TECHNOPHOBIA OR TECHNOPHILIA? : A STUDY OF CYBERPUNK SCIENCE FICTION by Dr. Ramesh Chougule, Assistant Professor, Department of English Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University

 TECHNOPHOBIA OR TECHNOPHILIA? : A STUDY OF

CYBERPUNK SCIENCE FICTION

Dr. Ramesh Chougule

Assistant Professor, Department of English

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University,

Sub-Campus, Osmanaba, Maharashtra, India-413501

             Cyberpunk Science Fiction provides a fruitful insight into the technologically mediated aspects of the postmodern experience. In the mid-eighties, a movement in science fiction started known as Cyberpunk Science Fiction which includes the writers like William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner etc. These writers have written novels on Virtual Reality, computer networks, Artificial Intelligences, Cyborgs, Androids, and biotechnology situated in often ruthless urban settings. Cyberpunk represents society interested in technology as new experience. Its aim is to picture dark near future, located twenty or thirty years. Bruce Sterling, the spokesperson of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, claims that “cyberpunk helped to bridge the Yawning cultural gulf between the sciences and the humanities, the formal world of art and politics, and the culture of science, the world of engineering and industry” (Bruce Sterling 1986: xii).  Cyberpunk science fiction is postmodern genre in the sense that it “disrupts the boundaries between nature and technology to understand the meaning of this emphasis on technology and technological resilience” (Tiziana Terranova 1996: 24). It is the effort of the project to represent postmodern culture saturated by new technologies and effect of these technologies on society. The novelists chosen for the study include William Gibson and Rudy Rucker who excel in depicting techno-culture and new technologies’ effect on society. The project discusses the writers like William Gibson and Rudy Rucker, perhaps the best-known cyberpunk writers.

          William Gibson writes about the Japanese culture in his ‘Sprawl Tetralogy’ whereas Rudy Rucker resists the notion of writing about Japan. The relationship between body and technology is at the centre of cyberpunk science fiction. In the postmodern era, the technology invades body and vice versa. Certain alterations are done in the human body by implanting eye lenses, biochip and prosthetic additions. These characters are called cyborgs. William Gibson and Rudy Rucker’s novels offer abundant material for posthumanism and cyborgs. In Gibson’s Neuromancer, almost every character is wired. Case, Molly and McCoy are in one way or another are connected with machines. Case lives a life of computer console whereas Molly’s eyes are covered by artificial dark glasses to enhance her strength and reflexes. McCoy Pauley is a software construct replicating the consciousness of human being. Virek in Count Zero lives in a Virtual reality world while his body grows in a huge tank. Virek’s sick body is kept alive in a vat, has his own mental reality constructed for him: “As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch-spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact. Then it became metal again, green painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder. A few drops of rain blew into her face. Smell of rain and wet earth. A confusion of small details, her own memory...warring with the perfection of Virek’s illusion. Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the church of the Sagrada Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well, fighting vertigo....You are disoriented. Please forgive me. Joseph Virek was perched below her on one of the park’s serpentine benches. You must forgive my reliance on technology. I have been confided for over a decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stockholm” (CZ 24-25). The characters living in paraspace enjoy the movement from one parallel world to the other. Bobby Newmark, for instance, permanently jacked into his own cybernetic world construct in Mona Lisa Overdrive, “Gentry said that the Count [Bobby Newmark] was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge Microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that were true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite...he could have anything in there’, Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. ‘A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs...’ ‘Like he’s living in a stim.’ Cherry asked. ‘That’s why he’s always in REM?’ ‘No,’ Gentry said, ‘It’s not simstim. It’s completely interactive. And it’s a matter of scale. If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximatiuon of everything...’ (MLO 162-163).  In Rudy Rucker’s Ware Series, the content of the human brain is transferred into a live robot. Cobb’s thoughts, software and brain are transferred into the bopper to achieve immortality and omniscience.

          The breakdown of boundaries between natural and artificial is another feature of cyberpunk science fiction. Like technology invades body, it also invades nature. The opening line of Neuromancer “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel” (NM 1) is an instance of the invasion of nature by technology. William Gibson’s significance lies in his invention of term “cyberspace,” a chronotope for the narrative description of the interaction of information as spatial relationships between visualized entities. He describes computer programs and the data stored by large corporations and institutions in visual terms. In Sprawl Trilogy, not only artificial intelligences (Neuromancer and Wintermute) but also humans (Case, Molly) inhabit cyberspace. In Rucker’s Realware alien called Shimmer sends Phil in hyperspace where he meets his father. Shimmer and other six aliens have created paraspace where Omnipotence resides. Shimmer and other aliens try to create their community by distributing allas to human beings. Aliens extract personality waves from the one who comes in contact with allas. And the one who rebels Shimmer is sent to hyperspace. Humans like Phil feels sad to see difficulties faced by the humans on the Earth. All characters can move from Paraspace to the Earth easily. Thus William Gibson and Rudy Rucker evolve cyberspace as a new holistic movement in sciences as a whole. Thus Nature, Technology and society are woven together to indicate a new organisational model of interconnection which is universally applicable.

          Both William Gibson and Rudy Rucker are concerned with the effects of technology on the human life though both differ in their approach. William Gibson portrays human being’s urge to become immortal by using technology whereas Rudy Rucker seems to suggest the same in his earlier two novels but at the end of Ware Series he shows the positive effect of technology on humans. William Gibson is considered as more pessimistic analyst of technology’s effects on human society. He is distinguished by the radical position he has advanced in relation to the problems technology poses. He has paid particular attention to the negative aspects technology’s relationship to civilization and its predominantly deleterious effect on the human condition. His views are of considerable relevance in that he provides us with a theoretical background of cyberpunk in his Neuromancer.  Rudy Rucker begins with the negative effects of technology in his earlier novels of Ware series and ends with the positive note in his Realware.

          Both William Gibson and Rudy Rucker tend to concentrate on the negative effects of technology on human being. In this connection Daniel Dinell writes, “Besides their intimate connection to weapons development and military training, cyberspace technologies are driven by the divine aspirations of Technologists. As we’ve seen, the central dogma underlying these heavenly dreams is the cybernetic belief that a human mind-thoughts, attitudes, memories - consists entirely of information patterns that can be digitized and transferred into a computer, which will sustain that mind-pattern identity forever in a pleasurable virtual environment. Yet the dream of digitized immortality in an engineered heaven is often treated as a curse in science fiction, as in Software and Neuromancer” (Daniel Dinello, 172).

          Cyberpunk science fiction novels attach zero value to its apocalypses: they are neither good nor evil. The destructive vent, whether nuclear war or natural or man-made disaster, that results in an altered landscape takes place out of sight at some point before the narration begins and has little moral or epistemological impact. The typical cyberpunk reaction to these off-stage cataclysms is in fact profound indifference. Sponsler writes in this connection, “In the quintessential cyberpunk novel, Gibson's Neuromancer, for example, the Sprawl-a huge, sprawling, urban zone that stretches down the eastern sea-board of the US-is in some unexplained way the product of rampant urban growth that is set against the desolation of the central and western regions of the United States, which have by some unexplained means been turned into the howling wasteland that we see in Mona Lisa Overdrive. All our attention is focused on the bustling Sprawl and diverted away from both the wastelands and what might have caused them. In Gibson's work, and in other cyberpunk stories, disaster is taken for granted; it is a kind of white noise in the background, humming behind all the action” (Sponsler  1993 : 254).

          Larry McCaffery’s remark on cyberpunk works summarizes the position taken by Rudy Rucker and William Gibson: “The works of ‘cyberpunk’ writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, mainstream figures like William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, various industrial sculptors and performance artists, as well as most contemporary science fiction films, strike a common note - the uneasy recognition that our primal urge to replicate our consciousness and physical beings (into images, words, machine replicants, computer symbols) is not leading us closer to the dream of immortality, but is creating merely a pathetic parody, a meta-existence or simulacra of our essences that is supplanting us, literally taking over our physical space and our roles with admirable proficiency and without the drawbacks of human error and waste” (Larry McCaffery 1991: 15-16). In Rudy Rucker’s Software Cobb Anderson aspires to become immortal and succumbs to the lure of electronic immortality by boppers. Cobb’s brain/software/individual consciousness is modified through interaction with computer networks. In this way Cobb’s body is invaded by the technology in order to redefine the nature of humanity as a species. In this connection Tiziana Terranova writes, “In posthumanist and cyberpunk SF scenarios, the natural body is increasingly colonized and invaded by invisible technologies and the natural outcome of this colonisation is inevitably the abandonment of the body altogether” (Tiziana Terranova 158). In the beginning Cobb feels that by transferring his personality into the machine, he will enjoy technological immortality. However, he apprehends his foolish activity and ends his life along with the machines created by him. William Gibson’s Neuromancer tells the same story that Tessier-Ashpool has created Artificial Intelligence in order to become immortal. However, the same Artificial Intelligence tries to enslave the human beings and to become all powerful.

To sum up, William Gibson and Rudy Rucker suggest us to use technology in a balanced way, it beneficial and useful for the betterment of the society. The very useful kind of function will be performed in a less techno-oriented cyberculture.  If the science and technology deploy less, the future will be bright for society. Cyberpunk depicts a doomed and desperate world that reiterates globalization, multinational corporate domination, powerless and pliable masses, and environmental degradation. It offers a consensus vision of the imminent deployment of technology in the service of capitalism writ large. William Gibson’s novels depict “not the rural American frontier, but the electronic undergirding of a dark, hyper industrialized landscape. Cyberspace itself was a luminous electronic universe, but one inhabited by potentially vicious anthropomorphized computer systems and dominated by large corporations” (Fred Turner 162). Rudy Rucker also depicts the life of the dilapidated urban people living on both the earth and the moon.

The present research paper informs and enlightens decisions about technology. Technology helps society in the most beneficial ways. It is essential on the part of society how devices, techniques, people, institutions, goals, and values are intertwined. To build a better future, it is essential to understand the complex world that empowers those who design, fund, market, distribute, regulate, use, and dispose of or recycle technology. Making informed decisions about technology is not simply a process of maximizing benefits and minimizing problems; it requires careful reflection on the values that are at stake and thoughtful deliberation about the best strategies to realize those values. Technology constitutes the world in various ways. The research paper explores the variety of ways by which machines and techniques are embedded in society and thereby shape institutions, relationships, and values. This exploration provides a basic understanding of how technology and society are intertwined, an understanding that is essential to any attempt to shape the future. Both William Gibson and Rudy Rucker present a future world based on the emerging trends in electronic and information technology and try caution us how imbalance use of technology brings havoc and disturbance in the life of human beings. Human beings try to acquire omnipotent power with the help of recent developments in technology at the cost of human values and human identity. No doubt, technology helps us in solving some of the problems in society for a better future. However, the same technology creates new problems and constraints. The challenge of taking advantage of the benefits of technology while minimizing the negative consequences of doing so is one that faces all of us, because all of us make decisions that shape or direct the development and use of technologies. For Gibson and Rudy Rucker, cyberspace and paraspace are the fictional tools to explore not only the emerging possibilities of digital technologies, but also the deeply dystopian tendencies of American life in the early 1980s. The protagonists of their novels and inhabitants of both the moon and the earth “struggled to survive in the shadows of a world where large corporations had ruined the natural environment, where government seemed to be breaking down and local Mafias taking over, and where physical suffering was routine” (Fred Turner 163).

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REFERENCES:

1. Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia!:Science Fiction Vision of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

2. Gibson, William. Neuromancer (NM). London: Voyager, 1984, reprint 1995.

3. _____________. Count Zero (CZ). New York: Ace Books, 1986.

4._____________.Mona Lisa Overdrive(MLO).NewYork:Bantam Books, 1988.

5. _____________. Virtual Light (VL). New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

6. _____________. Idoru (I). London: Penguin Books, 1997.

7. ____________. All Tomorrow’s Parties(ATP).London:Pengui Books, 2000.

8. McCaffery, Larry. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Post-modern Science Fiction. Durhan: Duke University Press, 1991.

9. Rucker, Rudy. Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge. New York Harper-Perennial, 1992.  

10. _____________. Autobiography. Contemporary Authors, Vol. 228, 2004. 

11.  _____________. The Ware Tetralogy (WT). Prime Books, 2010.

 12. Sponsler Claire. “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jul., 1993).

13. Sterling, Bruce. Preface to the Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books, 1986.

14. Terranova, Tiziana. The Intertextual Presence of Cyberpunk in Cultural and Subcultural Accounts of Science and Technology. Ph. D. Thesis submitted to Goldsmith’s College, University of  London, 1996.

15. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. London: The University of Chicago Press Ltd., 2006.