882c548a   
   From: vagans@inanna.eanna.net   
      
   In article ,   
   ghost   wrote:   
   >   
   >   
   >In article ,   
   > 3ngine  wrote:   
   >   
   >> Greetings all!  I'm currently doing some research for my Masters   
   >> thesis, and would just like a few quick opinions: in my own personal   
   >> opinion, I think that the cyberpunk movement started in 1980 with   
   >> Shirley's _City_Come_A_Walkin'_ and pretty much ended in '92 with   
   >> Stephenson's _Snow_Crash_.  Can anybody come up with any influential   
   >> books/short stories to the genre either before 1980 or after '92?   
   >>   
   >> I'm not sure that Gibson's bridge trilogy fits into the definition of   
   >> cyberpunk, nor am I 100% sure that _Heavy_Weather_ by Sterling fits   
   >> the bill.  Any thoughts on this?  This is very preliminary research;   
   >> I'm pretty much compiling a list of CP books/stories that I'll be   
   >> looking at, so feel free to jump in with anything you've got.  Thx.   
      
      
      
   >Cyberpunk was, is and always will be walking the line of various kinds   
   >of S/F anyway. A good portion of the reason it started was because S/F   
   >itself was becoming a rather boring genre of literature getting stuck up   
   >in space operas and fantasy stories set in space. CP grounded it back   
   >down to what it was way back in the 30s - the future coming at you very   
   >quickly whether you like it or not.   
      
   "Cyberpunk" sf is simply "hard sf". Back in the 20s it was rocketry,   
   radio, and tv, rather than vr, computers, and networks. Space opera,   
   was a 30s phenomena -- Smith's Lensmen series, for example -- revived   
   by Star Wars and Dune mostly, in our time.   
      
   Post WWII, the sf industry and fandom dealt with several issues. One   
   was "mainstream acceptance" of the genre, or the lack of it. Another   
   was the issue of the "anti-hero" who began to make an appearance in sf   
   to the chagrin of the Lensmen and Brotherhood of Aviators (Wells,   
   Shape Of Things) -- the crewcut, war hero Engineer types who dominated   
   sf (see almost anything by Heinlein).   
      
   You can see in any good list of pre-cyberpunk sf influences that a   
   lot of those stories from the 50s were written with humor -- someone   
   mentioned Polh and Kornbluth's work: Gladiator At Law, The Space   
   Merchants, for example. Or, they were very quirky, such as PKD. Or,   
   "experimental", such as The Demolished Man.   
      
   Humorous, quirky, experimental -- those are just ways of saying they   
   weren't accepted as "real" sf by the Analog types who dominated   
   post WWII sf. But those stories were where the "anti-hero" protagonist   
   could exist in that era of sf. Mostly, the "anti-hero" was just   
   a normal human being.   
      
   >If you really need to pin dates on the thing just say the High Point of   
   >CP was between 80 and 92 .. but it definitely had seeds before 80 and   
   >will have works after 92 that will fit the bill. Besides, it's also a   
   >matter of personal taste. [And if you want to really get picky you can   
   >say the whole idea for CP probably came from Tofler's "Future Shock"   
   >which is non-fiction.]   
   >   
   >And personally, I'm not sure I like all this sub-sub-genre bullshit   
   >that's going on around here ... nanopunk, biopunk, genepunk .. If your   
   >definition of cyberpunk is so rigid you can't twist it a little to fit   
   >nanotech and biotech and blahtech underneath it if the same Feeling   
   >behind the words is there then you missed the point somewhere. Stay   
   >flexible or you're going to get sucked down, chewed up and spat out.   
      
   The "sub-sub-genre" bs is academia-talk. At the beginning of academic   
   interest in sf, they avoided genre sf, they had Wells and Verne, and   
   the non-sf BNW and 1984. "Cyberpunk" was their entre into genre sf.   
   For them, anything before N is "pre-cyberpunk" and anything after the   
   classic 80s cp is "post-cyberpunk" -- or worse: this *punk and   
   that *punk.   
      
   Cyberpunk is simply science fiction of the "hard" variety, ie, with   
   a focus on science and technology, however, unlike the Great   
   Engineer variety of hard sf, its protagonists are of the "anti-hero"   
   kind.   
      
   The genre will continue as long as writers are motivated to explore   
   the possible effects of new technologies on people and society, and   
   that may be away from computers, vr, and networks, and towards nano,   
   bio, genetic technology.   
      
   All the *punks, including Cyberpunk, are just markers in a syllabus.   
      
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