pp291-293

review of Storming the Reality Studio edited by Larry McCaffery, first published in Vector 169, October/November 1992

What is it we are talking about here? Postmodernism is a cultural mode which has developed since the Second World War. First identified by the French philosopher Lyotard, it is a reaction to, and development from, the modernism of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It can be seen in the music of John Cage and Talking Heads, in the performance art of Laurie Anderson and the rise of improvisation comedy, and in the fiction of Borges and John Fowles. Among its characteristics, it is anti-hierarchical, what Michel Foucault called a heterotopia, where there is no authority, no absolute, no clear ordering within a list. This results in the breakdown of boundaries between genres, and between author, character and reader.

Cyberpunk is a mode of science fiction which developed during the 1980s. First named by Bruce Bethke in response to the fiction of William Gibson, it is identified by a detailed interest in the surfaces of the worlds described, in the interface between computer/machine and human, in low-life and urban decay, in the glossy, glamorous conflict of low-life hero and multinational corporation It is a form of romance which builds on traditional sf formulations (cyberpunkers acknowledge debts to Alfred Bester, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany among others), salted with some influences from the edges of the mainstream (cyberpunkers also acknowledge debts to William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon). Since these latter are clearly identifiable as postmodernists, does that make cyberpunk postmodern?

That is what Larry McCaffery believes, and what he sets out to demonstrate in this fascinating and entertaining book, which bears the slightly unwieldy subtitle ‘A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction.’ The problem is that my opening paragraphs are closer to a definition of terms than you will find anywhere in this book. Maybe definitions such as this run counter to the heterotopic grain of postmodernism, but one can’t help feeling that McCaffery is stretching boundaries as much as possible in order to shoehorn in his thesis.

Let us begin with what the book contains. After an introduction and a checklist there are twenty-nine short stories or novel extracts, followed by twenty essays or extracts from longer critical works. The authors of the fiction are impeccable: Acker, Ballard, Burroughs, Cadigan, Delany, Delillo, Gibson, Pynchon, Rucker, Shepard, Shiner, Shirley, Sterling. There’s good straight-down-the-line postmodernism here, straightforward sf, clear no-doubt-about-it cyberpunk, and a few which hover in between, but they don’t all cross boundaries in a way which fits the thesis. Delany’s tale of a homosexual encounter recounted with a thread of fantasy fits the postmodern mould, but cyberpunk it ain’t. And what about Lewis Shiner’s ‘Stoked,’ which isn’t cyberpunk, isn’t sf, and is no more postmodern than Catcher in the Rye, which it closely resembles? In fact the only story here which unequivocally fits McCaffery’s case is Bruce Sterling’s ‘Twenty Evocations.’

As for the non-fiction, there are some of the best critical essays I have seen on cyberpunk, especially by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr and Veronica Hollinger. There are also extracts from longer works by Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard, which are clear and informative on postmodernism. There is little of the turgid and impenetrable prose you might expect from such a gaggle of academics. However, Timothy Leary (yes, that Timothy Leary) is far too precious for his own or anyone else’s good. And there is one infuriating instance of pretentiousness, when Arthur Kroker and David Cook disguise an interesting premise (about ‘TV [as] the processed world triumphant’) in statements such as ‘TV functions by substituting the negative totality of the audience with its pseudo-mediations by electronic images for genuine sociality, and the possibility of authentic human solidarities.’¹ Yet, these articles hardly seem to touch upon the presumed central link between postmodernism and cyberpunk.

McCaffery tries to set the agenda in his introduction, when he equates the postmodern world with post-industrial capitalism, where information has become the key global resource. In so far as cyberpunk deals with the human and societal problems of information overload and other aspects of our information age, it can be seen as an outgrowth from post-industrial society. But does that lead us to infer the identification between cyberpunk and postmodernism?

Part of the problem is that McCaffery speaks of ‘terms that were previously speculative abstractions suddenly become literalized.’² This may be a phenomenon of postmodernism, yet it is also the backbone of all science fiction. Cyberpunk may literalize the abstract in this way, but as science fiction has always done rather than as postmodernism is now doing. Cyberspace has bled outward from sf into postmodernism, rather than, as McCaffery would have it, from postmodernism into sf.

And this is a point which is backed up by one of the few essays in the book which directly addresses the question of the relationship between the two modes. Brian McHale, in ‘POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM,’ points out that the growing legitimation of science fiction, and especially of cyberpunk, is part of a general postmodern phenomenon, the collapse of genre distinctions between high and low art, between pop culture (sf) and ‘serious’ fiction. In fact, this feedback between ‘high’ and ‘low’ is a universal of our cultural history. The only thing which makes postmodernism any different from the rest is the speed of the feedback loop, which has allowed postmodernists such as Pynchon to feed on the sf of their youth in their own fictions, for cyberpunkers to feed on Pynchon for inspiration, and for Pynchon to feed in turn on cyberpunk in his most recent novel.

There is a relationship between postmodernism and science fiction, though the blinkers imposed on this book do not allow it to be properly explored. But cyberpunk is not, in and of itself, a purely postmodern phenomenon, nor is it the only part of science fiction which could be so identified. The result is a readable, fascinating book – well worth reading whether you are interested in postmodernism or cyberpunk – but it consistently manages to miss the one target it has set itself.