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Not everyone agrees. In the face of a burning planet, the idea of using technology to achieve immortality seems naive at best. Young people in China “lie flat” instead of working, and refugee children in Sweden have a “resignation syndrome”; in a world where despair is #mood, the desire to prolong life indefinitely is a bit vampiric, if not just gash. “Cyberpunk was relevant and important to boomers obsessed with law and order and determined to avoid the realities of human aging and incarnation. In 2021, we have new and different mass obsessions, which makes cyberpunk look weird, “said Kelly Robson, a Hugo nominee and winner of the Nebula Award. “In conclusion, fuck cyberpunk.”
Given that the world has caught up, if not surpassed, the imagination of the genre, its place in fiction can be limited or limiting in the way that Tolkien’s retelling can be limiting for the fantasy writer. This is one of the challenges of telling a future story: in the end, time arrives, like a rubber band returning to shape. And sometimes it stings. Readers often assume that authors are happy when they “predict” future events “correctly,” but they rarely ask us about the nasty feeling of watching the worst happenings. Describing his debut novel for CrimeReads, Lincoln Michelle said: “The body scout is an attempt to replace “cyberpunk” with flesh and look at what happens when the human body becomes the main area of technological innovation and corporate control… These days, the greatest anti-utopian novel may be the evening news. “
Just because cyberpunk history looks like the present doesn’t mean it can’t point to the future. Ten years after Bruce Betke published his 1983 short story Cyberpunk, Octavia E. Butler published what is perhaps one of the most influential novels in science fiction. A parable of the sower. It tells the story of a young black woman named Lauren Olamina, who lives outside Los Angeles in 2024, watching an authoritarian president be elected, human rights gutted, corporate cities built and old neighborhoods demolished. Lauren does what the characters do: she prepares. She gathers her mind and seeds and leads her community to freedom and, ultimately throughout the book, to the stars. Like most of Butler’s novels, he shifts the narrative focus from individual rebellion and success to community liberation and heritage. If cyberpunk warns of the cancerous late stages of capitalism, A parable he asked, “And what are you doing about it?” And while cyberpunk as a genre has acquired metaphors for slavery and autonomy, Butler’s books look at the actual transatlantic slave trade.
Butler’s fiction focuses on, among other things, genetic engineering, the embodied experience of aliens and post-humans, what the individual owes to his family and community, power and its use, terrible sacrifices in the name of survival. Remembering a dinner with her Essence, author and scholar Tananarive Due says Butler expressed the central question of her work as “How can we make ourselves more survivable?” Although considered the mother of Afrofuturism, her narrative patterns are repeated in all of cyberpunk genres: nadezhdapunk, biopunk, solopunk, etc. It echoes in Nalo Hopkinson Midnight robber, Premee Mohamed’s The annual migration of clouds, by Louise Erdrich Future home of the living God, by Nnedi Okorafor lagoon, Becky Chambers The long road to a small, angry planet, by Tade Thompson Rosewater, LX Beckett Gamechanger, and more. In Toronto, Black Lives Matter activists have just purchased a 10,000-square-foot community center for black artists and activists and named it the Wildseed Center of one of Butler’s books. Whether or not one of these qualifies as a cyberpunk activity is still an example of what the movement might look like.
In his notes, Butler said: “The struggle is to keep him together, keep him alive and teach him to be and do his best. It summarized Mother Olamina’s current mission, but also described the 21st century in astonishing detail. This is a work of science fiction aimed at the future. For better or worse, so many of cyberpunk’s android dreams have come true. Now we have to imagine how to rebuild.
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