Bittercon: The Evolution of Cyberpunk
One last panel discussion from GenCon.
One thing that's obvious when re-reading the seminal works of cyberpunk is how Zeerusty any specifics of the technology have become. The "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer seems laughable now, when a small cellphone has 128 gigabytes -- but in 1982, when the book came out, DOS was still built to take up to 64 kilobytes of memory because Bill Gates couldn't imagine anybody needing more than that. Even as late as 1992, a decade after Neuromancer came out, I had to do some serious budgeting to upgrade my Mac SE from one to four megabytes of RAM, and an 85 MB hard drive was an astonishing amount of room to work with.
There are other specifics that have grown Zeerust, even on elements that remain futuristic. For instance, the hacker characters of Neuromancer have cool direct-to-mind computer interfaces -- but it's still presupposed that connecting them will require physical cables, and thus some kind of implanted jack that goes through the skin, with all the ongoing risk of infection that would involve. And the "sky the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel" that was touted by a number of writing workshops as such superb description no longer evokes the intended image of an overcast sky, as CRT televisions with analog tuning have given way to flat-panels with digital tuning that show a channel with no signal in a blue about the color of Microsoft's dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
But when we read Neuromancer, we also need to remember that William Gibson wrote it on a manual typewriter, and had no real background in information technology -- which may actually have been liberating, since he was less constrained by what the experts considered the limits of the possible, like Bill Gates and his 64KB comment. He was focusing only partly on gosh-wow computer technology. His real focus was what happened when computer technology was no longer the realm of carefully-vetted white-coated experts in the old "dinosaur pen" computer rooms, but in the hands of everyday people of all walks of life, including those who had a more flexible view of the proper use of technology.
As the years have gone by, writers have had to keep far enough ahead of the actual progress of information technology in the here-and-now to maintain that gosh-wow feeling of an almost magical, yet dark and dangerous, world of a future in which the street is finding its own uses for technology, for readers for whom computer technology is now a ubiquitous part of daily life. Some things are obvious -- anyone writing cyberpunk now has to take into account the ubiquity of WiFi, broadband, and other wireless networking technologies. Having a character literally jacking in, unless it involves something like a bionic limb that's directly interfaced into the body, is going to look like Yesterday's Tomorrow, but without enough of the patina of age to give it the charm we see in steampunk, dieselpunk, etc.
In my Chaffee Artilect 'verse, I do mention Toni using an implant to enter the storyscapes of the game world she works with -- but it's left assumed that it's fully inside her body, with no jacks or other parts going through the skin, and she's communicating with the Internet via some form of wireless technology, which presumably has the necessary bandwidth to carry that much sensory data. In some other cyberpunk works I've read recently, the characters seem to be using some form of neural induction technology to feed information into the brain via a headset that remains entirely outside the skin -- but it also communicates wirelessly to the wider Internet, rather than requiring Ethernet or any other networking cable.
That's unsurprising as more and more of us have replaced Ethernet with WiFi in our home and office LAN's. Even as late as 2019 I still had a couple of cables snaking their way from the front room through the kitchen to my office to get an old G3 and G4 PowerMac on our household LAN. This was both a trip hazard and a cat-toy problem, and the flexible plastic sheath of the 100m cable was beginning to break up in places and covered with electrical tape.
In 2020 my brother the computer engineer was able to help me put together a WiFi bridge between those computers in my office and the UVerse gateway in the front room. As I reeled up those cables to put them in storage, I was astonished at just how filthy they'd become over the years (I originally set up our LAN back in 2004, although the router did have to get relocated from my office to the front room when we first got DSL in 2007 and the router needed to be closer to the DSL modem) -- and how much more convenient it was when I didn't have to worry about those not tripping over two cables every time I needed to go out to the garage, or through certain parts of my office. Sure, there were shorter Ethernet cables connecting the G3 and G4 to the Apple AirPort Extreme base station, which was communicating to the Airport Express in the front room, tied to the UVerse gateway, but those were so small that it was the same effect as if everything were on WiFi.
And I tend to be a late adopter of these technologies, typically receiving them as hand-me-downs or buying them off eBay or at thrift stores. The average reader of cyberpunk probably regards WiFi connectivity throughout the house as a given, and would find a house wired for Ethernet as oddly quaint, like one with phone jacks in every room, or even one piped for gas lamps in every room. So the technology in a cyberpunk story or novel has to presuppose wireless connectivity under its tech, unless there is a very good reason to need some form of hardwired connectivity. Similarly, the devices themselves need to be sufficiently advanced from the top tier of generally available that they feel as gosh-wow as the protagonist's "deck" in Neuromancer, with capabilities that we can only dream of.
Another interesting thing is how cyberpunk, its tropes and its aesthetics have influenced other sf genres, including space opera. For instance, we can see the influence of cyberpunk in transhumanist novels and games such as Eclipse Phase -- and when an author wants to retain an old-school aesthetic in the technology of a space opera future, it's often necessary to consciously embed reasons for the lack of advancements in those areas. For instance, David Weber's Honor Harrington 'verse has its Final War in its backstory, and what little information we get about it (even hardened soldiers dislike talking about those horrors) makes it unsurprising that it should have generated powerful taboos about a whole range of technologies, taboos that have persisted centuries lower and restricted the advances of a wide range of technologies so that the future feels a lot more like the futures of classic space opera. Similarly, David Drake's Republic of Cinnabar Navy 'verse had an even more destructive war between Earth and the Inner Worlds that led to a centuries long Dark Age until more distant worlds such as Cinnabar could build their tech base back up to being truly spacefaring, but with a society that innovates more slowly and cautiously.
One thing that's obvious when re-reading the seminal works of cyberpunk is how Zeerusty any specifics of the technology have become. The "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer seems laughable now, when a small cellphone has 128 gigabytes -- but in 1982, when the book came out, DOS was still built to take up to 64 kilobytes of memory because Bill Gates couldn't imagine anybody needing more than that. Even as late as 1992, a decade after Neuromancer came out, I had to do some serious budgeting to upgrade my Mac SE from one to four megabytes of RAM, and an 85 MB hard drive was an astonishing amount of room to work with.
There are other specifics that have grown Zeerust, even on elements that remain futuristic. For instance, the hacker characters of Neuromancer have cool direct-to-mind computer interfaces -- but it's still presupposed that connecting them will require physical cables, and thus some kind of implanted jack that goes through the skin, with all the ongoing risk of infection that would involve. And the "sky the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel" that was touted by a number of writing workshops as such superb description no longer evokes the intended image of an overcast sky, as CRT televisions with analog tuning have given way to flat-panels with digital tuning that show a channel with no signal in a blue about the color of Microsoft's dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
But when we read Neuromancer, we also need to remember that William Gibson wrote it on a manual typewriter, and had no real background in information technology -- which may actually have been liberating, since he was less constrained by what the experts considered the limits of the possible, like Bill Gates and his 64KB comment. He was focusing only partly on gosh-wow computer technology. His real focus was what happened when computer technology was no longer the realm of carefully-vetted white-coated experts in the old "dinosaur pen" computer rooms, but in the hands of everyday people of all walks of life, including those who had a more flexible view of the proper use of technology.
As the years have gone by, writers have had to keep far enough ahead of the actual progress of information technology in the here-and-now to maintain that gosh-wow feeling of an almost magical, yet dark and dangerous, world of a future in which the street is finding its own uses for technology, for readers for whom computer technology is now a ubiquitous part of daily life. Some things are obvious -- anyone writing cyberpunk now has to take into account the ubiquity of WiFi, broadband, and other wireless networking technologies. Having a character literally jacking in, unless it involves something like a bionic limb that's directly interfaced into the body, is going to look like Yesterday's Tomorrow, but without enough of the patina of age to give it the charm we see in steampunk, dieselpunk, etc.
In my Chaffee Artilect 'verse, I do mention Toni using an implant to enter the storyscapes of the game world she works with -- but it's left assumed that it's fully inside her body, with no jacks or other parts going through the skin, and she's communicating with the Internet via some form of wireless technology, which presumably has the necessary bandwidth to carry that much sensory data. In some other cyberpunk works I've read recently, the characters seem to be using some form of neural induction technology to feed information into the brain via a headset that remains entirely outside the skin -- but it also communicates wirelessly to the wider Internet, rather than requiring Ethernet or any other networking cable.
That's unsurprising as more and more of us have replaced Ethernet with WiFi in our home and office LAN's. Even as late as 2019 I still had a couple of cables snaking their way from the front room through the kitchen to my office to get an old G3 and G4 PowerMac on our household LAN. This was both a trip hazard and a cat-toy problem, and the flexible plastic sheath of the 100m cable was beginning to break up in places and covered with electrical tape.
In 2020 my brother the computer engineer was able to help me put together a WiFi bridge between those computers in my office and the UVerse gateway in the front room. As I reeled up those cables to put them in storage, I was astonished at just how filthy they'd become over the years (I originally set up our LAN back in 2004, although the router did have to get relocated from my office to the front room when we first got DSL in 2007 and the router needed to be closer to the DSL modem) -- and how much more convenient it was when I didn't have to worry about those not tripping over two cables every time I needed to go out to the garage, or through certain parts of my office. Sure, there were shorter Ethernet cables connecting the G3 and G4 to the Apple AirPort Extreme base station, which was communicating to the Airport Express in the front room, tied to the UVerse gateway, but those were so small that it was the same effect as if everything were on WiFi.
And I tend to be a late adopter of these technologies, typically receiving them as hand-me-downs or buying them off eBay or at thrift stores. The average reader of cyberpunk probably regards WiFi connectivity throughout the house as a given, and would find a house wired for Ethernet as oddly quaint, like one with phone jacks in every room, or even one piped for gas lamps in every room. So the technology in a cyberpunk story or novel has to presuppose wireless connectivity under its tech, unless there is a very good reason to need some form of hardwired connectivity. Similarly, the devices themselves need to be sufficiently advanced from the top tier of generally available that they feel as gosh-wow as the protagonist's "deck" in Neuromancer, with capabilities that we can only dream of.
Another interesting thing is how cyberpunk, its tropes and its aesthetics have influenced other sf genres, including space opera. For instance, we can see the influence of cyberpunk in transhumanist novels and games such as Eclipse Phase -- and when an author wants to retain an old-school aesthetic in the technology of a space opera future, it's often necessary to consciously embed reasons for the lack of advancements in those areas. For instance, David Weber's Honor Harrington 'verse has its Final War in its backstory, and what little information we get about it (even hardened soldiers dislike talking about those horrors) makes it unsurprising that it should have generated powerful taboos about a whole range of technologies, taboos that have persisted centuries lower and restricted the advances of a wide range of technologies so that the future feels a lot more like the futures of classic space opera. Similarly, David Drake's Republic of Cinnabar Navy 'verse had an even more destructive war between Earth and the Inner Worlds that led to a centuries long Dark Age until more distant worlds such as Cinnabar could build their tech base back up to being truly spacefaring, but with a society that innovates more slowly and cautiously.