Cyberpunk…punk…unk…nk…k…

First published in Phlogiston Eighteen, August 1988.

If I knew what cyberpunk was, this article would be about it. Since I don’t know, and since close examination of the texts that are generally agreed to be it has failed to reveal the secret, the article is instead about what cyberpunk would be if cyberpunk was what I said it was.

So what do I say it is?

Cyber is easy of course. It derives from cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Weiner in 1947. He defined it as the science of control and communication in animals and machines. Today, according to the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, cybernetics is defined as:

…the science of effective organisation.

Most people think it has something to do with computers and indeed it does, but only peripherally. One can talk of computer cybernetics as one branch of the science. But it is a small and not very important part. Interestingly, it is closely related to General Systems Theory, which is usually abbreviated to GST. New Zealand Government please note!

Now, what about punk? What on earth is that? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as:

prostitute (archaic);
rotten wood; fungus growing on wood used as
tinder; worthless stuff; rubbish; tosh.

Obviously therefore, cyberpunk is literature about the effective organisation of worthless archaic prostitutes who have fungus growing on the rotten wood beneath their beds. I suspect that the popular appeal of the books derives from the fact that the fungus may be used as tinder and is therefore highly inflammable and liable to burst into flame if too much friction is applied. The sources of such friction and the gory descriptions of burning beds that it engenders are, as far as I am concerned, the highlights of most cyberpunk novels.

Now that I have defined cyberpunk to everybody’s satisfaction, let’s look at it a little more seriously.

Whenever you start to talk about a literary movement of any kind, the argument nearly always falls between the Scylla and Charybdis of style and content. Both are important and they overlap to such an extent that critics often spend so much time arguing about what they mean when they say style (or content) that the piece of writing whose content (or style) they are supposed to be discussing is totally forgotten. So before we start let’s define content as being what a piece of writing is about (a computer) and style as being the form of words the writer has chosen to describe that content. (“Yes, now there is a God”—Answer by Fredric Brown.)

To me the most immediately obvious thing about the style of cyberpunk books is how terribly old fashioned it all seems. Generally cyberpunk appears to have a cynical, amoral attitude. Protagonists are often either wheeler-dealers, or else they have some sort of manipulative hold over the wheeler-dealers or (at the bottom of the heap), they wish they had such a hold. This very cynical, sometimes wise-cracking style is straight out of the “hard-boiled” era of detective fiction. It was the sort of thing that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler pioneered in Black Mask magazine in the 1930s. It enjoyed a brief revival in the 1960s when John le Carre and Len Deighton applied the same formula to the spy novel and dragged it kicking and screaming into literary maturity out of the ghetto where Ian Fleming had left it. The San Francisco Chronicle called Len Deighton “The Raymond Chandler of the cloak-and-dagger set”. With equal justification, I think I could call William Gibson the Raymond Chandler of the spaceship-and-rayguns set.

The other common stylistic denominator is a heavy reliance on so-called brand name realism-sticking in identifiable names and products that actually exist in the real world (or, in the special case of SF, that sound as if they ought to exist in the real world). The whole point of this, of course, is to make the world view that the writer is presenting to you feel more lived-in, more natural and real. It all helps in the willing suspension of disbelief. But again, this stylistic trait is not new. Ian Fleming spent pages discussing genuine golf clubs, cocktails, motor cars, cigarettes and clothes. Michael Moorcock parodied the whole thing delightfully in his Jerry Cornelius stories, took it completely over the top, and effectively killed it forever as a valid writing technique. Whole pages were devoted to minute descriptions of Miss Brunner’s designer clothes and Jerry’s designer music, not to mention Bishop Beesley’s sweets and the never-to-be-forgotten chocolate coated nun.

Even the pop charts of the time were not immune to the syndrome. Peter Sarstedt’s Where Do You Go To My Lovely is probably the archetype (“…your clothes are all made by Balmain…”), but he was not alone in what he did.

On the basis of this analysis, the only conclusion you can come to is that cyberpunk is so old fashioned that it creaks when you turn the pages. If that was all there was to say, it would be easy to dismiss cyberpunk as just another fad like the yo-yo and the hula hoop (and clackers-do any of you remember clackers?). Fortunately, there is a lot more. The content of many cyberpunk books is generally very interesting indeed.

William Gibson, a tall thin man with a wit that is dryer than a martini, has admitted that before he wrote Neuromancer he didn’t know very much about computers. Sometimes that shows in the text. There is a section about modems that is straight out of the steam age and which doesn’t belong in a futuristic setting at all. However such small errors of detail are not important in the wider context. Out of ignorance, Gibson has produced what is probably the cleverest metaphor for the electronic age since Marshall McLuhan coined the concept of global village. He invented cyberspace.

Never mind that the word is nonsense, that it doesn’t mean what ignorant Humpty Dumpty critics have chosen to make it mean, Gibson invented it, and it is powerful.

Essentially, cyberspace is a visual picture of information (in the abstract) and at the same time an indicator of both the effect of properly organised information on society and a comment on the nature of information processing itself. That is a hell of a lot to pack into one small concept. That he succeeds is in itself a comment on his writing skill.

Properly organised, information is probably the most valuable thing that our society produces. Without information and access to it, we are nothing at all. If I didn’t have a dictionary and various other reference books lurking on my shelves, I would have been completely unable to make the joke that opened this article. But because I could easily find the definitions of cybernetics and punk, it took little effort. The work had all been done for me. All I had to do was find it and put it together in the right way.

That is just a small and fairly trivial illustration of the problem. However if you expand it into the real world and start asking questions like “What steps can I take to keep food fresh without using chemicals that poison the people who eat it and without violating legal statutes in the countries I intend to sell my food in” you can start to appreciate the scope of the problem. The answer to this question is what keeps New Zealand solvent since it is the fundamental problem facing all the producer boards. Their success in answering it (and in keeping their answers up to date) is measurable by how well they perform. Could you answer the question? Would you know where to look to try and find the answers?

In a quotation that I can never locate when I need it, Dr. Johnson said something on the order of: “There are two kinds of information, the information that you know, and the information that you know how to find”. The corollary is that if you don’t know it, and don’t know how to find it, it might as well not exist, because it is useless to you.

The mechanisms of information retrieval are of fundamental importance. Questions about the nature of information and the methods of keeping track of it and retrieving specific items out of the mass of information that surrounds us are the concern of that curious discipline called information science.

Many people seem to consider that information science is synonymous with computer science (the confusion about cybernetics raises its parallel head again). It isn’t, of course. It grew out of librarianship, out of the study of the never ending tasks of cataloguing, indexing, storing and retrieving which are the life blood of the librarian.

By the middle of this century it was becoming obvious that the traditional librarian was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. It was simply impossible to handle the vast amounts of information that the world was generating. The old tools couldn’t cope any longer. There are 23 volumes in my 1966 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The subjects range from A to Zygote; and all the information contained in all those thousands of closely printed pages bears the same relationship to the totality of man’s knowledge as a spoonful of water does to the Pacific Ocean.

That’s where the computer comes in. The disciplines of information science and the power of the computer combine to form the most powerful tool we have for organising the information we possess, for interrogating that collection of information and for retrieving the answers to our questions.

If I had to answer the question I posed a few paragraphs ago about preserving food and not violating legal statutes in different countries, I would go to one of the several organisations who have computerised data collections, and I would interrogate the Chemical Abstracts database to find out about chemical food preservatives, and one (or more) of the legal databases (perhaps Lexis) to find out about the legal situation. I would have my answers in minutes.

There are other sorts of information collections of course. Your tax records, your medical history, your criminal record, your car registration, your credit rating, your bank account. What guarantee do you have that I can’t get at that information with my home computer?

As things stand, you don’t have much of a guarantee at all. Recent publicity about so-called hackers accessing supposedly secure and private information collections, and films such as War Games have shown that information cannot be regarded as sacrosanct.

Computers talk to each other. Information passes up and down and round about. Information, the right to access it and how to keep secret the bits that should not be accessed without limiting access to the bits that should be freely available are deeply important questions, and they are questions that are currently very fashionable.

Information is the life-blood of the twentieth century and computers are the veins through which it travels. If the blood ever ceases to flow, if we are denied access to the information we need, then by Dr. Johnson’s definition it is useless and might as well not exist. Whether it is looking up a word in a dictionary so that we spell it correctly, or whether it is looking up a legal precedent to avoid a miscarriage of justice, or whether it is finding out what work has been done on hepatitis so that we can save the lives of our children, we must have information, both as individuals and as a society (which is only the totality of individuals after all). But we must also have safeguards. The secret service dictum of the need to know applies here. Trespassers will be XXXXXXXed (word deleted in the interests of public morality-editor). Some information is more secret than others.

That is why I think William Gibson’s novels are so important. The cyberspace picture he paints of the interconnectedness of information and the guards and traps that enclose it, all have their parallels in the real world. He has elucidated a fundamental problem, one which affects us all, and he has encapsulated it in a clever and very powerful image. We can see it. Before, we knew it existed but we had no picture of it as a whole. Now we do. Gibson is a synthesiser, and he has brought together all the disparate bits that I have alluded to above into one cyberspatial whole.