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Christophe Den Tandt

Studies in American Naturalism, Volume 8, Number 1, Summer 2013,

pp. 93-108 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/san.2013.0003

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 Cyberpunk as Naturalist Science Fiction

Christophe Den Tandt, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Urban Naturalism for the Computer Age

Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), depicts a world Emile Zola,
Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Raymond Chan-
dler might have claimed as their own. The film opens with a panoramic
view of an industrial megalopolis identified in screen captions as 2019 Los
Angeles. Viewers discover a tangle of urban canyons, fire-spouting oil re-
fineries, and huge pyramid-shaped high-rises. Los Angeles streets bathe
in the glare of ubiquitous advertising graphics—neon signs, giant screens
on the face of skyscrapers, floating dirigibles blaring out commercial mes-
sages. The city’s crowds make up a multilingual mass exhibiting a dazzling
plurality of ethnic or subcultural dress codes. Above all, the cityscape pro-
claims through its manifold logos that it is a construct of powerful cor-
porations. In the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction, the film’s first
scenes follow a private investigator (Harrison Ford) as he calls on some
of the masters of this capitalistic world. Whereas in Dreiser or Chandler
such figures would include steel, oil, or newspaper magnates, in Blade
Runner they comprise corrupt policemen, genetic engineers, and robot-
ics tycoons.
Ridley Scott’s film reworks the thematics of urban naturalism and
hard-boiled novels not only by scrutinizing the power structure of the
urban-industrial scene but also by raising questions about the make-up
of the human subjects inhabiting this dystopian environment. The pes-
simism of classic literary naturalism was due to novelists’ suspicions that
modern subjects are human beasts—characters like Frank Norris’s McTe-
ague, superficially trained into the decorum of civilization, yet driven by

Studies in American Naturalism • Summer 2013. Vol. 8, No. 1

© 2013 Studies in American Naturalism
94 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

atavistic urges. Instead, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century science-fiction

attributes the disquieting hybridity of humans to their ever more intimate
relation to machines. Most humans and animals in Blade Runner are cy-
borgs, compounding biological processes, industrial refitting, and artifi-
cial intelligence. At one point, the private investigator, who specializes in
hunting down rogue androids, is asked to gauge the biological status of
the robotics tycoon’s secretary. It takes a personality test of more than a
hundred questions, accompanied by eye scans and blush-response moni-
toring, for him to ascertain that the young woman fails to elicit proper
levels of human empathy and is therefore an engineered organism. She is
similar to 2019 Los Angeles pet snakes or fishes: the latter are handcrafted
artifacts whose genes display serial numbers.
In early 1980s popular culture, Blade Runner marked the advent of cy-
berpunk, the science-fiction subgenre mapping the social relations gener-
ated by information and computer technologies. In an anecdote familiar
to sf fans, William Gibson—who would become the major novelist of the
budding movement—tried to see Ridley’s Scott’s film on its release, yet
soon had to flee from the movie theater because he felt the movie was
uncomfortably close to his own vision of the future. The publication of
Gibson’s award-winning first novel Neuromancer (1984) marked the break-
through of cyberpunk’s literary production. The text—the first install-
ment of Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy”—popularized a thematic feature that
would prove definitional for all later instances of the genre: the evocation
of polities electronically interlinked by what Gibson was the first to call
“cyberspace” (Gibson, “Burning” 197). The label cyberpunk itself, coined
by sf writer Bruce Bethke, refers to postmodern sf ’s concern both with the
socio-technological aspects of information-based societies and with the lat-
ter’s capacity to generate subcultures comparable to those spawned by rock
music. Two years after Neuromancer, the short-story collection Mirror-
shades (1988), edited by Bruce Sterling, publicized previous works by other
members of the cyberpunk group—Sterling himself, Pat Cadigan, Rudy
Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Mark Laidlaw, and Greg Bear. In addi-
tion to the Mirrorshades authors, later writers such as Neal Stephenson and
Cory Doctorow joined the movement, expanding it toward what is some-
times labeled postcyberpunk. Though cyberpunk sf has found its most so-
ciologically and technologically sophisticated expression in literature, it has
inspired a significant film corpus comprising, beyond Blade Runner, Ste-
ven Lisberger’s Tron (1982); David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and eX-
istenZ (1999); Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987); Andy and Larry Wachows-
ki’s The Matrix (1998); and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002).
 Christophe Den Tandt 95

Towards a Transhistorical, Transgeneric Naturalism

As cyberpunk maps the landscape of the near future, it perpetuates the
tradition impelling realist/naturalist artists to provide a totalizing chart
of new stages of social and industrial development. According to an ad-
mittedly schematic narrative of contemporary culture, each surge of real-
ism/naturalism—in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the late nineteenth-
century U.S., the 1930s, and indeed the 1980s—matches a moment when
the need was felt to assess social reconfigurations that had rendered the
field of urban-industrialism illegible. Mid-nineteenth-century English au-
thors, reacting to the Industrial Revolution, borrowed an evocative label
from essayist Thomas Carlyle in order to designate this literary-didactic
venture: the “Condition-of-England” novel (Kettle 165). Similarly, cyber-
punk provides a late twentieth-century condition-of-technocapitalism
survey: it expresses the response of early 1980s observers to the social im-
pact of the electronic media and the digital revolution.
Anchoring cyberpunk in the realist/naturalist tradition raises prob-
lems of literary-historical mapping and genre definition, however. Cy-
berpunk authors claim a cultural lineage that pays abstract homage to
socially oriented mimesis yet makes no explicit reference to the classic
expressions of realism and naturalism and sometimes even explicitly de-
viates from realism altogether. Within science fiction, Gibson, Sterling,
and their fellow writers acknowledge literary influences ranging from early
masters like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells; pulp-fiction stories and sf com-
ics; technologically-oriented hard sf from the 1950s to the 1970s; as well
as 1960s New-Wave authors like Harlan Ellison, Joanna Russ, Philip K.
Dick, Samuel Delany, and J. G. Ballard. With regard to these antecedents,
the cyberpunks profile themselves as realists insofar as they plead for a re-
turn to an sf idiom offering a scientifically informed assessment of tech-
nological change. In the prefaces to Mirrorshades and to Gibson’s Burning
Chrome—two texts that acted as cyberpunk’s manifestos—Sterling con-
tends that cyberpunk aims for the “self-consistent evocation of a credible
future” (“Preface,” Burning 10). The new genre carries out a “return to the
roots” of sf, reviving the spirit of Verne and Wells against later develop-
ments (Sterling, “Preface,” Mirrorshades xi). In particular, cyberpunk dif-
ferentiates itself from the production of 1960s and 1970s authors such as
Ursula LeGuin and Roger Zelazny, whose works verge on “sword and sor-
cery fantasies” (Sterling, “Preface,” Burning 10). Sterling’s claims suggest
therefore that cyberpunk fits Darko Suvin’s definition of classic sf as hy-
pothetical realism—a literary practice applying the epistemological prin-
ciples of the empirical sciences to hypothetical projections of the future
96 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

or to alternative constructions of reality (Suvin, “Poetics” 65; Suvin, “On

Gibson” 352).
Still, in an apparent departure from sociological mimesis, cyberpunk
also relies on antirealist postmodernist sources—the technological allego-
ries of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs, for instance, from which
they borrow their fascination for subcultures. Cyberpunk has according-
ly been greeted as one of the pillars of popular postmodernism (Jame-
son 38; Tabbi 215). It has generated a theoretical corpus—cybercriticism—
investigating the postmodernist thematics of humankind’s shift into a
posthuman future (Bukatman 30–31). Also, cyberpunk’s realist credentials
are undercut by the genre’s anchorage within mass culture. Cyberpunk is
often sensationalistic and escapist. It resorts to the epic fabulation oth-
erwise found in hard-boiled crime fiction or space opera: its narratives
promise their readers maximum excitement and the reassuring prospect of
their protagonists’ victory.
In this context, instead of implausibly arguing that cyberpunk fits the
classic concepts of realism and naturalism, we must redraw the latter genre
categories in more inclusive terms: the definitions required for the pres-
ent purpose should be, metaphorically speaking, long and broad. Realism/
naturalism must be stretched transhistorically to include texts chronologi-
cally remote from classic nineteenth-century instances. These definitions
must also be transgeneric: they must accommodate texts that, in addition
to mapping social conditions, obey conventions unrelated to the realist/
naturalist canon. In previous scholarship, there have been similar attempts
to identify modernistic variants of realism (Herman 148, 186), or to make
naturalism compatible with postmodernist writing or late twentieth-
century science (Pizer 391; Zayani 363). Serious obstacles stand in the way
of these endeavors, however. First, the transgeneric reconceptualization of
realism is bound to re-examine the latter’s basic epistemological possibil-
ity: it requires critics to specify how texts deviating from the classic real-
ist formula still render accounts of social reality. Second, one must deter-
mine whether the distinction between realism and naturalism retains its
relevance beyond the context in which it was initially articulated. In the
present case, there is no guarantee that the subject matter and philosophi-
cal outlook traditionally invoked to assert naturalism’s specificity—urban
poverty, proletarianization, prostitution, evolutionary determinism—will
have any bearing upon contemporary sf.
Though we cannot tackle the epistemological legitimization of real-
ism at large in these pages, we may nevertheless address the other above-
mentioned objections. First, realism and naturalism gain considerable
 Christophe Den Tandt 97

transgeneric breadth once we accept that no impassable barrier separates

mass-culture narratives from serious socially oriented mimesis. Cultural
studies scholars have shown that the popular narratives of crime fiction,
sf, or even the Hollywood western serve as carrier waves for a realist or
didactic payload: the realist/naturalist components of popular texts are
encoded within the broader lattice of patently non-realistic action sto-
ries (Naremore 103–04; James 198–99; Jameson 38). In this light, popular
narratives turn elements that by formalist standards would be discarded
as didactic digressions into the text’s primary focus of interest. Addition-
ally, cyberpunk epic narratives, however stereotypical, are socially sig-
nificant in their depiction of working subjects. Gibson’s fiction resorts to
what Will Wright, in an analysis of Sam Peckinpah’s westerns, has called
the “professional plot”—stories about groups of experts with a mission
(164). The protagonist of Neuromancer is a noir loser whose talents as
a computer hacker are reactivated when he joins a team of characters
with complementary skills—martial arts experts, computer gear sales-
men, media terrorists, and subcultural groups living in the margins of
the cyber culture. Narratives of this type carry out the realist agenda of
circumscribing the degree of autonomy available to protagonists in the
capitalistic labor market.
Second, given an adequate reading perspective, it is possible to estab-
lish that the realism/naturalism distinction lends itself to historical and
transgeneric transposition after all: a naturalist variant of sf, different to
some degree from its realist counterpart, can be isolated on the basis of
methodological principles structurally similar to those invoked in order
to mark out the same boundary in late nineteenth-century non-sf fiction.
Post–World War II scholarship suggests that naturalist writing obeys a
specific dialogical pattern: naturalist works play off the discourse of clas-
sic realism against elements of romance and the gothic (Walcutt 1; Kaplan
158–60; Den Tandt, Urban 16–20). From a socio-cognitive perspective,
this dialogical tension signals the interplay of two modes of perceiving
and representing the social field: while classic realism depicts the famil-
iar lifeworld—the “knowable community,” to take up Amy Kaplan’s term
(47)—naturalism, through its appeal to romance, peers beyond this pe-
rimeter and seeks to capture what James Naremore calls the “social fantas-
tic” (16). Naturalism’s romance components can admittedly not deliver an
analytical mapping of social conditions: they offer glimpses of what Mary
Papke, quoting Frank Norris, calls life “[t]wisted from the [o]rdinary”
(iii). Yet such romance sociology nevertheless ranks as a cognitive speech
act: naturalist texts thereby mark out the limits between what ought to be
98 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

represented in art at a given historical moment and what can actually be

mapped with the distinctiveness of a quasi-scientific gaze.
Ironically, transposing this rationale to science fiction risks nudging
the whole of sf away from realism and towards the naturalist end of the
spectrum. Everyday realism—the depiction of “the ignobly decent life,”
as novelist George Gissing grimly puts it (145)—seems to have little pur-
chase in a genre devoted to the hypothetical and the non-actual: with its
tales of extra-terrestrials, inhospitable planets, and reconfigured humans
sf reality seems twisted from the ordinary by definition. Therefore, in the
case of sf, new coordinates must be chosen to serve as the realist pole
of the dialogical axis: sf realism does not depict the everyday round of
life; it imagines states of society amenable to rational political, scientific,
and technological control. In other words, realist sf portrays the knowable
community nearing an idealized state of closure—at the point when it has
been thoroughly explored and reordered. In this logic, Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward (1888) and Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories qualify as
realistic, whereas works portraying far less stable hypothetical societies—
H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908),
and indeed Scott’s Blade Runner—are naturalistic. Admittedly, the dialo-
gized tension illustrated here implies no clear-cut contrast: the texts men-
tioned above stretch along the gradient of a dialogized field, ranging from
representations of the most tightly organized societies to the portrayal of
worlds accommodating ever higher levels of sociological or anthropologi-
cal entropy. Nor does this distinction match the familiar binary opposing
utopian and dystopian texts. Anti-utopias such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahr-
enheit 451 (1953), George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971), or Ira Levin’s This Perfect
Day (1970) paradoxically fall on the realist side of the line because they
postulate the possibility of rational—albeit oppressive—regimentation.
Naturalist sf is less one-sided. It examines what Mohamed Zayani evoca-
tively calls “the changing relation between order and disorder”—the en-
actment of political and scientific rationalization as well as the obstacles
that prevent the latter’s completion (349).
In this light, cyberpunk qualifies as naturalistic in so far as it focuses
not only on the construction of the social fabric of information societies
but also on the latter’s unraveling. Gibson’s Neuromancer indicates that in-
formation monopolies, however powerful, are countered by underground
groups using the very means technocapitalism makes available to its popu-
lation. Likewise, cyberpunk’s naturalism manifests itself in the suggestion
that the technological reshaping of the living subject brings with itself the
latter’s grotesque distortion. In Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), “super-
 Christophe Den Tandt 99

bright” mutants see their genetically boosted intelligence veer toward psy-
chosis (243). Many of Gibson’s characters favor monstrous technobiologi-
cal enhancements, giving rise to what I call the posthuman gothic (see
below). Finally, cyberpunk displays the naturalist propensity to highlight
the consequences of social, technological, and biological malfunctioning.
Camera implants in Gibson’s stories, unless crafted by prestigious brands
such as Zeiss Ikon, destroy their owners’ optic nerves (“Burning” 212). In
Sterling’s Schismatrix, orbital stations end up devoured by parasitical bac-
teria. Comically, in the same novel, technologically advanced aliens whom
humans admire for their mastery of interstellar travel can be blackmailed
for sexual perversion (138).

Cyberspace/Metaverse/Matrix: The Information

Society as Electronic Grid
Cyberpunk’s approach to social cohesion and entropy is inseparable from
its depiction of electronically interlinked polities. In this matter, cyber-
punk authors have played a role that pre-1980s sf had somewhat relin-
quished: they acted as Jules Verne-style futurologists, anticipating the
practical implementation of technologies that had only been theorized in
overly optimistic terms by techno-propagandists (Marshall McLuhan, Al-
vin Toffler), and had thus far been the preserve of scientists and the mili-
tary. With regard to science fiction itself, cyberpunk’s interest in the so-
cial impact of computing signalled a change in emphasis. Cybersystems
and artificial intelligences were not absent from previous sf, but they
were overshadowed by the genre’s fascination for space exploration, extra-
terrestrials, mutants, and android robots. Cyberpunk reversed these sf pri-
orities as it registered a change in the popular representation and market-
ing of computer technology. Until the 1960s and 1970s, data systems had
been depicted as colossal machines operated by the faceless technicians
of military, state, or industrial apparatuses. Cyberpunk, on the contrary,
made visible the social bond generated by what Joseph Tabbi calls the
“populist technology” of the 1980s—mass-consumption devices such as
personal computers and game consoles (218). The triumph of cyberpunk’s
futurological approach in this matter was the literary or filmic represen-
tation of the virtual field of interfacing now called the Internet. Though
a few major cyberpunk works—Blade Runner or Sterling’s early fiction—
make no reference to global interconnection, the genre would probably
not have become an identifiable subset of sf had William Gibson failed to
sketch out what computer users would discover only a decade later.
It is symptomatic of sf ’s anchorage in naturalism that cyberpunk
100 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

should make the Internet’s flow of electronic interfacing perceptible under

the guise of virtual cities—electronic environments structurally similar to
the real-space urban fields. The cyberspace “matrix,” Gibson suggests in
“Burning Chrome” (1982) and Neuromancer, is a “consensus hallucina-
tion” providing “an abstract representation of the relationships between
data systems” (“Burning” 196). The data thus stored and exchanged takes
on the visible shape of “an endless neon cityscape” (Neuromancer 256)
displaying the “bright geometries” of its virtual buildings and informa-
tion thoroughfares (“Burning” 197). In this, cyberpunk authors illustrate
metaphorically what urban studies researchers call the “virtualization”
of urban experience—the shift from conviviality in phenomenal space
to computer-generated social bonds (Ghent Urban Studies Team 88).
Real-space city settings in Gibson’s early works—notably the “Sprawl,”
a megalopolis extending from Boston to Atlanta (Neuromancer 43)—are
mirrored in an electronic matrix that in its densest spots displays such
structures as a “blue neon replica” of the rca building (Neuromancer 257).
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1993) provides an even more detailed ac-
count of how computer cities are constructed. This cyberpunk thriller un-
folds partly in the “Metaverse”—Stephenson’s name for cyberspace (24).
Within this field, computer hackers have created a virtual city called “the
Street” (24). The latter is a software-generated real estate tract shaped as a
“grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere”
(24). As such, the Street resembles a Las Vegas-like digital Strip with a di-
ameter “considerably bigger than Earth” (24). Its tectonics fit the mindset
of computer nerds: it accommodates programmers’ wildest fantasies, pro-
vided these constructs fit within a digital grid measured according to pow-
ers of two. Similarly, Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix drives the
virtualization of urban space to its mystifying fulfillment. Naïve urbanites
in this film mistake cyberspace for the actual texture of everyday life. Only
guerillas who have withstood a painful awakening process know that this
inauthentic cyberenvironment should by right be represented in the form
of computer screens displaying a ceaseless drip of cryptic digits.
Cyberpunk’s virtual cities are proper objects of transgeneric naturalism
in so far as they are not reducible to knowable communities: the apparent
clarity of their neon-like lattices is riven by fractures and contradictions.
On first inspection, the cybercity fulfills a fantasy that haunts the classic
naturalist representation of the urban world—the possibility to depict an
environment where social exchanges unfold on a single plane of existence.
Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle famously links all segments of French soci-
ety to the biological chain of one extended family. Theodore Dreiser’s city
 Christophe Den Tandt 101

novels present the urban spectacle as the manifestation of “[l]ife” or “the

world” (Titan 12; Sister 485). Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) and The Octo-
pus (1901) portray the U.S. economy as the traffic of one single commod-
ity: gold in the former case, wheat in the latter. Likewise, the fictional so-
ciology of cyberpunk takes for granted that information itself constitutes
the unifying principle of all economic and social exchanges. Still, neither
in classic naturalism nor in postmodernist sf does this monist concept of
the urban economy prove sustainable. The classic naturalist city resists the
efforts of protagonists and authors who seek to appropriate it as a manage-
able object. Likewise, the cybercity’s field of data, which should by right
be transparent to cognition, is not amenable to knowledge and political
control. Therefore, cyberpunk juggles with contradictory epistemological
and political evaluations of its electronic world. Two axes of uncertainty
structure this unstable mapping game: the texts explore whether the cy-
bercommunity is a closed or open field; simultaneously, they investigate
whether it offers a utopian or dystopian environment.
Cyberpunk’s depiction of the electronic city manifests authors’ rejec-
tion of a closed, dystopian information society and, conversely, their en-
dorsement of a pluralistic, utopian one. The threat of seeing the informa-
tion society act as a repressive total system was one of the obsessions of
early 1980s postmodernist theory. Jean Baudrillard, in his reflections on
what he calls the simulacrum, offers a provocative formulation of this view
(Simulacres 10; Amérique 9). He contends that late capitalism deploys ut-
terly impersonal signifying processes—a field of simulacra entirely closed
in upon itself. In a famous passage inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Baudril-
lard illustrates this notion by comparing the postmodern signifying econ-
omy to a map that has erased the territory it was meant to represent: the
technologically generated signs of consumerism have phagocytized real-
world objects and subjects (Simulacres 9). If nothing subsists beyond these
simulacra, individuals are left without any means to put their consumerist
lifeworld to the test of reality and thereby to resist it.
Cyberpunk’s response to such abstract technocatastrophism is emblem-
atic of the potentialities of naturalist sf defined above. Baudrillard’s de-
piction of postmodern American cities takes for granted that social insti-
tutions and subjects have been emptied out of existence, making urban
space equivalent to the desert (Amérique 66). The cyberpunk city seldom
resembles this nightmare: it still features distinct landmarks and agents—
capitalist conglomerates, in particular—with assignable, albeit fictional
names: the Tyrrell Corporation (Blade Runner), Ono-Sendai (Gibson’s
Neuromancer), or Blue Ant (Gibson’s Zero History [2010]). sf novelist
102 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

Samuel R. Delany has congratulated Gibson and his fellow writers for
highlighting the industrial aspects of the information age, thereby making
capitalism a topic of popular sf for the first time (Dery 197). This gesture
of political demystification is illustrated in Gibson’s Virtual Light (1993),
where protagonists use enhanced-reality glasses allowing them to spot the
network of capitalist ownership structuring the San Francisco cityscape
(133). The socio-political landscape revealed thereby is too determinate
and too open to consciously articulated power strategies to qualify as a
total system.
Similarly, cyberpunk counters the prospect of a homogenized cyber-
world by its representation of hypothetical subcultures of the electronic
age. In this, Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson emulate Thomas Pynchon
and William Burroughs, whose fiction sets itself the task of imagining the
various manifestations of a “counterforce” (Pynchon 611). Accordingly,
Gibson’s narratives churn out a roster of eccentrically named groups with
countercultural or criminal pursuits: “Johnny Mmnemonic” (1981) features
a band of Luddites called the “Lo Teks” and a Yakuza brotherhood named
the “Sons of the Neon Chrysanthemum” (28, 17); Neuromancer introduces
the “Panther Moderns” cyberguerillas and the “Zionite” Rastafarian orbit-
al station (57, 103); Virtual Light follows the adventures of anti-capitalist
“Cognitive Dissidents” (131). Similarly, Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988),
echoing Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s libertarian theories, introduc-
es the “Rizome” network of economic democrats and their opponents, the
Free Army of Counter-Terrorism” or “F.A.C.T.” (3, 132). Sterling’s Schis-
matrix offers a catalogue of posthuman subcultures divided among advo-
cates of genetic programming (the “Shapers”) and of techno-prosthetic
enhancements (the “Mechanists”) (5). Stephenson’s Snow Crash and The
Diamond Age (1995) provide satirical surveys of a fragmented global culture
where nation states have been eclipsed by planetwide privatized franchis-
es such as “CosaNostra” and a Neo-Victorian fraternity called “Atlantis”
(Snow 35; Diamond 12). Overall, through its commitment to social plural-
ism, cyberpunk evokes a postindustrial configuration in stark contrast not
only with Baudrillardian total-system theories, but also with golden-age sf.
The nodal points of the cyberpunk world are no longer the power centers
of a technocratic elite but marginal environments such as shady computer
stores, underground clubs, orbital leisure resorts, and hide-outs for cor-
porate mercenaries. These settings spread across several planes of being—
phenomenal, virtual, and orbital—making up a pluralist space that might
best be called a postmetropolis. In this world, social bonds based on soli-
darity give way to what Sterling calls “[f ]luidarity” (Schismatrix 216).
 Christophe Den Tandt 103

Still, alongside the endorsement of postmetropolitan fluidarity, cyber-

punk discreetly gives voice to nostalgia for a utopian form of closure—an
emotion rooted in anxieties over techno-induced social and existential dis-
sociation. Gibson develops this theme in passages reflecting on the possi-
bility to achieve a total grasp of cyberspace. In Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988),
the leader of a youth gang living in a New Jersey industrial waste land is
obsessed with “the Shape” of the matrix (75). He investigates this question
with the help of a protagonist whose deep immersion in cyberspace allows
him to dialogue with the “loa”—voodoo-like entities presiding over the
matrix’s fate (10). In Gibson’s Count Zero (1986), a young gallery opera-
tor is asked to locate the creator of ready-mades reminiscent of surrealist
sculptor Joseph Cornell’s collage boxes. Each of these art works is a micro-
cosmic “universe” made up of odds and ends of the cyber-postmetropolis,
thereby allegorizing the latter’s putative closure (28). Both the ready-made
artist of Count Zero and the electronic Voodoo deities in Mona Lisa Over-
drive are revealed to be artificial intelligences—a narrative twist signalling
that the totality of the cyberenvironment remains elusive to human sub-
jects. Similarly, several subcultures of Gibson’s, Sterling’s, and Stephenson’s
cyberworld paradoxically yearn to revert to pre-electronic harmony. The
Rastafarian Zionites of Neuromancer regard the postmetropolis as a dis-
tended version of fallen Babylon (248). Sterling’s Schismatrix depicts an or-
bital city-state—the Neotenic Cultural Republic—that disavows fluidarity
and advocates conservative “[p]reservationist” policies (230, 11). Stephen-
son’s Atlantis New Victorians preach a social discipline that counteracts the
centrifugal drift of the technologies they otherwise zealously develop.

Posthuman Gothic
Beyond the nostalgia for a retotalized lifeworld, misgivings about cyber-
pluralism underlie the often gruesome fashion with which sf authors rep-
resent the technological reconfiguration of human bodies and subjects.
Cyberpunk signals its hesitations about the value of technological change
by developing a discourse of posthuman gothic. I have argued elsewhere
that classic naturalism approaches new urban conditions with a mixture
of fascination and disgust, thereby giving rise to a naturalist variant of the
urban fantastic (Urban 124–30). In turn-of-the-twentieth-century texts,
these troubled emotions are stirred by the social, ethnic, and gender fea-
tures of the populations of fast-developing cities. In cyberpunk, gothic
discourse issues from the defamiliarizing modes in which human sub-
jects interface with software and machines. This aspect of the near future
fuels, on the one hand, utopian hopes about the enhancement of mind
104 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

and body: Scott Bukatman celebrates the advent of what he calls a “ter-
minal” subject linked to its environment through multiple connections
(9); Donna Haraway looks forward to an egalitarian polity of “[c]yborgs”
transcending human restraints (149). On the other hand, the posthuman
condition stirs fears of the traumatic reshaping, even the loss of the sub-
ject. When the development of the cybersubject is viewed negatively, the
resulting critique of technology amounts to an indictment of information
capitalism. Computer systems, cyberpunk authors suggest, drive reifica-
tion to new extremes: their technology is, as Sterling puts it, “invasive”
and “visceral,” and as such is capable of introducing privatization, exploi-
tation, and inequality into aspects of the human experience that had hith-
erto been sheltered from it (“Preface,” Mirrorshades xiii).
There is admittedly some grim playfulness in cyberpunk authors’
portrayal of posthuman reconfigurations. Early 1980s texts—Gibson’s
“Sprawl Trilogy,” Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist cycle—compete in imagin-
ing the most eccentric couplings of body, consciousness, prosthetics, and
data. The thematic topography of this posthuman bestiary is structured
by an axis whose polar opposites are, on the one hand, the expansion and
metamorphosis of bodies and subjects and, on the other, their disruptive
invasion and hybridization. Posthuman expansion is the keynote of a the-
matics of technopsychedelism. In a fashion reminiscent of Burroughs’s
surrealistic sf novels, jacking into cyberspace is compared to shooting
mind-expanding drugs. Casey, the protagonist of Neuromancer, is initial-
ly portrayed as a cyberaddict who has been severed from the matrix for
weeks. When he jacks in again, the experience has the value of a heroin
high. Likewise, in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, characters seeking
an ever deeper immersion into the matrix follow the curve of a worsen-
ing addiction. Sterling’s Shapers/Mechanist cycle depicts posthuman en-
hancements in more optimistic colors. Mechanist expansion is illustrated
in the figure of protagonists nicknamed “wireheads,” whose reliance on
mind-to-computer interlinking and technological prosthetics takes them
beyond human physicality (Schismatrix 195). The eponymous heroine of
“Spider Rose,” for instance, is the two-hundred-years-old custodian of an
orbital station. She is “brain-linked” (259) to multiple sensors, allowing
her to gaze “a quarter of a million miles into space” (259). The Shaper
version of posthuman expansion, achieved through genetic programming,
produces figures such as Kitsune in Schismatrix. The former employee of a
brothel franchise called the “Geisha Bank,” Kitsune reshapes herself into a
full-fledged orbital world powered by giant multiple hearts (11). This new
 Christophe Den Tandt 105

organic tourist resort boasts walls of human flesh and furniture made of
ivory cloned from Kitsune’s teeth.
The invasive/hybridizing dimension of the posthuman make-over—the
colonization of bodies and minds by information technology—is arguably
one of cyberpunk’s most familiar themes. Gibson introduces it in “Johnny
Mnemonic”: the eponymous character’s skull is graced with a computer
plug allowing him to store information on an “idiot/savant basis” (15); the
data is secured by a password to which Johnny has no access. Similarly,
protagonists in Count Zero enhance their value as mercenaries by down-
loading into their nervous system software packages conferring instant
foreign-language proficiency or airplane-flying skills. In the same novel
and in Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gibson drives the logic of techno-invasion to
its logical conclusion by introducing a character—Angie Mitchell—who
has been grafted neural “receptors sites” allowing her to access cyberspace
without hardware connection (Mona 18). Angie experiences her organic
relation to the matrix as a quasi-psychotic experience: her mind echoes
with the voices of the electronic Voodoo loa.
Technological invasion is inseparable from hybridity, since the intro-
jected augments interact with the human substratum in order to create
new posthuman life forms. Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” features two
transsexual club bouncers called the Magnetic Dog Sisters, who have re-
shaped themselves into thin, muscular, greyhounds—one white, the oth-
er black. The Lo Teks rebels in the same story boast fang-like implants
borrowed from Doberman pinschers. The posthuman cultures depicted in
Sterling’s Schismatrix and in Rudy Rucker’s erotic stories are more eccen-
tric still: the Lobsters in Schismatrix are cyborgs whose previously human
consciousness has been introjected into shell-like bodies that withstand the
vacuum of deep space. Rucker’s Freeware (1997) depicts the various ways in
which intelligent augments may be added to human bodies for erotic pur-
poses. Technohybridity, these examples suggest, acts as cyberpunk’s major
source of gothic intensities because it involves the redrawing of key exis-
tential boundaries. Gibson’s early fiction introduces a device called sim-
stim, which allows users to share another person’s perceptions, violating
traditional concepts of selfhood. Other techniques create beings straddling
life and death: the characters of Neuromancer seek the help of Dixie Flat-
line—a deceased hacker whose consciousness has been preserved on disk;
in Count Zero, the wealthy Herr Virek lies in near-death state in hospital,
yet he summons guests to his virtually generated mental world. Predict-
ably, characters find The Flatline’s software-generated laughter chilling and
Virek’s virtual bubble uncanny (Neuromancer 169; Count 25).
106 Studies in American Naturalism vol. 8, no. 1

Cyberpunk and the Politics of Naturalism

In political terms, the ambivalence with which cyberpunk approaches the
social landscape of the near future constitutes still another transhistorical
link to earlier stages of naturalism. For most of the twentieth century, the
fiction of Zola, Norris, and Dreiser was interpreted as a vehicle of liberal-
ism and left-wing politics. Yet in recent decades, naturalist politics have
been re-evaluated in less idealistic terms. Scholars have highlighted the
novels’ lapses into sexism and racism, and their covert fascination with na-
scent consumerism (Den Tandt, “Refashioning” 405). Naturalism’s hith-
erto unacknowledged ideological complexity is noticeable in its reluctance
to attribute a stable value to the social phenomena it depicts. Frank Nor-
ris’s The Octopus initially praises the struggle of California farmers against
railroad trusts only to endorse the same corporations’ conquering spirit in
its last pages; Dreiser’s Sister Carrie depicts Chicago streets both as “wall-
lined mysteries” and as channels in “the great sea of life,” thereby hinting
that this site of capitalistic alienation may enigmatically buoy up vital en-
ergies (7, 13). By the same token, it is not clear whether cyberpunk, with
its mixture of utopian and dystopian accents, glamorizes or debunks the
virtualized postmetropolis and its posthuman reconfigurations. Its utopi-
an component is expressed in Gibson’s belief that “the street finds its own
use for things”: a pluralist street culture is able to turn new technologies
to emancipatory ends (“Burning” 215). Yet cybercritics such as Joseph Tab-
bi and Mark Dery wonder whether, under its veneer of political dissent,
postmodern sf does not merely exacerbate its audience’s craving for capi-
talistic gadgetry (Tabbi 218; Dery 194). Hampered by the sensationalism
of popular literature (as classic naturalism may have been by the ambigu-
ous intensities of the gothic), cyberpunk might lack the analytical subtlety
to make good on its intended critique of technocapitalism.
Without dismissing this negative judgment, one may object that the
chief value of classic naturalism and cyberpunk has been less their capacity
to analyze an emergent social configuration consistently than to make the
latter available for literary negotiation. Ambivalence is in this respect im-
putable to the shock of the new—the discovery of urban industrial con-
sumerism in the former case, the response to infocapitalism in the other.
If so, the greater political peril incurred by naturalism old and new lies less
in unrefined political evaluation than in the absence of social mapping al-
together. The evolution of cyberpunk beyond the 1980s has unfortunately
veered towards this pessimistic scenario. The sf field in recent decades has
been characterized, on the one hand, by the dissemination of cyberpunk’s
 Christophe Den Tandt 107

technological imagery in superficial form through feature films and tele-

vision, and, on the other, by the dominance of the dragon epics of heroic
fantasy. In these circumstances literary cyberpunk has failed to retain its
dialogical balance: as it morphed into postcyberpunk, its realist and natu-
ralist components have grown asunder. Gibson’s later novels—Pattern Rec-
ognition (2003), Zero History—take the realist path: they shun defamiliar-
izing technological speculations, and provide a fragmented portrayal of
a postindustrial present discreetly altered by the information economy.
Stephenson’s recent fictions—Cryptonomicon (1999), or his sprawling “Ba-
roque Cycle” (Quicksilver [2003], The Confusion [2004], and The System of
the World [2004])—opt for naturalist romance: they resort to uninhibited
fabulation on scientific and technological topics. In the process, the deli-
cate equilibrium of hypothesis and observation required for naturalist sf
is found missing.

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