Shifting Frontiers: Mapping Cyberpunk and the American South

Moore, John. "Shifting Frontiers: Mapping Cyberpunk and the American South." Foundation No. 66 (Spring 1996): 59-68.

Divides cyberpunk into two regional strands: On the one hand, there is a Californian version of cyberpunk, with John Shirley and Richard Kadrey as its emblematic figures. Californian cyberpunk tends to be the more politically engaged strand: its technopolitics remains anchored in an oppositional ideology that challenges corporate power structures and remains suspicious of technology as social control. On the other hand, there is the Southern version of cyberpunk, with Virginians William Gibson [long resident in Vancouver, BC — RDE] and Tom Maddox and Texans Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner as characteristic figures. Southern cyberpunk tends toward a post-modernist, ambivalent celebration of technological development. In this strand, the opportunist outlaw remains powerless to mount a sociopolitical challenge to corporate power, but this central figure's ability to survive and sustain personal development through technological self-transformation is regarded as a feat of heroic stature. In developing these tropes,Southern cyberpunk dialogically interacts with the protocols of Southern literary discourse, using them as points of reference and springboards for extrapolation. (p. 63)

— Which Moore illustrates with Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. "On one level, then, the schism in the novel's title refers to the conflict between the two dominant factions in a future space-faring humanity," i.e., "the Shapers — who practice human genetic engineering — and the Mechanists — who prefer prosthetic enhancement of the human body." Moore asserts "the Southern origins of this text" and from that sees its central conflict as an appropriation and mutation of the Southern literary concern with sectional conflict. The Mechnists can be broadly identified with the North and its ideology of industrialism and machinic [sic] transformation; the Shapers can similarly be seen as a projection of the South and its ideology of dynastic and eugenic inheritance. (p. 64)

RDE, Initial Compiler, 11May19