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Storey 1 <html><head> Joshstorey@gmail.com1 Doctor Hassler Science Fiction May 13, 2005</head> <Title>Building A.I. (artificial identity): Cyberpunk and the Construction Sense of Self</title> Most essays on cyberpunk share two common properties: 1) they define the cyberpunk genre through shared themes of counter-culture heroes, mega-corp governments, and high-tech artificial intelligence software, and 2) they at least pay lip service to William Gibson’s Neuromancer. This essay does both and neither, for while it discusses the concept of cyberpunk via Gibson’s seminal novel, it does so in a way as to emphasize not the common themes among “cyberpunk” (notice the scare quotes) novels, but the common tone among the “cyberpunk” culture, and it does so while attempting to avoid big pseudo-intellectual sounding works like “pre-postmodernistic cultural decentralization.” From the start, let it be known that this is an academic text descended on high from the tips of the white ivory 1 <b>The Punk in Cyberpunk</b> The “cyber” bit is rather obvious—computers, networks, high-tech gadgets and all that jazz. But, the “punk” in cyberpunk, that’s not so easy to point out. The attitude is not hidden so much as it is fluid and protean. It is the viscera that keep the pages alive, long past the inevitable expiration date of their advanced science technology. In her introduction to Virtual Geographies, Sabine Hausser quotes Greil Marcus on the true nature of punk culture: “Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction, and thus sometimes seeking it...It was not history. It was a chance to create ephemeral evens that would serve as judgments on whatever came next” (Hausser 29). Hausser goes on to explain that while punk music was a Open Source Research Paper: I hereby relinquish all intellectual property rights to the following document. All quotations and citations stand as property of their respective owners; however while I sign my name to this essay, I hold no claim to any of the information past the original publishing. Do with it as you will. Alter away. Let it live. See appendices for more information. Storey 2 tower, posing as a gutter-born treatise and definitive word on “cyberpunk” fiction/culture/attitude/tone. With that out of the way, the reader is free to take the following with as much salt as she likes. There is no pretense on the author’s part (or perhaps there is plethora pretense), either way that was the introduction and this is The Thesis: Through language, format, and pacing, an artificial tone of fragmentation and separation permeates Neuromancer, shaping the characters’ choices and building their identities as both fragmented and artificial. short lived phenomenon, it helped define an attitude that served as a model for later generations. In turn, cyberpunk “defines itself in terms of an avant-garde and subculture. It’s members proclaim themselves rebels, revolutionizing science fiction and overthrowing the old order” (31). Take notice of the key words here: defines, proclaims, itself, and themselves. It would seem that cyberpunks (in this instance the word is being used as an adverbial noun to describe a group or class of people) take control of their own self definition the way non-cyber punks had done a generation before. Cyberpunks set themselves apart from mainstream science fiction culture by rebelling against tradition. Bruce Sterling is quoted as saying “Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human-being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats, and closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won’t make it go away. That is cyberpunk” (“Cyberpunk”). Apparently, cyberpunks set themselves up as dirty, gritty, hard-ass and at the same time cool (said with elongated o’s, preferably with lowered eyelids through a cloud of cigarette smoke). But then, there is that old saying about appearances and the art of deception. M.H. Abrams defines tone as “the expression of a literary speaker’s attitude to his listener. The tone of his utterance reflects...his sense of how he stands towards those he is addressing” (131). If we suppose this to be the case (and why wouldn’t we suppose so if it is included so authoritatively at the start of the paper), then one only has to look at Storey 3 how Gibson’s characters speak in clipped fragment sentences to realize the tone of the novel. As an example, take this short exchange between Case and Molly2: “You hurting?” he asked. “I could do with another night at Chin’s.” “Your dentist?” “You betcha. Very discreet. He’s got half that rack, full clinic. Does repairs for samurai.” She was sipping her bag. “You ever been to ‘Stambul?” “Couple days, once.” “Never Changes,” she said. “Bad old town.” (Gibson 85) This small section epitomizes the speech throughout the book—clipped and distant, as if the reader is hovering on the perimeter of a conversation she walked in on halfway through. Grammarians should be gnashing and wailing at this point, with perhaps two George Slusser points out that the term “cyberpunk” was not self created; instead the label was “bestowed by the media...sent back through the information loop to cohabit with writers who did not create it” (Slusser 3). So then how can it be said that cyberpunks create their own identity when their name, the very brand which defines their identities to the population at large, was created by an outsider? complete sentences in the entire dialogue. Remember though, that the tone of speech reveals the attitude towards the audience. The cut up slang of Gibson’s underworld dwellers helps them establish their punk attitude and, along with it, their super-cool counter culture identities. Sterling relates cyberpunk to rodent experimentation; Gibson’s punks try to turn themselves into the rats—by implanting technology into their bodies, but also by setting themselves up as outcasts and vermin via their too-hip-for-you argot. Neuromancer’s fragmented tone is present in more than the dialogue though. It appears in the jagged piecing together of the narrative and in the drastic separation between the protagonist (Case) and the title character (Neuromancer). In “No Future! 2 Case being the super-cool consol cowboy protagonist archetype clichéd by an ever growing market, and Molly being the super chic street samurai babe/love interest. Storey 4 Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration” Patrick Novotny enforces3 the themes of fragmentation, eclecticism, and bricolage4 within cyberpunk fiction. Novotny attributes the “cut-up literary technique” of most cyberpunk work to William S. Burroughs, and says the juxtaposition of these cut-up sections of text form a core textual methodology within the genre5 (Novatny 113). Neuromancer’s chapters are literally broken into different sections with each break representing a scene change. Sometimes the change takes a few seconds; sometimes it takes weeks or even months (as is the case with the change between parts one and two of the book). The scene cuts (to borrow a term from film6) do more than simply advance the time frame of the narrative; the cuts, like the dialogue, serve as a fragmenting factor, a way to separate the reader from the narrative and the characters. Many times Gibson will start a scene, develop the situation, and stop the action before the climax: Molly, 3 The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook will teach any |\|00b (translation: noob, or newb, or newbie) the ins and outs of how to be oh so cyberpunk. The Fakebook has detailed diagrams telling you what to wear (mirrorshades are a must), how to talk, and what to read/watch/drink. If you follow all the directions in the Fakebook, you will definitely look the media clichéd cyberpunk, but you won’t be a cyberpunk. You’ll be faking it, giving into the man, the media, and all the pop culture punk (cyber or otherwise) is supposed to reel against. In his introduction to the Fakebook, Sterling says, “We actual cyberpunks—by this I mean science fiction writers, damnit...we never sneer and we never dress like, God forbid, Tom Wolfe. We just laugh at inappropriate times...and we dress and act just like industrial design professors” (Sterling 9). At great length...|\|00b Bricolage being, “the manipulation of cultural forms and aesthetic representations in sites of resistance, the forging of a discursive space where alternative forms of cultural expression may emerge” (Novotny 102). 5 Or sub-genre, or non-genre depending on if you view cyberpunk fiction as part of SF, something different than SF, or just more of the same SF with a leather clad cult following. 6 And why not borrow a film term, since this whole cyberpunk thing is about bricolage, collage, merging and remixing, right? 4 Storey 5 scratching her stomach with “burgundy nails” (Gibson 45), Case tripping on betaphenethylamines in a hotel room (134) or buying a brutal melee weapon in Chiba city—“Three oiled, telescoping segments of tightly wound coil spring slid out and locked. ‘Cobra,’ she said” (15). Later, the narrative picks up somewhere else, in medias As soon as “cyberpunk” (in this case referring to the actual word cyberpunk, not the literary/cultural/technological movement/genre/style/slash) hit the media mainstream all hope of a self defined identity was lost. res7, and like Case fumbling around Chiba city trying to lose his tail, the reader is left to fumble out the details of what came before, of what happened in the space In 1995, MGM and United Artist released Hackers, the techno romp about a group of too-cool-for-you teen cyberpunks looking to rebel against an evil mega-oil-corp with the help of their Macintosh computers. The insert to the DVD release of Hackers discusses what the costume designers went through to capture the “current trend of technowear,” the club-scene “cyber fashion” (Hackers). While the designers note that most of the fashion is built around second-hand clothing, putting those second-hand clothes on high powered movie stars like Angelina Jolie turns statements into fashion, necessities into accessories, counter culture into pop. between paragraph breaks. These kinds of jumps become more and more prevalent as the novel progresses, especially after Case begins to flip between the Matrix and Molly’s simstim, which, because it allows case to tap directly into Molly’s sensory inputs but does not allow him to communicate with her, means Case and the reader are often thrown into scenes What’s worse, when actual hackers attempted to rebel in their own way against the mega-movie corp—i.e. by hacking the Hackers web site—the movie studio turned it into a marketing ploy: without prior context. Perhaps the most drastic separation, though, is between the title character and its actual introduction. Consider it this way: the first time the reader is introduced to the name “Neuromancer” is on the cover of the book, page 0 if you will. At this point, however, “Neuromancer” is 7 One of those fancy literary d\/\/33b terms I was going to avoid. Oops. Storey 6 just a work, a title, something to call the collection of bound pages. The idea that this word, “Neuromancer,” is actually a character does not come about until somewhere near the last third of the novel, page 180-ish depending on your edition. That leaves almost <blockquote>A group calling itself the Internet Liberation Front managed to ‘doodle’ all over the photograph of Hackers stars Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller, and replaced the verbiage, ‘this is going to be an entertaining, fun promotional site for a movie,’ with ‘this is going to be a lame, cheesy promotional site for a movie!’ The studio good-naturedly decided to maintain the site during the theatrical run of the movie in its altered form. (Hackers)</blockquote> two-thirds of the book between the introduction of the name and the introduction of the character, and while there are hints of Neuromancer’s manipulation of the characters earlier on (in particular the first time Case enters the AI’s simulated reality and discovers the late Linda Lee in a fabricated arcade), the reader is no more aware of Neuromancer’s presence than Case. Gary Westfahl, in “’The Gernsback Continuum’ and William Gibson,” claims Neuromancer is the story of Wintermute and his conjoined twin, Neuromancer, and that “excessive fascination with Gibson’s human characters has shifted concern away fro the artificial intelligence that is the real subject of the novel” (Westfahl 105). And while the construction of the AI’s identity is the drive behind the story, the novel is not Wintermute’s story, and it is not Neuromancer’s. To call it so would be to deny the majority of the novel, which focuses solely on Case and his journey MGM/United Artists turned a digital lashing out into a gimmick to give their site street-cred. At this point, other critics might proclaim the death of cyberpunk, but that’s a bit clichéd, and besides it would imply that “cyberpunk” existed before the media created it. Quite the contrary, “cyberpunk” was created by the media and imposed upon the identities of the authors writing a new style of literature. Sterling picked up the ball and ran with it for awhile, but never let it be said that “cyberpunk” was anything but a pop culture creation. The attitude—the punk in cyberpunk—though, that’s a different matter. Storey 7 to free/release/create this new form of intelligence8. The story begins with Case and it ends with Case and to ignore Case in favor of Wintermute/Neuromancer is to ignore the tone of the novel, the tone of fragmentation. Wintermute/Neuromancer need to be combined in order to be set loose upon cyberspace; however, Case must separate his consciousness from his body in order to accomplish most of his tasks. Both the tone and structure of the novel point towards fragmentation and so points towards Case. Along the same line of thought, though, it is impossible to ignore Wintermute/Neuromancer’s impact upon the novel9. The AI keeps the plot flowing and moves the story forward, it is the initiator of the action and the mastermind behind the hackers’ heists. One could build a very cyber metaphor by saying the AI is the code upon which the program of the story is built. Without the code, the program would not run, but then without the program, the code is just a collection of ones and zeroes. The fight for Lewis Shiner claims the word “cyberpunk” has been “commodified” in order to sell merchandise, everything “from comics to board games to specialty magazines for keyboard players” (Shiner 17). Shiner points out that while the first occurrence of the C-word came from a short story by Bruce Bethke in 1983, the word reached wide spread use thanks to the Washington Post’s Gardner Dozois, who used the C-word in an article dated December 30, 1984 (Shiner 17). From there it was a downhill tumble into the realm of advertisement and mainstream manipulation. After the style/genre/sub-genre/what-ever received a label, it could be defined. After the beast was named, it could be controlled. Like a system administrator tracking a true to life cyber-d00d back to his home IP, mainstream media had begun rooting out the nefarious underbelly of cyberpunk and shining it up for general public consumption. After the C-word was slapped onto a story, it had to contain mega-corporations, and hackers, and technology that jacked right into your head. Of course, the kind of “C-word” stories that come from this definition are the very embodiment “genre” pieces (and that’s genre said with as much distain and disgust a literary mind can muster). In other words, these “C-word” stories are prefabricated, fill-in the blank kind of tales that have inundated American culture for decades. But then, even saying that much is stretching the focus of the novel, as Case’s main motivation is not a desire to create something new, but to regain something old—his ability to access cyberspace and his need to retain that access when he discovers the neurotoxin sacs inside his body. 9 Duh, w/o the computer d00ds there wouldn’t be a plot, L4|\/|3R. 8 Storey 8 Shiner equates “formula” C-word stories to the typical North American hero genre adventure fiction: “the outsider who walks in, sets a problem right, and moves on. The problem usually involves a confrontation with representatives of an opposing viewpoint who are dehumanized (made to seem evil) and then blown away” (23). Disregarding the psychological implications of such twodimensional, violencesolves-the-problem, supreme independence pieces, the fact remains that C-word work is a rehash of previous archetypes and plot models. C-word fiction is not a new wave or a new genre, it’s the same old mediocre stories retold with newer gadgets. Shiner attempts to cull the beast of mainstream cyberpunk by giving it its own title, “sci-fiberpunk” (17). But it may be too late to stop the spread of the term and its implied (formulaic) meaning. Shiner admits this when he says, “It’s simpler yet to say, ‘You know. Cyberpunk. Guys with 10 dominance between the title character and the novel’s protagonist (being at this point a meta-textual battle for supremacy within the reader’s mind but only after examining the text as such in the context of this essay10) elaborates on the major tension (and major separation/fragmentation) in the novel—the tension between meat and mind and the fragmentation of both. At the novel’s start, Case is trapped within “the prison of his own flesh” (Gibson 6). The “relaxed contempt for the flesh” (6) he developed as a keyboard cowboy is now a slow torture and steady reminder that he cannot jack into the matrix. Case, who had reveled in the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” (6) is condemned to a solid, physical existence. He is exiled from his utopia and ensnared inside his meat, and so at the start, the reader finds Case wanting to rid himself of his flesh via the only method left open to him, namely suicide. And even after he regains access to cyberspace, a pure cyber (a pure mind) existence is denied Case at the beginning of the novel. He is forced back into a physical existence because the digital heists he is hired to perform require a simstim link with Molly. More jargon!!!!!111ONE Meta-textual??! WTF? @___@ J00 SUX0R d00d. XD Storey 9 From Case’s viewpoint simstim is “basically a computer chips in their heads’”(22). Leftist (punk) literature (in this instance known as Days of War Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners) claims the revolution cannot be televised, meaning as soon as a message hits mainstream media it ceases to “sell” the revolution. Instead, the revolution is used to “sell” something else, a band, a book, or laundry detergent. Now, the aforementioned book (which is filled with as much anti-propaganda propaganda as the farthest right-wing literature) talks about revolution in a political/social situation; however the metaphor of revolution easily carries over into the literary world. meat toy” and a “gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” (Gibson 55). Ollivier Dyens says the physical body in cyberpunk fiction is “not supple enough to integrate into itself the dynamics necessary to be an effective ‘player’ in the cyberpunk society,” (Dyens) and so the body becomes something to be discarded. However, in order for Case to pull of his hacking runs, he has to be able to see what Molly sees, and unfortunately feel what she feels. All of the runs Case performs require a bodily aspect to the hack. He needs a physical presence just as much as he needs a digital (mental) presence. When Case accesses Molly’s simstim during the run on If cyberpunk’s assumed purpose was to revolutionize the SF community, then scifiberpunk slit the throat of the movement. Sense/Net, he flips “into the agony of broken bone” (64) and almost passes out, driving home the physicality of his forays into cyberspace and his And yet there’s still that tone, that revolutionary punk attitude, present in authors of the “genre.” Authors like Shiner, St.Jude, and Sterling who recognize the prevailing cyberpunk/sci-fiberpunk stigmas and yet continue to work to create something new. connection to the meat world. Case’s abandonment of the meat is also hindered by his conversations with McCoy Pauly, also known as Dixie or just “Flatline.” The Flatline is a construct, a digitized duplicate of McCoy’s brain that exists even though McCoy’s body is dead. Dixie has attained meatless existence, Storey 10 and yet he hates his current state and wants to die: “I’m dead, Case...What bothers me is, nothin’ does...Do me a favor, boy...This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddamn thing” (105-106). Dixie relates his existence to phantom limb syndrome, claiming he’s like an amputate appendage—a mind without a body. At this point, it becomes convenient11 to examine the interesting fact that Dixie is a constructed consciousness. In “Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological12 Self,” Dyens talks about the self constructing aspect of cyberpunk identities. He claims cyberpunk identities are protean, shifting, multiple, and most importantly constructed: “In the cyberpunk universe, the body...is a schizophrenic construct; its identity is a centerless amalgam of informational systems” (Dyens). The building multiple cyber identities are not limited to literary characters either. Sociologist Sherry Turkle13, in her book Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, looks into real world identity construction. Turkle notes that online we are only who we say we are, and this construction allows us to explore other modes of identity not typically open to our physical selves, but identities that are set free in the mental plane of cyberspace. However, none of the identities in Gibson’s novel are self constructed. The Dixie construct was created by Sense/Net, Armitage was from Cordo’s memories by Wintermute who can only interact with people by taking on the visage of another person, Molly’s memories are altered by her former pimp employers, and Case and Linda Lee have their images/consciousnesses forcibly copied by Neuromancer. So while Turkle sees this identity construction phenomenon as a healthy experience, Gibson sets it up as something else for Case, Flatline, and the other characters in Neuromancer. Of course, it’s convenient at this point; the writer has authority here and gets to choose when things are convenient and when they aren’t. The reader, however, is advised to skip this section if he or she does not feel it is convenient to diverge at this point. j00 R w31c0m3. 12 More j4rg0n (?) 13 Along with many other (non “cyberpunk” centered) techno-analysts, including but not limited to: Howard Rheingold, Lisa Nakamura, Juilan Dibbell, John Perry Barlow, Abigail Van Buren, Jean Baudrillard, Ian Hacking, James M. Glass, etc. 11 Storey 11 In order to reach his utopia, a bodiless existence, Case must separate himself from his physical body. Jean Baudrillard makes note of this separation in “Simulacra and Science Fiction”: “in any case the dissociation from the real world is maximized, [and] the island of This attitude has to remain undefined though, otherwise it risks drifting into the realm of mainstream and suffering the same fate as the C-word. A defined, listed, named, and categorized punk will never be a real punk, and so the key to survival lies in continual reinvention and denial of a finalized existence. And in order to create something new, it has to be continually new, continually recreated, protean, and schizophrenic. utopia stands opposed to the continent of the real” (122). But, Baurdillard’s statement is tempered by the stipulation that an unattainable utopia is simply that, unattainable, a dream, “a lost object” (123). The punk literature (see hyper-box above) asks how much of your life comes at you through a screen, whether those are movie screens, computer screens, or television screens. According to the punk lit, screens fragment experience by making everything vicarious. However, Case doesn’t access cyberspace through a screen. He jacks into the network and pushes his consciousness into the virtual space. There is no separation between Case’s brain and cyberspace, and so the possibility of reaching his Utopia is a reality. In fact, Neuromancer offers to make that possibility real, and yet Case refuses him. Accepting the offer and reaching his utopia would cause Case to submit to eternal fragmentation and separation from his physical body, and in sort of ironic reversal put him exactly where he started—cut off from one aspect of his existence. At the beginning, Case was separated from his mental existence in cyberspace; by accepting Neuromancer’s offer, he would be separated from his physical existence in actual space. Storey 12 However, by denying Neuromancer’s offer he retains both existences as possibilities, attainable, and thus not lost. As a side effect of his denial, Case manages to complete his final run, combine Neuromancer and Wintermute, and create a new kind of AI, a new kind of technology, and a new kind of consciousness. The new Neuromancer is set free into the world of cyberspace through combination, not separation and fragmentation, but Case embraces those which Neuromancer is not and concludes his interaction with the AI by shattering the screen the AI appears on with a shuriken: “‘No,’ he said, and spun, the star leaving his fingers, flash of silver, to bury itself in the face of the wall screen. The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain. ‘I don’t need you,’ he said” (Gibson 270). Yes, Case returns to Chiba city, where he began the novel, but he returns as a man divided between mind and meat, not trapped within one or the other. Case is able to create through his denial, and through his fragmentation, he has access to multiple possibilities. And as Case denies Neuromancer, modern SF writers who wish to create something new—to write real cyberpunk, be real cyberpunks, and avoid the realm of definition—must continually deny categorization and terms. In order to be cyberpunk, you must deny it, but simply denying it does not make one cyberpunk. It is a paradox, a dilemma, a split, and it requires a certain tone, a certain special kind of attitude. Storey 13 Appendixes14 [A.1] Open Source The term Open Source was first used to refer to programming code that is free and available for anyone to view, alter, and make their own. In time, it was also expanded to the game mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons. The basic premise behind Open Source is two heads are better than one, and twenty are better than two. A slightly Socialist form of creation, Open Source implies that the product will be continually tweaked, continually recreated, and continually new. By giving up intellectual property rights to this essay, I am opening it up to the concept of an Open Source text, one that may or may not reach true cyberpunk-dom with its continual newness. [A.1.2] Wiki Wiki is a type of webpage that allows anyone to edit the content of said webpage. In the light of creating a truly Open Source text, I will make a PDF version of this file available on the internet at http://----------------------------, and a wiki version (which can be altered, saved, revised, and evolved) here: http://-------------------------------. For more information on wikies visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki. [A.1.2.3] Hyper-boxes In an attempt to simulate hypertext markup language throughout this (nonhyper)text document, I have included “Hyper-boxes” that can either be read in conjunction with the current page, or as a separate subsection of the paper. It is up to the reader to decide whether or not she wants to read all of the hyper-boxes at once, or read them one at a time as they appear on the page. Leaving a bit of the decision making process (albeit not all of the process) to the reader is a way of removing the authority of the author and, again, creating a type of living text. [A.1.2.3.4//xj117_be4Ul34v3] A brief l337 lexicon L337, or leet (shorten form of “elite”), is a type of internet slang that, frankly, makes words harder to read in an attempt to sound cool and cutting edge. While some claim l337 is faster to type in while playing online games, the real point seems to be to make your sentences as convoluted and confusing as possible. Misspellings are intentional and numbers are frequently substituted for actual letters. When attempting to read l337, it’s best to sound the words out phonetically. To help decode some of the very fragmentary words, here is a brief overview of common letter substitutions: A=4 14 E=3 O=0 (zero) S=5 T=7 Because all real literary works need these, don’t they? M=|\/| L=1 W=\/\/ N=|\| Storey 14 Works Cited Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 4th ed. New York: Holt, 1981. Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Science Fiction.” Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glasser. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 1994. “Cyberpunk.” Wikipedia. 11 May 2005. 26 April 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk>. Days of War Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners. CrimethInc, 2001. Dyens, Ollivier. “Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self.” Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal (2000): 26 pars. 25 April 2005 <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb00-1/dyens00.html>. Heuser, Sabine. Virtual Geographies: Cyberpunk at the Intersection of the Postmodern and Science Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Novotny, Patrick. “No Fugture! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration.” Political Science Fiction. Eds. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox. Columbia: S. Carolina UP, 1997. 99-123. Shiner, Lewis. “Inside the Movement: Past, Present, and Future.” Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens: Georgia UP, 1992. 17-25. Slusser, George. Introduction. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens: Georgia UP, 1992. 1-14. Sterling, Bruce. Introduction. St.Jude, R.U. Sirius, and Bart Nagel. Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook. New York: Random House, 1995. 7-9. St.Jude, R.U. Sirius, and Bart Nagel. Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook. New York: Random House, 1995. Westfahl, Gary. “’The Gernsback Continuum’; William Gibson in the Context of Science Fiction.” Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens: Georgia UP, 1992. 88-108.
