Cyberpunk in a Transnational Context

Book excerpt: Mike Mosher’s “Some Aspects of Californian Cyberpunk” vividly reminds us of the influence of West Coast counterculture on cyberpunks, with special emphasis on 1960s theoretical gurus such as Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan, who explored the frontiers of inner space as well as the global village. Frenchy Lunning’s “Cyberpunk Redux: Dérives in the Rich Sight of Post-Anthropocentric Visuality” examines how the heritage of Ridley Scott’s techno-noir film Blade Runner (1982) that preceded Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) keeps revolutionizing the art of visuality, even in the age of the Anthropocene. If you read Lunning’s essay along with Lidia Meras’s “European Cyberpunk Cinema,” which closely analyzes major European cyberpunkish dystopian films Renaissance (2006) and Metropia (2009) and Elana Gomel’s “Recycled Dystopias: Cyberpunk and the End of History,” your understanding of the cinematic and post-utopian possibility of cyberpunk will become more comprehensive. For a cutting-edge critique of cyberpunk manga, let me recommend Martin de la Iglesia’s “Has Akira Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?” which radically redefines the status of Akira (1982–1993) as trans-generic, paying attention to the genre consciousness of the contemporary readers of its Euro-American editions. Next, Denis Taillandier’s “New Spaces for Old Motifs? The Virtual Worlds of Japanese Cyberpunk” interprets the significance of Japanese hardcore cyberpunk novels such as Goro Masaki’s Venus City (1995) and Hirotaka Tobi’s Grandes Vacances (2002; translated as The Thousand Year Beach, 2018) and Ragged Girl (2006), paying special attention to how the authors created their virtual landscape in a Japanese way. For a full discussion of William Gibson’s works, please read Janine Tobek and Donald Jellerson’s “Caring About the Past, Present, and Future in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Guerilla Games’ Horizon: Zero Dawn” along with my own “Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga”. The former reconsiders the first novel of Gibson’s new trilogy in the 21st century not as realistic but as participatory, whereas the latter relocates Gibson’s essence not in cyberspace but in a junkyard, making the most of his post-Dada/Surrealistic aesthetics and “Lo-Tek” way of life, as is clear in the 1990s “Bridge” trilogy.