View source for Cyberpunk: Future so bright they gotta wear shades

'''Landon, Brooks. "Cyberpunk: Future so bright they gotta wear shades."''' ''Cinefantastique'' 18.1 (December 1987): 27-31. As of 30 March 2023, available on Internet Archive, here.[https://archive.org/details/cinefantastique_1970-2002/Cinefantastique%20Vol%2018%20No%201%20%28Dec%201987%29/] Hardcopy may be consulted under tight restrictions at/via Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Margaret Herrick Library.[https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8wq08fz/]

Lede: "From ''[[Max Headroom (US television)|Max Headroom]]'' to ''[[ROBOCOP (1987)|RoboCop]]'', science fiction's new wave is hip and high tech" (slightly reformatted).

An over-view of the topic from a major scholar of SF film. Notes "that cyberpunk is at the heart of a new cultural and media convergence" and that "There is no rigid formula, but many cyberpunk stories are set in a relatively near post-industrial, multicultural future in which electronic and bio-technology have saturated all forms of experience — become an inescapable environment, a technosphere, much like that presented in MAX HEADROOM [TV show]. It is often a hardboiled tech[-]noir, technosleaze, retrofitted future [...]" (p. 27).

Especially since the Internet Archive may not be an available source — additional key quotes:

<blockquote>
Cluttered with the litter of brand[—]name gadgets [...] and marked by bizarre obsessions with fashion, this [cyberpunk] future parodies both capitalism and consumerism [... with an economy seemingly] divided between the smothering corporate power of multinationals and a thriving blackmarket in almost everything, Key to both economies is the manipulation or theft of information. [...] Cyberpunk characters live on the fringe of society [... or] cyberpunk society is nothing but fringe. 

[...] story after story suggests the possibility of translating human life into electronic data,[https://www.clockworks2.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=upload&go=Go] or raising data to a state approximating life (Artificial Intelligence) [AI, or, more recently, AL: Artificial Life — RDE], creating a world where Max Headroom would have lots of company, as in Rudy Rucker's ''[[Software]].''

Perhaps the central assumption of cyberpunk is that life, like film, video, and computer data can be edited as to become "post-human," radically reprogrammed through artificial evolution or redesigned by technology, an idea that drives Bruce Sterling's "[[Twenty Evocations: Life in the Mechanist/Shaper Era|Mechanist Shaper]]" series of stories. [...]

In many ways a reaction against the fear of technology expressed in SF's New Wave writers of the sixties, cyberpunk embraces technological change without suggesting that it necessarily makes life any better — just more interesting. (p. 28)
</blockquote>



RDE, finishing, 29Mar23
[[Category: Literary Criticism]]
[[Category: Drama Criticism]]