WEEK 9 LECTURE

CYBERPUNK & WILLIAM GIBSON

First of all before I start blogging about this weeks lecture, there is a confession I must make, I didn't actually go to this lecture. I tried but due to a crash on the freeway which I wasn't involved in (thankfully) I arrived just after this lecture finished. All this was just to give you (the marker) a heads up if you find this blog entry confusing. Because I'm trying to write it from the lecture notes provided and I'm finding them confusing so bare with me.

The lecture started off by outlining what Cyberpunk actuall is
Cyberpunk is typically distinguished from standard science fiction by the inclusion of several prominent tropes, including but not limited to:

The existence and proliferation of cybernetic enhancements or replacements – in other words, cyborgs
•the existence of synthetic or non-organic life forms, of various degrees of sentience (androids, replicants)
•a future society governed under a corporatist or oligarchic dictatorship
•prominent asiatic or oriental influences in subsequent cultural advertising and common language
•graphic violence, sexuality, drug use, and other anti-moralist narratives and archetypes (a natural consequence of the focus on hard-boiled noir characters)

Who wrote/writes cyberpunk?

- William Gibson
- Bruce Sterling
- Neal Stephenson
- John Shirley
- Lewis Shiner
- Rudy Rucker

Who is William Gibson?

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/source.asp

- born: 17th of March, 1948, in Conway, South Carolina, USA
- grew up in Wytheville, Virginia
- Vietnam draft dodger; moved to Toronto, Canada
- Received a Bachelor of English from University of British Columbia in 1977
- Has written many things, including several ‘trilogies’

The Sprawl Trilogy:
Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

The Bridge Trilogy:
Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999)

The Blue Ant Trilogy:
Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), Zero History (2010)

The street finds its own uses for things…

Neuromancer, 1984: “cyberspace”

Written entirely on a typewriter

Coloured geometrical representations of data

Shadows are security, rumours are almost true
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc26BVmpQsU


Burning Chrome

Aesthetics: gritty, tech heavy, seductive, claustrophobic

Genre: hybrid, draws from film noir and SF

Style: prose is written in fragments that skip around ‘narrative time’

Key Issues: theft, seduction, voodoo/luck, contingent alliances, addiction, fusion of human and machine, tragic desire, the eerie in the everyday


Cyberpunk as a lingua franca of digital culture

huge impact on imagining human-and-machine interconnections

ubiquitous access to information and its lack of security

largely pessimistic view of humans and machines (cunning opportunism) but not large apocalyptic scenarios of other SF

CP gave a language to the way the markets of capitalisms have material impacts on people’s lives and how people get hooked on technologies


Some Examples

http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biFMsh2g0OM
No Maps for these Territories (DVD, in library)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNs9iznzOj8&feature=related