The Future That Was: The Future is Born (A Triptych Moment)
A quick Kickstarter update before we begin: we’re about 1/4 of the way to the stretch goal where I write about George Mann’s Engines of War, in which he attempts to do a Time War novel. We’re also only three pledges from 300 backers.
Now for this post: a taste of my current project, The Future That Was, which I’m writing the first five chapters of before I go back to Last War in Albion for a bit. It’s the first (or arguably third) volume of a projected trilogy of books about the history of science fiction, focusing, as the title suggests, on cyberpunk. Beyond this preview, this book will be 100% Patreon exclusive until it’s finished and published. The second chapter and beginning of the third are already available over there.
City Lights, Receding: Neuromancer
There were of course antecedents; a thing such as cyberpunk could not just emerge sui generis. Some have pointed as far back to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. More credible was the New Wave of Science Fiction heralded by writers like J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock in the UK and Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. LeGuin in the US. William S. Burroughs was another credible antecedent, albeit one largely outside of the science fiction mainstream. In terms of specific works, there was Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness, James Tiptree’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In, John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, or any number of Philip K. Dick works. And the start of the movement proper was similarly ragged—John Shirley would eventually be unambiguously associated with the movement, for instance, and published City Come A-Walkin’ in 1980. All of these works had early glimpses of the future that was. But the moment when the veil was pulled back and the world gaze upon the future in all its awe and horror came slightly later still. It would be best to describe this as a triptych moment—the near-simultaneous emergence of three more or less independently created works in three different media.
The word “cyberpunk” itself was coined by minor sci-fi writer Bruce Bethke who was looking for a title for a story about teenage hackers he’d written. Wanting something that gave a sense of his fusion of high-tech computers and youthful rebellion, he “took a handful of roots –cyber, techno, et al– mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right.”1 But Bethke’s story, although dating to 1980 in his telling, was not published until November of 1983. By that point William Gibson had already published “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome,” his first two stories set in and around the Sprawl, a futuristic megalopolis stretched across the entirety of the US East Coast. It was these stories, with their famed “high tech low life” aesthetic, that would in practice define the genre that eventually took on Bethke’s name. Already major elements of the aesthetic were in place.…