The Sprawl: Cyberpunk Ground Zero

You can argue about who counts as the first cyberpunk author – some would advocate for Philip K. Dick, others might make a case for John Brunner, Niven and Pournelle’s Oath of Fealty is often cited as a potential influence on the genre – but it would hard to say that William Gibson wasn’t the definitive cyberpunk author. Quite simply, if Gibson’s seminal work in the genre does not count as cyberpunk, then the term is pretty goddamn meaningless.

That said, as the world has caught up with the requirements of his fiction, Gibson’s writing has become less stylised, less science fictional, and more like modern-day techno-thriller material: computers are now at a point where Gibson can tell many of the stories he wants to tell without resorting to science fictional departures from current tech. When it comes to Gibson’s cyberpunk writing, the truly definitive stuff is his work from the 1980s, and specifically the stories of the Sprawl setting, “the Sprawl” being in-setting slang for the continuous urban development extending from Boston down to Atlanta along the East Coast of the US.

Though the Sprawl itself is not as central to most of these stories as you’d think – they tend to be more globe-trotting affairs – the tales keep looping in and out of it, so it’s a fairly apt term for the series. It’s now some 40 years after these stories first started being published, and we are now very much living in the sort of future Gibson was envisioning, so let’s see how well these have aged.

Burning Chrome

Before we get into the Sprawl series itself, it’s worth looking at this short story anthology. Collecting more or less all of Gibson’s short fiction up to 1986, the majority of the material here predates Neuromancer and finds him developing ideas he’d later use there, and three of the stories actually take place in the Sprawl setting and provide little prequel snippets to the Sprawl trilogy itself. Some of the other stories have sufficient thematic overlap that they feel like they could be Sprawl stories, but only three – Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel, and Burning Chrome – are the subject of significant callbacks in the Sprawl novels.

Does Bruce Sterling Dream of a Cyberpunk Movement?

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Preamble

Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling and published just over twenty years ago, is an overview of the hottest young talent in SF in the mid-1980s. As far as introducing the reader to a bunch of authors, many of whom are writing buddies of Sterling himself, it does a fair job; while I wasn’t so enraptured by the stories that I’d want to keep the book and read them over and over again, they at least gave me some idea of which authors of the William Gibson-Bruce Sterling circle I’d want to explore further. On that basis, it’s a pretty good book. Mirrorshades is held up by cyberpunk fans as a definitive collection, in every sense of the word. The claim that the book defines the cyberpunk genre originates with Sterling himself, in his introduction. And if the definition was “cyberpunk is stuff that Bruce Sterling and his mates write”, I’d have no problem with it.

If only it stopped there.