Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?

Nixon, Nicola. "Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?" SFS #57, 19.2 (July 1992): 219-35.

Cogent and lively examination of the often-asserted revolutionary agenda in cyberpunk, "first placing it within the context of its immediate feminist antecedents, then raising a number of questions on its peculiar reliance on specific cultural icons popular in the Reaganite America of the 1980s" (Abstract 235), emphatically including cyberspace cowboys seen as "capitalist entrepreneurs." NN concludes that cyberpunk is "not radical at all" (231). (The debate itself may be of interest for the assumptions even in cyberpunk works in the Age of Thatcher and Reagan that radical literature is desirable and that hard-copy books might have significant political affects.)