What is it about good fiction that makes me want to crawl under my bed, stay there, and just give up? Is it that I don’t think that I have a story in me that can even come close to what I read, or is it the worlds that are spun before my eyes are worlds that I don’t want to live in? And if I don’t want to live in these future techno-forward futures, can they be stopped?I did not think that I would see the day when a Post-Cyberpunk Anthology would emerge out of the wires. Rewired is a pleasant shock. It filled with many good stories. I will review a few here in the upcoming days. However, the bigger question in my mind for this post is how a sub-genre of science fiction, cyberpunk, could evolve into post-cyberpunk, and have I had my head in the sand all this time? Or is all this labeling just non-sense?
My definitions:
Cyberpunk is one of my favorite genres. It focuses on the marginalized anti-hero that has been forced out of society because the anti-hero refuses to accept his or her role in the shiny new world.
Post-cyberpunk was a new term to me that I guess has been around since 1991 that describes what came after cyberpunk. Post-cyberpunk focuses on those same anti-heroes that made cyberpunk cyberpunk. However, these new heroes and heroines more readily accept technology, use technology, and most importantly are not surprised by technology. The same technology that would have new and important is about as shocking as seeing a microwave.
So, I guess I have been writing post-cyberpunk.
If you want to know more about each click cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, or find a copy of Rewired and read the introduction “Hacking Cyberpunk” by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel.
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007.
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