Science Fiction and Politics: Cyberpunk Science Fiction as Political Philosophy
Michaud, Thomas. "Science Fiction and Politics: Cyberpunk Science Fiction as Political Philosophy". In New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, editors. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 2008: [65]-77.[1]
"Cyberpunks develop a political mythology founded on technology, particularly on virtual reality [VR]. This essay will focus on the political philosophy generated by cyberpunk science fiction through the analysis of the rock of William Gibson, specifically his Sprawl trilogy: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive (Michaud, p. [65]).
Michaud finds Gibson's 1980s cyberspace "primitive," contrasted even with the metaverse in Neal Stephenson's 1992 Snow Crash. In Gibson's novels, cyberspace is a cybernetic landscape produced by the interconnection of machines. Hackers are the far persons able to penetrate the sanctuary of machines" (p. 66); cf. and contrast the moments of humans in the world of machines in A. C. Clarke's The City and the Stars. It's the US wild west, from a "cowboy" point of view.
"The second age of hackers in science fiction begins with Stephenson's Snow Crash, in which the metaverse is a new town artificially created and in which it is possible to connect" (p. 66).
Other works covered or at least mentioned include Permutation City, THE MATRIX, INNERSPACE, Gibson's own Idoru, Pat Cadigan's Synners, THE TERMINATOR, CYBORG, Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Jorge Luis Borges's 1949 story "The Aleph."[2]
Stresses libertarian aspects of cyberpunk, mentioning its tensions but not spending much time on c-p's downsides. Cyberpunk, "proposes a radical liberty in the use of new technologies. Faced with the technocratic organization of real societies, virtual territories are lands of freedom, without rules. Information is completely free, and cyberpunk philosophy has inspired the hacker ethics advocating the horizontal circulation of information" (p. 69).
RDE, finishing, 23Dec21