The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture

Abstract

Since its emergence in the early to mid 1980s, cyberpunk has been a speculative realm in which our collected anxieties over rapid and widespread techno-cultural change, the omniscience of mega-corporations, the encroachment of virtual spaces and artificial intelligence, the advent of robotics and cybernetic augmentation, and the status of the human body in this brave new posthuman world have been explored in both cerebral and spectacular fashion. [...]it can be argued that cyberpunk has outgrown its original use as a generic marker, especially now that we live in a world where artificial intelligence, increasingly advanced robotics, and a version of the cyberspace envisioned by William Gibson in his seminal debut novel Neuromancer (1984) (replete with virtual reality headset hardware—a classic piece of cyberpunk iconography) are now everyday science fact rather than science fiction. Chapters on additional cyberpunk media topics include—among others—"Comic Books," "Anime," "Television," "Video Games," "Photography and Digital Art," "Fashion," and "Music," which emphasize the extent to which cyberpunk, its aesthetics, and its themes have travelled and cross-pollinated with other art forms over the last few decades. Brian Ruh's chapter "Japan as Cyberpunk Exoticism" pays just as much attention to the domestic developments that ignited Japan's own cyberpunk movement, such as its punk rock and DIY film subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s, with Suzuki's earlier chapter providing additional insights into Japanese society during this time, which led to similar cyberpunk explorations in manga before Gibson's novel had been translated and released in Japan. [...]The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture implicitly sets the stage for cyberpunk to be thought of as a polycentric phenomenon to a certain extent, with the Japanese "center" engaging in cultural transactions with the North American "center" and vice versa.