Post-Human: The Cultural Limits of "Cyberpunk"

Including an electronic conversation with Bruce Sterling, and his own selected list of cyberpunk readings

Abstract

This paper is in itself a hybrid form, as hybridity is also one of its main concerns. The authors of this “article plus interview” are at pains to fight back the effects of the poststructuralist belief in the undecidability of meaning: they try to fix the meaning of SF genre cyberpunk. In order to accomplish this fixing task they point out the assumedly most remarkable features of the 1980s genre: its interest in literary renewal, its antihumanist stance, and its most interesting topoi, namely the gloomy landscape, the individual independent hero, and the transgression of the dichotomic animate/inanimate. Their analysis leads the authors to conclude the paradoxical hybridity of cyberpunk, by them temporarily located between some old humanist and modernist values and the opposing stance of the postmodernity. These theoretical lucubrations are followed by an interview to cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling where he discusses about beginnings and ends of the literary SF movement and depicts the new type of cybernetic human that is sprouting from our technotronic Western civilization. The paper ends with a list of Sterling’s suggested readings for anyone interested in the genre.