For Shurin’s next principle, he states:

Cyberpunk is inextricably linked with the real experience of technology.

Cyberpunk exists as a subgenre of science fiction, and therefore it focuses naturally on a more narrow aspect of the genre. Shurin notes that this definition in particular limits the scope of what cyberpunk is. I think cyberpunk as a genre both resists and welcomes this type of labeling. On the one hand, resistance to any formal definition is inherent in the counterculture movements that cyberpunk was built upon. Trying to place firm labels and gatekeep the genre is far from the ethos of its origins. On the other hand however, there is a cultural critique that makes cyberpunk what it is, and when that specific critique gets bogged down by qualities from of the genre, it can lose some of its luster.

Cyberpunk was born out of the anxiety that many people were feeling around technology and the pervasiveness with which it began to take over our lives. It continues for that same reason—in the AI era, the social media era, the smartphone era—our lives are more connected with technology than ever before. The current of technological anxiety runs thick, and with recent movements such as the new luddite movement taking hold, the suspicion around technology is very high.

Shurin goes on the explain his point, saying that:

As a genre about technology, and not “science” more broadly, there are limits to cyberpunk’s scope. Technology, in this context, is manufactured. Cyberpunk is not science fiction that explores the ramifications of something inherent (such as the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin), innate (such as fiction that focuses on xenobiology, mutation, psychic powers, or other “flukes of biology” stories), or encountered (such as stories about discovering or exploring alien civilizations, lost worlds, or strange artifacts). By focusing on technology as a product, cyberpunk is about agency: it speaks about change that we are attempting to bring upon ourselves.

So technology is something inherent in the genre and it is something that, most importantly, is developed by humans. Cyberpunk is largely about the effect that humans have on ourselves through the use and creation of technology. Which is why the what-ifs and imagined futures in the genre can be so poignant. We recently had a cultural moment where many AI researchers came out saying that there is high likelihood that AI could cause the end of humanity. To which many rational people responded, “Well, why are we continuing to make it it then?” It is not alien technology, is it not xenobiology, it is a bunch of computers and processors and RAM and code and neural networks made by people. You don’t get much more cyberpunk than that.

Genres however, change and grow. To assert that cyberpunk must stay in this thin lane of techno-cultural critique and never grow lest it become something else, feels so very anti-cyberpunk. Of course the genre has grown an evolved, but I think it’s interesting to look at the cost of that.

Let’s look at an example in the staple work of Altered Carbon.

Altered Carbon is originally a 2002 novel by Richard Morgan, which follows the character of Takeshi Kovacs. In Morgan’s world, people’s consciousnesses have been digitized and inserted into bodies known as “sleeves”, allowing people to live for multiple lifetimes. Consciousnesses are stored in the base of the head, in something known as a cortical stack. In universe, that technology comes from an alien metal that humanity found after colonizing many other worlds across the galaxy.

I don’t think anyone who knows their cyberpunk is going to consider Altered Carbon anything but, however, we see here that Morgan broke one of Shurin’s principles. In a small way, we are dealing with found technology. But I think we can argue here that what keeps Altered Carbon firmly cyberpunk is its focus. While the technology may have come from an alien source, Morgan’s focus in the novel is how humanity has morphed that technology into something of their own, and how that technology is affecting humanity. The crux of cyberpunk is looking at humanity’s relationship with the tech, and Altered Carbon absolutely does that. It examines how the rich might live forever in a world like this through mass cloning of their sleeves. It examines identity in a world where you trade bodies.

I mentioned in the second part of this series that a lot of early cyberpunk read as fairly realist, but perhaps a better way to put that is that the problems they were concerned with were different than more modern cyberpunk. Of course, works like Neuromancer dealt with world altering AI and the like, but a genre classic like Pat Cadigan’s Synners spent a not insignificant portion of the book showing how bad the traffic would be in a future LA where all driving is automated by a system called GridLid.

These are interesting ideas, but they have been done. Because of the narrow scope of cyberpunk when viewed from this principle, there are only so many places new writers and creators can go. Which is why I think genre blends and pushing the “rules” of the genre are inevitable.

I think Shurin is largely correct though. If we look at cyberpunk as humanist literature that questions the technology we have created and the fundamental repercussions of that (commoditization, for instance), then the waters do start to get muddy once we add in these different elements.

At the same time, it is a genre that some people think has died or will die soon, especially with the AI world we now live in. Writers must iterate then, for nothing dies as fast as a stagnant genre. If cyberpunk resists natural crossing or mixing, then I would also agree that it is probably doomed to die.

Muddying the waters sometimes can be good. I think new writers in the genre should understand these fundamental points, but not let their creativity be hindered by them. It is a genre that was born from bizarre imaginings of the future, and it will only thrive if we keep it that way.