Cyberpunk & Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson

ISBN-13: 9780485006070 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 280 str.

Dani Cavallaro

Opis

Cyberpunk is the fiction of a culture saturated by electronic technology. Its vocabulary is the language of cybernetics, biotechnology, corporational greed and urban subcultures. Massively successful in both book and film form, cyberpunk has redefined not only contemporary science fiction but also, through its capacity to anticipate technology and its cultural impact, analytical work in the social sciences and humanities.

Cyberpunk and Cyberculture explores the work of a wide range of writers -- Acker, Cadigan, Rucker, Shirley, Sterling, Williams and, of course, Gibson -- setting their work in the context of science fiction, other literary genres, genre cinema -- from Metropolis to Terminator to The Matrix -- and contemporary work on the culture of technology.

Seven main themes are addressed: the impact of virtual technologies on identity, space and community; the interplay of technological and mythological motifs; reconfigurations of the body initiated by technoscience; issues of gender and sexuality; the significance of the sprawling megacity; cyberpunk's Gothic traits of monstrosity; transgression and social unrest; and the editing of history and memory. This is a major effort to address how present day culture has been impacted by a new generation as well as a new technology.