Word: cyberpunk
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company decided to go for a mix of cyberpunk and 1920s flapper...
...while sci-fi may never fully shed its dweeby image, the reality has evolved along with the rest of pop culture. Readers can choose from a wide array of subgenres, including Tolkienesque fantasy, high-tech cyberpunk, horror sci-fi, feminist sci-fi, techno-thriller sci-fi, gay and lesbian sci-fi and even sci-fi erotica. Readership and authorship have broadened too: women now account for a third of the science-fiction audience, compared with just 10% in the '50s, and such writers as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler (one of sci-fi's few African-American authors...
Then there's cyberpunk, the Net-based genre whose grim, dehumanized vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace...
...creators are focusing on fresher paranoias: Gibson's new novel, Idoru (Putnam), due in September, is a ghost story of sorts. And a second September book, Holy Fire (Bantam), by Bruce Sterling, another godfather of cyberpunk, is about intergenerational war. It's set 100 years in the future, in an age ruled by a wealthy centenarian gerontocracy whose disenfranchised children are readying a revolution based on the terrifying new cognitive landscapes offered by man-computer interfaces...
...book is a haunting and lyrical triumph, one of the few cyberpunk-influenced novels to weave a believable and emotionally involving vision of mankind's cultural and technological future from the reality of the vast Net already developing around us. That's all one can reasonably ask of science fiction: show us new worlds and make us believe our descendants might live there someday...