Naysayers seized on this to declare that cyberpunk was actually a movement of just one and his name was William Gibson. It soon became apparent that the center could not hold. However, the movement did not implode. Rather, popular culture hacked into it and turned cyberpunk to its own purposes. We saw cyberpunk music, movies, comics, and videogames. The slick magazine Wired became the Popular Science of cyberpunk. The cyberpunks had made computers and programming sexy; digital geekdom returned the favor by trying to reverse-engineer their ideas in silicon and code. But as it became more familiar, it also became tamer. Or maybe it grew up. There were cyberpunk ad agencies, cyberpunk fashion designers. Timothy Leary declared that the movie War Games was cyberpunk. The more people appropriated cyberpunk to their own uses, the fuzzier it became.

Our genre has been largely nonplussed by the spread of the cyberpunk meme. Learned papers have been given to explain the phenomenon. Some complain that science fiction has more to offer than dark visions of disaffected loners contending with totalitarian corporations. “The street,” so central to the classic cyberpunk vision, is not the world, they say. And they are right, of course. Meanwhile, as second and third generation writers have put on their mirrorshades, they are all too often dismissed as mere imitators. Some in our genre have decided that they know what cyberpunk had to say, and, whether they agree with it or not, have consigned it to the dustbin of literary history. Cyberpunk can no longer be an ideology, they would say. It can only be a flavor.

rewired

In retrospect, it seems clear to us that cyberpunk was a movement. We acknowledge all the criticisms leveled against it. The hyperbole that helped launch it was unfortunate. Yes, some core cyberpunks found other things to write about or fell silent.