke used the novel to communicate his disdain for the sub-genre of cyberpunk which simply copied Neuromancer, a derivative strain he called “Neuromantics.”

Not satirical, as such, but certainly revisionist, was Jeff Noon’s seminal novel Vurt (1993). This book featured a cyberpunk-like narrative, but rather than relying on computers and technology, it instead employed biological devices to create a shared hallucination which any human can access through colour-coded feathers. The novel thus achieves much of the same impact as cyberpunk through a different means. The novel was hugely successful and was followed by a sequel, Pollen (1995), and prequel, Nymphomation (1997).

Enter the Matrix

Ironically, it was well after the highwater mark of cyberpunk as a distinct literary genre that it finally broke through to the mainstream with a huge, hit movie. The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowskis, was a complex and mind-bending story about a young hacker who discovers that the real world is a lie, a computer simulation generated to entertain the human race, who in reality are imprisoned living batteries for a machine intelligence. With visceral kung fu action, mind-boggling philosophical asides and astonishingly cool production and costume design, The Matrix was a box office and critical smash, as was its collection of animated prequel films, The Animatrix (2003).

Unfortunately, the two sequel movies proper, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003) were less well-regarded, criticised for obtuse plotting and emphasising action over the storytelling. Debates over the trilogy’s place in the cyberpunk genre continue (the film features no kind of overt class struggle, a key part of the literary genre, though the theme of humans being cogs in a machine is present), but it was important for making certain cyberpunk ideas, such as machine-human interfaces, more readily accepted than they had been previously. The series will return later this year with a new entry, The Matrix Resurrections.

Integration

As the years passed, cyberpunk as a discrete genre became less of a readily-identified thing. “Cyberpunk novels” became less commonplace, with elements of cyberpunk instead being integrated into more established SF genres. Peter F. Hamilton’s sprawling space operas are primarily in that genre, but also feature machine-brain interfaces and towering cities of mega-skyscrapers familiar to cyberpunk fans. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002, adapted for television in 2018), a hyperviolent, body-swapping corporate thriller set in a far future San Francisco, was praised as a modern cyberpunk classic, but its sequels set on other worlds are almost in completely different genres. J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 television series is a space opera but also featuring virtual reality cybernets and computer simulations so real they cannot be told apart from real life. Even Star Trek, the most traditional of SF universes, dabbled in cyberpunk ideas by introducing the holodeck and biological-machine hybrid races such as the Borg.

Cyberpunk was arguably also defeated by real life. As a genre, cyberpunk is mostly near-future and posits a future of massively overcrowded cities. But the world’s population is clearly never going to get to the point to require such ridiculously massive cities with mile-tall residential blocks. Real-life computer development has been in some ways more advanced than posited by early cyberpunk – which mostly failed to predict the arrival of smartphones – but also failed to account for the fact that humans are likely too squeamish to accept the level of body modification and invasive brain procedures posited by the genre. With hackers and computer viruses taking down power plants and damaging infrastructure, the idea of wiring a computer interface straight into your cerebral cortex has become distinctly less edifying.

But in some respects, by exploring ideas of massive social and economic unrest caused by technology, the gaping and dramatically-growing equality gap between rich and poor, and the rise of systemic exploitation and those rebelling against it, maybe cyberpunk ended up being far more prescient than it first appeared. In many respects we are now living in a cyberpunk world, albeit one featuring slightly less neon than was imagined in the past.

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Synners by Pat Cadigan

In the not-too-distant future, the world is a morass of internet-based TV shows and corporate greed. The people best-equipped to survive in this world are those who synthesise content for the net: synners. The arrival of sockets, cybernetic implants which allow people to directly interface with computers through their minds, marks a major change in society and technology, and what it means to be human. But when something goes wrong, it falls to one group of synners - outcasts, failures and data junkies - to save society, fix the net...and discover that intelligence itself can be synthesised as well.

Synners is the third novel by American SF author Pat Cadigan. Originally released in 1991, it was a late-breaking novel in the cyberpunk movement, championed by the likes of Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Neil Gaiman. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and has been enshrined in the Gollancz SF Masterworks range as one of the all-time defining works of science fiction.

Synners is interesting for coming towards the end of the cyberpunk movement, at least before subsequent books like Jeff Noon's Vurt and Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon began taking it in very different directions and the movement was subsumed more into science fiction as a whole. It's also interesting for coming during the earliest days of the internet as we know it, so at least some terminology (laptops, email, virtual reality) rings true, unlikely earlier cyberpunk whose invented terms now feel very dated. Like most cyberpunk authors Cadigan missed mobile phones, but it oddly doesn't feel as archaic in this book. Cadigan is more interested in how technology and being networked impacts on the human condition and the methodology for accessing the net is less important. It is impressive how many other things she got right: satnav systems which actually don't really help anyone get anywhere, hackers uploading viruses to the net just for giggles and self-driving vehicles all feel pretty much on-point at the moment.

More impressive is how the novel feels like it's subverting cyberpunk itself. The Los Angeles of Cadigan's future America is, well, pretty much Los Angeles today, maybe slightly bigger and dirtier but certainly not the Los Angeles of Blade Runner. There's nary a mirrorshade or ill-advised superskyscraper (in an earthquake zone!) in sight and cyborg cops smashing down doors and firing massive guns are notable by their absence. But growing corporate power and tech companies acting like they are above the law and pressurising baffled politicians who can't see beyond the next election into giving them carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want without regard for the consequences for society and the economy have never felt more appropriate.

Cadigan's prose mixes poetry with hard-edged science fiction descriptions of hardware and software. They are sequences of people immersing themselves in the net and drugs which come across as lucid fever dreams. The novel also delights in the mundane: one of the most important viewpoint characters, Gabe, has marriage problems and a changeable relationship with his daughter, Sam. There is a frustrated air of rebellion in many characters, who take drugs and listen to loud music but no-one really cares any more, certainly not the government which is now wholly in the pocket of corporate interests.

Synners has some sins (syns?). The novel is slow to come together, taking a hundred pages to assemble a large cast of viewpoint characters (possibly too many; Gina, Gabe, Sam emerge as the main viewpoints and the novel may have benefited from dropping some of the secondary viewpoints). The scattershot opening makes the world feel grounded and realistic, but the lack of focus makes it hard to work out what's going on. But about a quarter of the way into the book starts to coalesce and the last quarter has the pedal fully to the metal as a global crisis erupts and only our "heroes" - the most dysfunctional bunch of hackers and artists you could ever hope to meet - can save the day.

Synners (****½) is a smart and grounded cyberpunk novel that gave the genre a final shakedown, stole its wallet and told it go and do something more interesting. Not the easiest of reads (especially at the start) but one that more than rewards the effort. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Wild Cards: Aces High, edited by George R.R. Martin

The world has been divided by the wild card virus: the unaffected, the deformed "jokers" and the super-powered "aces". All have their own agendas, some darker than others, but all are threatened by the arrival of the alien Swarm. As Earth comes under concerted attack by the creatures, several of Earth's own alien allies (such as Dr. Tachyon) help lead a defence. But destroying the Swarm Mother may be impossible as a cult of sympathisers leap to her defence...

After the original Wild Cards focused on forty years of alternate history with the jokers and aces facing discrimination, political manipulation and questions over their loyalties, it's a bit of a tonal shift to follow that up with a full-scale alien invasion of Earth. Yet this kind of variety is what has kept the Wild Cards series fun and why it's still going thirty years after its creation. We know aliens exist in the setting - the wild card virus itself came from Takis - so it's fairly logical to see the aces and jokers joining forces to take on the menace.

There are of course complications. Unlike most superhero settings, Wild Cards doesn't hold much truck with big superteams. Aces tend to do their own thing, only joining forces when absolutely necessary. For most of its length, Aces High deals with several prominent aces and jokers (Tachyon, the Turtle, Jube the Walrus, Kid Dinosaur, Modular Man and Fortunato, with a few appearances by Croyd the Sleeper) tackling apparently unrelated issues relating to the Swarm and a Masonic cult before they realise how their individual threads link up, and there is the inevitable big showdown.


The stories that make up the book come from some of the bigger names in 1980s science fiction and fantasy: George R.R. Martin, Pat Cadigan, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda Snodgrass and Roger Zelazny are the big-hitters, but the rest are no slouches either. The stories vary from big, epic war stories as the Swarm invades in force to smaller-scaled tales of back-alley hustlings in Jokertown to things inbetween. They are all excellent, although it sometimes feels like you're only getting snapshots of the action. The Turtle gets a big, interesting storyline and then disappears off-page for a hundred-off page, during which time clearly some other stuff goes down, and suddenly he shows up for the big finale.

This is a recurring issue with these kind of shared worlds, the nagging sense that you are not getting the full story and having to infer that some big story-critical moments have taken place off-page. But it's not too distracting and is made up for the fact that each writer is clearly having immense fun creating and crafting their characters and taking their storylines forwards. The framing stories, "Jube" and "Unto the Sixth Generation", do a good job of keeping the larger over-arcing story on track.

The book builds to a big climax which is satisfying from an action and character perspective. But it's clear that although the aces have won a major victory over the Swarm Mother, they have neglected to account for her human minions. That's going to come back to bite them, quite hard, in the third book in the series.

Aces High (****) is a fine addition to the Wild Cards universe and a compelling follow-up to the original book. It is available now in the UK and USA.

SF author Pat Cadigan kicks cancer in the backside

It's been a gruelling couple of years for SFF writers, as we've lost a whole series of great writers to a myriad number of health complaints. So it's fantastic to report some good news.

SF and cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan was fighting a relapse with cancer which she had been told was terminal. To the surprise of her doctors, the medication she took worked far better than they hoped. The cancer has been reduced in size and strength by 97%. Our best wishes and congratulations to Pat!

I would like to be more profound but at the moment, I’m just kinda dazed. Six months ago, I was terminal, at least as far as anyone knew. Today I’m no longer dying of cancer, I’m living with my technicolor Doc Martens boot on its neck.

You know, I don’t think that will ever get old.

TitanCon 2015

Last month I attended the fifth TitanCon, a science fiction and fantasy convention in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was the first TitanCon I'd attended, although I had gone to a fan "moot" in 2009 during the filming of the pilot episode of Game of Thrones. Several cast and crewmembers attended that moot, along with George R.R.Martin, and everyone had a great time (reports can be seen here, here and here, and you may recognise some of my photos from memes that have since sprung up online).

TitanCon itself started as a Game of Thrones-oriented event, although it's always had a strong literature track. This year, the international demands of filming for Game of Thrones and the growing expense of attending actors meant that none of the current cast was able to join us. Several crewmembers - most impressively Will Simpson, the show's senior concept artist and visualiser-in-chief - did attend and we were joined by returning actors Miltos Yerolemou (who played Syrio Forel in Season 1) and Aimee Richardson (who played Myrcella Baratheon in the first two seasons). With the GoT participation reduced, the literature track had to step up and it did in style.

The attending authors included Joe Abercrombie (The First Law Trilogy, The Shattered Sea, Best Served Cold), Sarah Pinborough (The Death House, The Dog-Faced Gods, The Nowhere Chronicles), Pat Cadigan (Synners, Fools, Mindplayers and numerous short stories), Peadar Ó Guilín (The Bone World Trilogy, The Call), Laurence Donaghy (The Folk'd Trilogy), Debbie "DJ" McCune (the Death and Co. series), Jo Zebedee (Abendau's Heir) and debut author Zoë Sumra (Sailor to a Siren). On the Friday evening (25 September) the authors read from their new books (or, in Joe's case, from The Heroes). Laurance Donaghy made a notable impact by reading an excellent and witty short story about God making an adoption application, which he'd only written the day before.

The main day of the convention was Saturday 26 September. I moderated a panel on Season 5 with Miltos, Aimee and Will. We discussed fan reactions to the divisive (putting it mildly) season, Will's feelings when the show won its glut of Emmy Awards and the circumstances behind Myrcella being recast (and maximum credit for Aimee handling that potentially awkward discussion with good humour and grace). Will also outlined the process how a sequence such as the Battle of Hardhome started with the script, was then expanded by his concept art and ideas and then turned into a detailed battle-plan on how to film it, before effects are added. He hinted that similar big scenes may lie ahead in Season 6, but was unable to say more.

Season 6 proved to be the main discussion point for a second panel later in the day, hosted by the mighty Peadar Ó Guilín (with myself as a guest). Due to the lack of actors currently on the show this was adjusted on the fly to involve the audience more and there was a lot of entertaining discussion about the divergence between the books and the TV series what plot points the upcoming season might develop further.

On the literature side of things, I attended an amusing panel about sex and how to write and handle it. The highlight of this panel was Joe Abercrombie reading a particularly...vivid sex scene from Morrissey's new novel.

There was also a quiz drawing on 1980s gameshow Blankey Blank pitting, which I did miserably at (although I did win membership of next year's convention as a consolation prize), but was hilarious, mainly for Joe Abercrombie winning a prize of George R.R. Martin's face.

Things wrapped up with a performance show put on by Brutal Ballet and then some karaoke and partying. A great time was had by all.

The Sunday was reserved for a special event: a coach trip around Northern Ireland to visit locations used on Game of Thrones. These included Ballintoy Harbour, where Iron Island scenes were shot for Season 2, and Portstewart Strand, where scenes were filmed for Dorne in Season 5. We also visited Larrybane Quarry, where scenes involving Renly and Stannis meeting in Season 2 were shot. The day was marked by a brutal rivalry between the two coaches, with escalating comments made on Twitter and Facebook. Things were wrapped up at Clandeboye Estate where the travellers on Coach One staged a brutal mock-Red Wedding on their Coach Two comrades. Then it was back to the hotel to watch the lunar eclipse. We took advantage of the coach's intercom system to hold a mobile panel on Aragorn's economic policies against the orcs post the War of the Ring (a topic much-discussed by GRRM recently), which was both random and fun.

There was no programming for the Monday, and with my flight not leaving until late the day was instead spent in the hotel bar with a surprisingly large number of other attendees. Comedy was invoked when an actual wedding party showed up, so one of our attending musicians decided to provide an appropriate soundtrack:

Overall, TitanCon was enormous fun. Belfast is a fun city (and unexpectedly great for burrito restaurants), the surrounding countryside is beautiful and the coach tour was a great way of both seeing the sights and also bonding with fellow attendees, some of whom went on to attend OctoCon in Dublin a couple of weeks later.


This was my first TitanCon but certainly won't be the last. With the chaotic shooting schedule of Game of Thrones likely to continue and the show likely to end in 2018, TitanCon is going to continue its evolution into a more general SFF convention for Northern Ireland, which is a good move. In 2016 it will likely be held earlier in the year (possibly early August) and I will certainly be attending.

TITANCON!

Next weekend I'll be at TitanCon in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

This will be the fifth TitanCon, which is held every year in Belfast. The convention is primarily dedicated to Game of Thrones, which films its studio scenes in the city at the nearby Paint Hall Studios, but also has a strong track dedicated to literature.

This year will feature authors Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Pinborough, Pat Cadigan, Peadar Ó Guilín, Laurence Donaghy, Debbie "DJ" McCune, Zoë Sumra and Jo Zebedee, as well as appearances by the Medieval Combat Group. Miltos "Syrio Forel" Yerolemou and Aimee "Myrcella Baratheon" Richardson will be representing for Game of Thrones, along with some other castmembers (not confirmed until the day as the filming schedule keeps changing).

There are also workshops on papercraft, claymaking, leather crafting and even waterdancing. Things are rounded off with a quizz and a party (of course!). There's also a coach tour on the Sunday which takes in various filming locations in and around the city.

I haven't been to TitanCon before, but I went to its predecessor, the 2009 Belfast Moot when they were filming the pilot and Kit Harington and Maisie Williams could walk down the street without being mobbed, which was great fun. I will also be moderating the "Season 5 in Review" panel which will be very interesting.

If you're interested in coming, there are still some tickets available and the congoers know how to throw a great event!