Dark Future Canon - What Constitutes and What Influenced Classic Cyberpunk? - Part 1: Introduction and Western Media, 1979-1995

 

Cyberpunk has long since been my favorite flavor of science fiction. It is political, near-future, gritty, and has informed my taste in many things growing up, from music to clothes to books and the sciences. What the genre itself is though, what entries there are that are or are not entirely canonical and defining of it, has always been a glorified pissing contest between several kinds of geeks and nerds. For some, cyberpunk was basically a catch-all thing where amoral superheroes with cyberpowers ruled supreme, fighting the power of megacorporations, one microchip at the time. For others, it was a grim, gritty, “honest” outlook at our collective future and needed to be treated with utmost respect, where down-on-their-luck low-life heroes were engaged in a constant uphill struggle against the man. They, too, might have had cyberpowers, but those were no match for the corporate, capitalist machine they raged against. But what was it that made that genre? What were the main entries into it – and what were important cultural, adjacent influences? With the immanent release of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 video game, it is time for an analysis. What is the history of cyberpunk in popular media? Personally and objectively? What works constitute cyberpunk genre canon?

Cyberpunk 2020 - A Hodgepodge of 1980s Tropes about the immanent dark future

I should backtrack a little. The most important thing for me, as a kid of the 90s, in terms of cyberpunk were always roleplaying games (RPGs). First and foremost FASA’s Shadowrun and R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk 2020. For many RPG nerds back in the day, those two represented two irreconcilable ideals. Shadowrun was, to many, the colorful, comic book variant. Cyberpunk 2020 was for the grown-ups, a game that lacked magic, elves and dwarves and dragons, and instead was markedly grittier, deadlier and extremely serious business. Not Twilight 2000 / Millennium’s Edge serious, but close. Most of my friends sat somewhere in between. We liked the gritty hyper-realism of Cyberpunk – but we also liked the additional color that Shadowrun offered, and so we played the latter with the spirit of the former.

In terms of influences, both roleplaying games shared a wide variety between each other. The quintessential roots of lower-case cyberpunk, the ur-texts, so to speak, were always William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, probably the purest in terms of original lower-case cyberpunk fiction that really defined the genre, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which defined the look and feel of the genre for decades to come. The core elements of cyberpunk were – and to some extent still are – computer hacking, a decaying, overpopulated, urban landscape of neon lights, derelict drifters, surveillance, a police state, virtual reality, questioning where humanity ends and begins, low-life protagonists who exists on the edges of society, extreme body modification and a mostly futile battle against - and within - an all-powerful globalized hyper-capitalism. The cyberpunk future of the 1980s kinda sucked. And yet it was somehow appealing. It sucked as much as the present, but hey, at least you got to look cool and have cool toys.

With Magic and Dragons, Shadowrun was the decidedly more comic - but also more versatile - of the classic cyberpunk RPGs

Gibson supposedly made the point that in the 1970s a very popular sub-genre of science fiction was post-apocalypse thrillers in which the world had ended – most of the time in nuclear fire – which was a reflection of the time’s popular anxieties. Cyberpunk denied that easy out from the hells of the present. The cyberpunk world was one in which cleansing nuclear fire did not wipe the slate clean, but one in which the worst aspects of the 1980s western world simply kept chugging along. Reaganism and Thatcherism just continued forever. A vision of the future was the economy trickling down on a human face – forever.

Classic cyberpunk of course also had a lot of problematic streaks. In 1980s America – and this genre is quintessentially American – a big, cultural fear was that the faltering American economy would lose in the global race for domination to all kinds of foreign powers. One was the Soviet Union, but another one, a more direct competitor on the capitalist battlefield, was Japan. Classic cyberpunk had something of an obsession with Japan. Japanese megacorporations ruled that fictional world with an iron fist. But at the same time, anything Japanese was extremely cool to the point of fetishization. Manga, anime, Japanese culture, Japanese capitalist culture, all the things, were at the same time alien, exciting, intimidating, scary, unknowable and just cool. Without much understanding needed.

All of these things would strongly impact Cyberpunk 2013 / 2020 (first and second editions of the popular tabletop roleplaying game, respectively) and Shadowrun in its various iterations. I focus on these two intellectual properties, because for me, personally, they offer the best lens through which to view the genre. Both portrayed essentially similar worlds, even if one had magic and dragons and the other did not. Both prominently featured Japanese megacorporations locked in a cold war for global domination with other, mostly American ones. Both were strongly influenced by popular media of the 1980s and early 1990s. This seems important. Classic cyberpunk is very much pre-The Matrix (1999) if not pre-Ghost in the Shell (1995). But popular media up to 1995 was essentially what informed the classic cyberpunk look and feel and general outlook on the world.

 The cast from Alien - Regular working class people thrown to the (space) wolves by their corporate masters 

So what is classic cyberpunk canon? It is very much open-ended and I would include more things in it than most people. But this series of posts is by means meant to be exhaustive, and I am sure to have omissions in them - either by accident or ignorance. Ridley Scott’s Alien is quintessentially cyberpunk – even if it lacks any urban themes. A group of low life workers have to face horrors unleashed upon them by their corporate employer/overlords. Blade Runner of course. Personally, the works of Philip K. Dick themselves are less cyberpunk canon than many of their adaptations. Most of the work of William Gibson however, is canon. The Terminator movies – again, low-life protagonists on the edges of society fight icons of the corporate / military industrial complex apocalypse. And the villain in the 1991 sequel is a cop. Robocop. All of them, even the bad ones, are quintessential cyberpunk. The series deals with issues of urban decay, urban crime, corporate gentrification, cyber ware, questions of the line between man and machine, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t get much more cyberpunk than this. Of course one might question the “-punk” moniker here, since the eponymous hero is still law enforcement. Regardless, most of Paul Verhoeven’s movies of this time are pretty essential canon entries. Including Total Recall.

While Blade Runner defined what cyberpunk cityscapes looked like, Tron defined the look and feel of cyberspace for a generation

Probably the only contribution to classic cyberpunk by the Walt Disney Corporation was the 1982 live-action movie Tron. Predating Neuromancer by two years, Tron presented an early vision of what William Gibson would later call cyberspace – a fully immersive, virtual environment inside a computer. Sure, Tron was a children’s movie, yet the themes and tropes it dealt in – corporations, hacking, a low-life programmer living above a bar as the protagonist setting out to fight the corporate computers – were all foundational building blocks for classic cyberpunk. The visual aesthetics were groundbreaking, and while the story was all a bit silly, the aesthetics and the Wendy Carlos synthesizer soundtrack created an undeniably central pillar of the genre – target audience be damned.

Most classic cyberpunk media is science fiction or otherwise genre-adjacent. John Carpenter’s Escape from New York is another classic. While generally more satirical than often appreciated, the depiction of near-future American inner cities as decrepit hellholes abandoned by the law altogether, a ruthless, human rights trampling government and the gruff, hyper masculine protagonist spawned countless imitators both in the media as well as around gaming tables. To say nothing of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series of videogames. Another staple of the classic canon are all of George Miller’s Mad Max movies. Yes, the latter are decidedly post-apocalyptic, but their materialist focus on cars and car culture, the fashion of the desert gangs, the general attitude make them cyberpunk mainstays. Then there’s also David Cronenberg’s output, especially his The Fly remake and, of course, Videodrome. The former was quite important for Shadowrun and its insect spirits. Scanners, too, deserves its well-earned place.

Full Metal Jacket's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was the quintessential military character for many growing up in the 1980s and 1990s

But it’s not just the overtly science fiction things that influenced the genre. War movies and baseline action flicks left their marks on the collective imagination. Most of Shane Black’s 1980s and 90s output is kind of a secondary cyberpunk canon. From Die Hard to Lethal Weapon, those left a deep mark on the imaginations of 90s kids. Rambo, to a certain extent, as well. Also movies like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket and the entirety of Vietnam war movies were quite influential. The collective trauma of America’s lost war loomed large in the imagination of the writers in the 1980s and subsequently in the imagination of the young people in the 1990s who engaged with cyberpunk fiction. But more than that, for many young people in the 90s, these war movies – especially Full Metal Jacket – provided a template of what military service was imagined to feel like. These movies offered a window into a world that many writers and people engaging with role playing games would never witness firsthand themselves, and thus offered archetypical characters – the drill sergeant, the heavy weapons guy, the sniper, etc. – to emulate in writing or in play.

Action thrillers, heist movies and other crime flicks and so on also make up a significant part of the whole canon. Yes they are not overtly cyber, and not always even punk. But Wall Street, regardless of the protagonists being stockbrokers and there not being a single societal reject in sight is nonetheless essential cyberpunk media. I guess the issue here is that for many of us growing up during that time – and arguably also for many of the writers who produced straight up cyberpunk science fiction movies like Wall Street provided an insight into the world of what the world of finance looked and felt like, and insight that was plausible enough, and also well-known enough to build off of down the line. Corporate types in cyberpunk science fiction could be modeled on and be generally reminiscent of Gordon Gekko simply because movies like Wall Street firmly established the character archetype in the popular imagination, similar to Full Metal Jacket’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman being the archetypical military character for many people.

Black Rain's Japanese motorcycle gangs and neon drenched downtown Osaka

Then there are also just straight up crime thrillers. Luc Besson’s The Professional did for the character archetype of the hitman what Wall Street did for the corporate shark. Michael Mann’s Heat – appearing on the scene at the tail-end of the classic cyberpunk period – provided a look and feel, a level of realism and grit, that many a writer, filmmaker and gamemaster in its wake would seek to emulate. Ridley Scott’s Black Rain offered another important entry into the overall cyberpunk urban visual aesthetic – a look and feel that was still quite reminiscent of Blade Runner but without any science fiction flourishes. Instead of a Syd Mead designed cityscape that was itself heavily inspired by Hong Kong and East Asian metropolises in general, Scott simply shot on location in real-world Osaka, ca. 1987. The Japanese presented in Black Rain are very foreign, alien and fully falling into the 1980s overall odd fetishization without much understanding for Japanese culture or customs - still ostensibly better than true humdingers of that particular genre like Michael Crighton's Rising Sun in which a western protagonist out-Japaneses the Japanese. Still, in Black Rain they are a threat, dangerous, and simply other. And if you stop paying attention, they’ll lop your head off with a katana before long...

In part 2 I will take a look at non-western media as reflected and received by western audiences and advance our timeline past the millennium.