he McGraw Hill edition of the Random House Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1991) defines "cyberpunk" as "1. science fiction featuring extensive human interaction with supercomputers and a punk ambiance. 2. Slang. a computer hacker." I mention this not to agree or disagree with the definition, but to note that the word "cyberpunk" is in the dictionary and has been for more than 10 years. For those who were SF readers when all the fuss was going on, a decade-old dictionary definition of what some people regarded as a revolution gives pause, to say the least. Those who weren't reading SF in the 1980s may, understandably, wonder what all the fuss was about.
But, as Pat Cadigan points out at the beginning of her eminently sensible introduction to The Ultimate Cyberpunk, the only response to the question "Isn't cyberpunk dead?" is "If it were, you wouldn't be asking that question." Questions of viability and authenticity are in some sense beside the point: There were a number of SF books and stories published in the 1980s that were called "cyberpunk," and they had an impact on both SF and the world at large. Any literary movement that actually adds words to the language—the same dictionary quoted above also lists "cyberspace"—deserves our consideration.
And The Ultimate Cyberpunk is, above all else, carefully considered. Cadigan's selection of 1980s cyberpunk SF is preceded by four older stories—"root stories," as Cadigan puts it—which demonstrate clearly that, whatever cyberpunk is or was, it came from somewhere. Simply to list the four older stories is to marvel: Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954), Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955), Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) and the Hugo-winning novella "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) by James Tiptree Jr. (pseudonym of Alice Sheldon).
Bester's tale of the criminal insanity shared by an android and its owner remains a masterpiece of literary construction; after almost half a century, it still positively throbs with narrative energy. Smith's story, while lacking the formal perfection of Bester, amazes both in its anticipation of Gibson's "matrix"—the "pinlighters" who fight the beasts of deep space do so by projecting themselves from the remote location of "squares of space ... the middle of an immense grid, a cubic grid, full of nothing"—and its unapologetic reveling in the psychosexual bond between the human pinlighter and the cat with which he fights. Dick's story (which was the basis for the 1990 film Total Recall), although far less flashy than Bester's or Smith's, is a representative example of this essential author's unmatched presentation of obsession, uncertainty and paranoia. And Tiptree's account of an unattractive young woman whose mind is wired into a beautiful artificial creation, with its offbeat narration, media landscape savvy and a conceptual leap at the end that would leave Bester, Smith and Dick all gasping for breath, would have been cutting-edge if it had first appeared last week.
Had there been room to add Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction" (1950), Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969) and excerpts from the novels of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany, Cadigan might well lay claim to providing The Ultimate Roots of Cyberpunk.
The queen of cyberpunk comes through
But there are only so many pages in any book, and Cadigan has much other ground to cover. With very little duplication of the only previous major anthology of cyberpunk SF, Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades (1986), Cadigan has assembled, if not an "ultimate" selection, then a comprehensive and accurate one. (In her introduction, Cadigan takes pains to point out that the word "ultimate" was the publisher's idea, not hers.) Coming to the stories of the '80s from the "root" stories, one notes that the earlier stories' anxiety over the status of the individual mind—"sanity" is of paramount concern to Bester, Smith and Dick, perhaps less so to Tiptree—is replaced by an assumption that the individual can adapt well enough to machine interfaces and radical physical change, but often at great cost.
William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" (1982) is a blueprint for most of what the popular imagination associates with cyberpunk: cyberspace, the "matrix, the electronic consensus—hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data," presented in a swift and elegantly narrated heist caper whose conclusion is equal parts success and regret. Greg Bear's Nebula-winning "Blood Music" (1983) remains one of SF's most powerful considerations of the transformation evolution of humanity through technology; crucially, Bear makes it clear that there are losses as well as gains, and that the former are irreversible, while the latter may be incomprehensible. Bruce Sterling's "Green Days in Brunei" (1985) regards technological change not as wondrous so much as inevitable and acknowledges that not everyone will necessarily want to go along with those changes. Perhaps more than any other story in the book, it is a relatively accurate forecast of the wired future that has arrived even earlier than Sterling would have imagined. And both Rudy Rucker's "The 57th Franz Kafka" (1983) and editor Cadigan's "Patterns" (1987) provide brief but memorable moments of transfiguration and paranoia.
The two stories also included in Mirrorshades, John Shirley's "Freezone" (an excerpt from his 1985 novel Eclipse) and Lewis Shiner's "Till Human Voices Wake Us" (1984) demonstrate the elasticity of the C-word: Shiner's take on the technological transformation of humanity is almost incidental to his careful and poignant narrative of the death of a marriage, while Shirley's fast-paced, highly entertaining account of a fading rock star on the run in a swirling, drug-addled cityscape is far more punk than cyber. Arguably most powerful of all, however, is William Gibson and Michael Swanwick's "Dogfight" (1985), in which dazzling computer-simulation combat is brought to ground in a southern truck stop. One of the charges once leveled against cyberpunk was that it sometimes displayed an adolescent preoccupation with alienation and violence; "Dogfight" offers a compelling and, dare one say, mature vision of the consequences of technological victory absent the maintenance of human relationships.
Cadigan wisely concludes with a more recent story from a British author not specifically associated with the (American) cyberpunk movement. Paul J. McAuley's "Dr. Luther's Assistant" (1993) shares with the author's 1995 novel Fairyland the background of a degenerate, post-capitalist Europe whose masses are overseen by an elite upper class dependent on bioengineered "dolls" for both work and pleasure and threatened by "liberationists" who can turn the dolls into "fairies," not-quite humans. McAuley's portrait of a man working in a sex arcade who is forced to confront the issues raised by both the dolls and the fairies combines Sterling and Shirley's political awareness with Tiptree's psychological acuteness and Gibson, Swanwick and Shiner's sense of loss while facing even more directly the bedrock issues of autonomy and control. If the first four stories of the book show us that cyberpunk came from somewhere, the last story shows us that it still has places to go.
Add to all that an annotated bibliography from Bruce Sterling of "What Every Well-Appointed 'Cyberpunk SF' Library Collection Should Possess," and a 16-page color insert of the previously unpublished second part of Frank Henkel and Bruce Jensen's graphic novel adaptation of Gibson's Neuromancer, and one has a book that may live up to its title after all. Pat Cadigan has done science fiction an invaluable service by bringing all of this material together in one volume.
