Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
(for Hugh Silverman)
A quick look at the Wikipedia entry for “science fiction”—though admittedly hardly a definitive source for such information—reveals approximately nineteen “subgenres” of science fiction, depending on how one counts. (The “subgenres” listed include: cyberpunk, time travel, alternate history, military sf, superhuman, apocalyptic and postapocalyptic, space opera, space western, social science fiction, and, under the category of “other subgenres,” climate fiction, anthropological sf, kaiju, biopunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, comic sf, feminist sf, science fiction opera, and science fiction poetry, though the relegation of some of these categories to “subgenre” is puzzling.) On the other hand, Worlds without End, a site dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, and horror, lists some thirty-eight subgenres. (Additional entries are alien invasion, artificial intelligence, colonization, dying Earth, utopia/dystopia, first contact, nanotechnology, robots/androids, singularity, slipstream, hard sf, soft sf, theological, virtual reality, near future, and mundane sf.) While the Wikipedia entry does include discussion of some sf descended from cyberpunk, it excludes some others; furthermore, it misses altogether the developments in near-future science fiction (e.g., recent William Gibson and the “mundane sf” movement, including Ted Chiang, Gwyneth Jones, Maureen McHugh, and Geoff Ryman; cf. Calvin 2014). While the Worlds without End site does include several of the ever-proliferating cyberpunk descendents, and while it does include the turn toward near-future sf, it significantly omits one of the most recent, even if quite ephemeral, fields: “post-punk sf.”
Granted, the developments and proliferations in naming and classifying science fiction have appeared with ever-increasing rapidity. Indeed, similar to what Vernor Vinge has noted in his work on the technological singularity, what we might call the “science fiction singularity” poses some similar challenges. Vinge argues that the rate of technological innovation has increased over time at an exponential rate. While technology initially developed relatively slowly, in the past century (or so), the rate of technological innovation has increased at a more and more rapid pace. When technology developed slowly, we (by which I mean to include scientists, technologists, writers, scholars, cultural critics, and cable TV news channel hosts) were able to imagine where the technology might lead and what (some of the) implications of that technological change might mean for humans and for the world around us.
Arguably, the changes and developments within science fiction have progressed along similar lines. Historically, science fiction writers have responded to social, political, cultural, scientific, and technological conditions. Mary Shelley responded to certain scientific inquiries regarding the reanimation of life; Karel Čapek responded to technological changes and the effects they had on workers; Isaac Asimov responded to the possibilities of computing and robotics; etc., etc. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sf writers responded to the possibilities and consequences of telecommunications, worldwide distribution systems, rocket travel outside Earth’s atmosphere, and weapons of mass destruction. They did not, however, write about (certainly not enough to classify it as a subgenre) virtual reality, nanotechnology, or biopunk, as the scientific, technological, and social conditions did not yet exist. Here I am reminded of something that I take from Thomas Kuhn’s work: it would be impossible for Benjamin Franklin to have written about the atomic bomb unless and until certain facts, certain technologies, and certain concepts were in place. That he did not write about the atomic bomb is therefore no failing on his part.
However, as developments within science and technology compound, as they build upon one another and replicate in weird, unexpected, and remarkable ways, the rate of change has increased, as well. In 1965, Intel cofounder, Gordon Moore, wrote that the number of transistors “crammed” onto a circuit board would double every two years. And, indeed, he was more or less correct. As a corollary, Intel executive David House proclaimed that computing power would double every eighteen months.
The two charts on these pages illustrate the difference in the rates of change.1 Figure 1 illustrates the rate of development in computing follows Moore’s Law. In part (and the process is considerably more complex than I am suggesting here), the doubling of computing power and speed has exponentially increased the rates of innovation and development. A doubling or quadrupling in computing power makes possible modeling, calculations, and applications that had never been possible. In contrast, figure 2 demonstrates the technological increase described in Vinge’s work on the technological singularity. The technological advances compound, and the rate of development increases. Some technologies make possible other technologies; an interactive and interdependent system of feedback engenders exponential increase. And these new innovations lead to new concerns for writers, critics, and talking heads. And new subgenres. A “science fiction singularity” would suggest that the genre and its many subgenres will continue to alter, morph, and develop more and more quickly over time at increasingly rapid rates. The “Post-punk SF Manifesto” suggests that—or argues for—a singularity beyond which we cannot imagine or represent.
(Ward Shelly’s graphic representation of the history of science fiction tells a slightly different story. While it does show more forms of science fiction now than in the past, it does not represent an exponential increase in the number of forms and influences; cf. <www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/HistoryofScienceFiction.html>.)
Figure 1. Transistor Counts (from Wikipedia, “Moore’s Law”)
Figure 2. “Technological Advances across Time” (from Awesome Science, <awesomescience.us/the-singularity>)
Cyberpunk
In their history of progressive rock, Beyond and Before (2011), Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell assert that “punk” rock was at least in part an antidote to what some perceived as the excesses of progressive rock. While progressive rock drew on the long form of classical music, on mythology, and most importantly, on science fiction, punk rock featured DIY musicians and dissatisfaction with the social, political, and cultural standards of the day. Punk argued that progressive rock was stale, formulaic, and out of touch with the everyday, lived experiences of most listeners. Punk rockers positioned themselves against the mainstream, against the status quo, and against a certain kind of mastery. Similarly, cyberpunk argued that science fiction—or the science fiction of the Golden Age and the 1950s—had become stale and formulaic (even while it simultaneously acknowledged its own roots within that same history). Furthermore, it argued that science fiction had failed to keep up with innovations and stylistics of mainstream fiction. Cyberpunk writers positioned themselves against the genre conventions but embraced (at least some) mainstream literary conventions. They did, however, embrace the punk aesthetic of fashion and the punk position against the heroic figure.
Cyberpunk was in some ways one of the iconic moments of science fiction. While the Golden Age tropes of tall, phallic rocket ships, bug-eyed monsters, and damsels in distress in brass bras remain prototypic images of sf for many writers/readers/viewers/spectators, that view of sf was if not supplanted then certainly supplemented by the image of neo-noir rebels dressed in long black coats, mirrorshade glasses, and spiked hair—an image that at once signals a rebellious, antiauthoritarian attitude and a neo-conservative, neo-Victorianism. Yes, he will be the One.
And cyberpunk was to be the genre that was to accomplish what the New Wave did not quite do—bring sf into the mainstream. (Cyberpunk’s virtues were lauded by Carl Freedman, Larry McCaffrey, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and its vices blasted by Nicola Nixon.) While New Wave writers had hoped to utilize the stylistic and narrative techniques of mainstream fiction, in part to bring sf to a wider readership and to make it more mainstream, their success in doing so was limited. (Even so, the New Wave remains a dynamic and exciting period of sf. For more, see Latham and Higgins in the bibliography.) Cyberpunk, on the other hand, saturated pop culture from literature to TV to movies to music to video games to fashion. Cyberpunk iconography and tropes constitute every bit as much of the popular image of science fiction as those iconic images of the Golden Age. These days, anyone can jack in, log on, and drop out.
Many critics and fans recognize Bruce Sterling’s “Preface” to the Mirrorshades anthology as the signal text that demarcates the origins of cyberpunk, in which he inhales the ’60s Zeitgeist and claims a rigid antiauthoritarianism and exhales the mid-’80s Zeitgeist and claims that no label (or the punks) can hold him. Slip-sliding frantically on the sf singularity slope, cyberpunk recombines the traditions and tropes of the ghosts of sf past with the literary models of the present; it splices the attitude and ethos of punk with that of the hacker; and it spawns a Monster that cannot be controlled but will, nonetheless, immolate itself on the pyre of its own successes and excesses.
Post- Variations
Post- is a bound morpheme tied to another word or concept by the hash. Post- is a complex, conflicted concept, multiplied in its meaning and intent by the connector. This sliding signifier can indicate an “after” temporally or an “after” conceptually or an “after” ironically. The post- of postmodernism is not necessarily the same post- in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, or postapocalypse. As Jay Embry notes, the post- of postapocalypse is fraught with complications as the “apocalypse” (certainly as imagined in Biblical and religious texts) already suggests an “after” (1236). In her “Discursus” on postpatriarchy, Lisa Žižek writes of the inherent contradictions in and the improbability (if not outright impossibility) of a (Western) society attaining a moment post patriarchy (45). As Madan Sarup notes in An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism (1993), one of the key goals of poststructuralism was a “critique of the human subject” (1). According to Sarup, the “term ‘subject’ helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as a product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious” (2). In some ways, cyberpunk undermined the human subject, suggesting—at least, at times—that the subject is an empty case, that humans are an effect of coding (cultural or mechanical). Though cyberpunk did have a tendency to slide back into a romantic subject, others took the metaphor even further. Consider, for example, the extent to which the four Js in Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) are all cultural code. Post-punk sf (P-PSF) further challenges the subject.
Secondly, Sarup notes that another goal of poststructuralism was a “critique of historicism” (2). In this critique, poststructuralists take aim, in part, at a particular view of progress which is linear, logical, and progressive. Much of sf has been predicated on just such a notion of history; the fiction of science and technology works part and parcel with a narrative of progress. The New Wave balks and structures crumble. Skepticism of the grand narrative rises. By the mid- to late-1980s, cyberpunk reembraces the grand narrative, and structures sprawl all over everything. Though the marginal folk don’t always fare so well. P-PSF synthesizes these two attitudes: those in the margins rewrite and redefine the structures.
Third,2 the poststructuralists engaged in a “critique of meaning,” particularly in language. The Sassurean rupture of the relationship between the signifier and the signified and the rejection of a direct relationship between signs and “extra-linguistic referents at all” (3), called into question the possibilities for closing down meaning. According to this model, then, words do not point to “reality,” whatever that is. For some, that breakdown suggested an end to critique, to dissent, to opposition. What’s a punk to do? Of course, resistance remains relevant. (See, for example, the work of Linda Hutcheon and her arguments for politics and postmodernism.) In P-PSF, the resistance is in the post-. The slippage of significance is the meaning. The impossibility of the message is the meaning.
While any literary scholar or cultural critic is all too familiar with the various forms and uses of post-, within science fiction, the most prominent example is “postcyberpunk.” According to writer and critic Lawrence Person (1999), postcyberpunk was ushered in with the publication of Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988), just two years after the publication of Mirrorshades. While postcyberpunk fiction features many of the same narrative and stylistic techniques, and features many of the same writers, Person suggests that postcyberpunk sf contains different characters in different settings meeting different outcomes. “Far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of society (i.e., they have jobs). They live in futures that are not necessarily dystopic (indeed, they are often suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant).” However, the rampant technological innovation continues to affect their lives in profound ways. As examples, he offers Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), Ian McDonald’s Terminal Café (1994), Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction (1995), Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels (1990), Raphael Carter’s The Fortunate Fall (1996), and Greg Egan’s Permutation City (1994). Postcyberpunk, then, responds to and represents a change in social, political, and cultural attitudes in the 1990s (particularly in the US). Furthermore, it represents the changes in the now-ten-years-older writers of cyberpunk themselves.
Even so, Person’s claim (akin to Asimov’s claim about sf many years earlier) that postcyberpunk is the “one” form “best suited to explore themes related to the world of accelerating technological innovations” seems hardly tenable. Postcyberpunk, like every other subgenre and trope discussed above, responds to particular historically and materially rooted conditions; it emerges at a time when it is possible for it to do so; it will be relegated to the dustbin of history when it cannot or will not do what is asked of it.
-punk Variations
While cyberpunk at some level turned its gaze toward the steaming wreckage of the collision of future developments in computers and virtual reality and the effects of globalization, some of the -punk derivations turn their lenses backward in what could be described as “retro-futurism” (cf. the retro-future film Space Station 76 [2014] and the Newitz and Jenkins articles in the bibliography.). In her essay, “Nostalgia for the Future,” Sharon Sharp notes that “retrofuturism” employs “the iconic imagery of previous visions of the future,” which might include “jet packs, homes of tomorrow, ray guns, and other space age manifestations of technological progress” (25). For example, steampunk, dieselpunk, decopunk, and atompunk all focus on a particular time in the past (the Victorian era, the period between the two world wars, the Art Deco era, and the era between the end of World War II and the beginning of the digital age, respectively) but include futuristic inventions, devices, and vices. Critic Jenny Sundén notes that the term “steampunk” was a “tongue-in-cheek proposition” that K.W. Jeter coined to describe his (and James Blaylock’s and Tim Powers’s) work “in the area of Victorian fantasies, retro-futurism, and alternate history.” So, in their very origins, the -punk derivations were rooted in farce and humor. Author Sara Harvey describes decopunk as “shinier” than steampunk, and dieselpunk as “grittier.”
Other -punk derivations like cyberpunk turn their lenses toward the future though here they tend toward the near future. Both biopunk (cf. Schmeink) and nanopunk focus on the developments within and the effects of particular scientific and technological developments, particularly within the biotech nanotech industries. As Lars Schmeink notes, outside literature/culture, a biopunk is a DIY hacker, someone who utilizes public access information and materials in their basement laboratories. Inside literature, biopunk signals a shift in focus from developments in computers and cyberspace to those within the biological sciences, bioengineering, and genetics such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). In biopunk, the individual maintains a profoundly anti-establishment snarl. Similarly, nanopunk turns toward the developments in nanotechnology and examines some of the ways in which nanotech can alter our homes, buildings, and devices as well as our bodies. For the former, see Wil McCarthy’s popular science book, Hacking Matter (2003) and his Queendom of Sol series, Collapsium (2000), The Wellstone (2003), Lost in Transmission (2004), and To Crush the Moon (2005). For the latter, see the anthology, Nanotech (2014) edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann, which features work by Greg Bear, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, and Kathleen Ann Goonan. See also Goonan’s Nanotech tetralogy, including Queen City Jazz (1994), Mississippi Blues (1997), Crescent City Rhapsody (2000), and Light Music (2002), and Steven Piziks’s novel, The Nanotech War (2002).
These are not, however, the end of the -punk derivations, which include the (albeit lesser known) categories of stonepunk, quartzpunk, clockpunk, teslapunk, transistorpunk, elfpunk, mythpunk, ataripunk, lisapunk, gothpunk, splatterpunk, devipunk, ribopunk, dreampunk, and yenpunk. Some of these are related most with role-playing games, not fiction. Nevertheless, they testify in part to the full integration of the Internet and meme-generation into the literary/cultural world. More cynically, they certify a near-total capitulation to niche-market-based production and marketing. Writers and publishers can target their intended audiences more directly with all the precision of a drone strike down a distant chimney. The one new term that does refer to literature and is of most interest here is “NOWpunk.”
Bruce Sterling (once again) defines the term, which he uses to describe his own novel, The Zenith Angle (2004). For Sterling, “NOWpunk” signifies “contemporary fiction that is set in the time in which the fiction is being published,” a definition that would include a significant portion of contemporary fiction (“Rant-a-Thon”). In his blog, A Book of Days, Daniel Fawcett devotes two posts to Sterling’s “NOWpunk.” In the post “Nowpunk,” he wrestles with the usefulness of the term—even while granting the usefulness of the “bound morpheme” “-punk”—and suggests that NOWpunk fiction (or TV) or NOWpunk characters do not “subvert the social order in any way,” which, he notes, is the very essence of the punk movement and aesthetic and of the “-punk” morpheme.
In zher Twitter posts, the cultural commentator Psychphiscam also scoffs—on two levels. First, zhe argues with the -punk morpheme, and second, takes on the “NOW” morpheme. On the former, zhe notes that NOWpunk remains trapped in the “same tone-deaf morass as the rest of the punks.” Even worse, zhe argues that NOWpunk is a “further re-entrenchment of the status quo.” As both Fawcett and psychphiscam argue, -punk fiction has lost its “punk-ass punk-ness.” What punk, what kid, what rebel, psychphiscam asks, is going to rally behind a banker working with the government to fight terrorism? Molly Millions would rip Derek Vandeveer a new one. Jael would gut him like a tauntaun.
On the latter point, zhe suggests that the space of NOW is use-less. Some sf writers and critics have argued that the gap between the recognizable world that we inhabit and the imagined world of the text creates the space for critical reflection and critique. NOWpunk, “like the realism and naturalism of the late 19thC,” psychphiscam argues (in the tweets that formed the basis of the “Post-punk SF Manifesto”), “collapses and eliminates” all critical reflection. Certainly, one can imagine a realist narrative that does, indeed, invite critical reflection, though “transparency” of the mirror reflection works against it. The sweeping generalization aside, the manifesto states that the move toward retro-futures, near-futures, mundane futures, near-pasts, alternate pasts, presents, and futures, and the NOW “abdicates a creative, critical, and crucial responsibility.” Even while the singularity scale suggests that imagining the future will become harder and harder, the sf singularity suggests that the move toward the NOW is inevitable. What the P-PSF manifesto really challenges is not so much the move toward the NOW but rather the failure of imagination for the future.
The Post-Punk Manifesto
Though the term “manifesto” has existed in English since at least 1620 (and far earlier in Italian and Latin, from which it derives), the concept has a long history. A manifesto sets out a personal, group, or governmental statement of views and intentions. Although the authors of the Post-punk SF Manifesto were certainly aware of The Communist Manifesto (1848, <www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm>), The Anarchist Manifesto (1850, <www.brh.org.uk/articles/anarchist.pdf>), The Dada Manifesto (1918, <www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/DadaSurrealism/DadaSurrReadings/TzaraD1.pdf>), The Surrealist Manifesto (1924, <www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Manifesto.htm>), The SCUM Manifesto (1968, <www.womynkind.org/scum.htm>), and A Cypherpunk Manifesto (1993, <www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html>), they were almost certainly drawing most heavily and most directly on The Mundane Manifesto (2006, <sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto>).
If punk rock intended (as if “punk rock” could intend anything) to be the end of progressive rock, it hardly succeeded. As Hegarty and Halliwell note, Johnny Rotten yelled from the stage in January 1978, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”—a signal from within that punk was dead and that it had presumably failed to kill off the dinosaurs (1). Indeed, prog rock lumbers on and proliferates itself in avant prog, RIO, prog metal, zheul, symphonic prog, djent, and progressive house, among others.3 If cyberpunk intended to be the end of science fiction (or of science fiction as usual), it was only marginally more successful. All of the forms and genres, all of the tropes that writers employed prior to the emergence of cyberpunk remain in use today (early 2015). Indeed, some of those that seemed to have passed out of favor during the New Wave and the turn toward “soft sf” have witnessed a resurgence. For example, space opera has seen a renaissance after the New Wave, after cyberpunk, and after the Mundanes—cf. Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell’s The Space Opera Renaissance (2007), Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan’s The New Space Opera (2007), or Rich Horton’s Space Opera (2014). Science fiction has changed, but those changes arguably owe as much if not more to the presence of female writers, writers of color, feminist and queer writers, and the globalization of the science fiction community and to the technologies that allow the creation and dissemination of sf across the globe and across and array of devices and platforms. (Much recent historical and scholarly work has revealed the extent to which the sf subject matter has always been global.) Science fiction cannot remain the same, not if it wants to remain viable. In 1986, Sterling wrote that science fiction was at a particularly fertile moment; as the technological and science fiction singularities and the mode of encoding and representation (science fiction) approach Tao zero of innovation and recombination, cyberpunk is a ghostly shade alongside post-punk sf.
The “Post-punk SF Manifesto,” then, like nearly all manifestos (certainly the literary or artistic manifestos) appeared after the fact. Just as the authors of the Mundane Manifesto note that some earlier writers may well have “accidentally” produced mundane fiction, so too did some of the post-punk writers produce work that was later included in the canon, well before the manifesto was issued. Or, as Sterling notes in his Preface to Mirrorshades, “In pop culture, practice comes first; theory follows in its tracks.” Mary Shelley wrote of a monster and his experiments; critics decided after the fact to call it “science fiction.” Samuel R. Delany and Vonda McIntyre wrote of ship pilots jacked into their computer system of their ships; pundits after the fact called it “cyberpunk.” Jeanette Winterson, sitting at home or at Starbucks, jacked into the net and typing furiously on zher tablet, has synthesized zher moment in time; retroactively, psychphiscam calls it “post-punk sf.” (Of course, the meta question here remains to be examined. psychphiscam’s articulation of P-PSF is itself predicated on a linear, progressive model.)
As noted, what was eventually to become the “Post-punk SF Manifesto” began as series of tweets from a user known as psychphisicam. Using the hashtags #wfgisarube and #mirrorshadesmirrors, psychphiscam sent out a number of tweets regarding an apparent dissatisfaction with the state of “science fiction now.” The two hashtags demonstrate a clear awareness of Gibson, Sterling, cyberpunk, and the Mirrorshades anthology while also indicating a strong dissatisfaction with the state of the genre. Both hashtags indicate a familiarity with the larger metatext that is science fiction. As the punks disavowed prog rock, as cyberpunks disavowed the old guard, psychphiscam and the “Post-punk SF Manifesto” disavow -punk sf.
In a turn similar to the rampant speculation surrounding the identity (and gender) of the writer James Tiptree, Jr., speculation ran wild regarding the identity of psychphiscam. While Alice Sheldon had to go to great lengths to hide her identity (even if it was eventually revealed), the anonymity of the Internet and Twitter afford psychphiscam a refuge and a cover that has not, as of this writing, been uncovered. Although the lure of the siren that is the intentional fallacy is strong, quite a lot can be gleaned by a close reading of the posts themselves. The very fact that no one could hack psychphiscam’s account nor trace zher posts has led some to believe that zhe works in Internet security, for the FBI (shades of Sheldon, again), or for some black or white hat operation (tweets from hippyhappyhoppy, conspiracious, and diggininthedirt). Zhe remains anonymous. Almost certainly, zhe adheres to the cypherpunk code of privacy, and perhaps used even cypherpunk code in order to remain anonymous. In one tweet regarding privacy, zhe alludes to “the cypher eric” (psychphiscam, June 2013). Still others believe that zhe is a suburban housewife from Worthington, Ohio (@notnuts). None of these speculations can be confirmed. Obviously, then, no one could say why psychphiscam was interested in science fiction, nor what stake zhe had/has in the profession or the art.
In the “Preface” to Mirrorshades, Sterling writes of technology out of hand. In his Cypherpunk Manifesto, Eric Hughes embraces technological change, though with a few caveats. Without using the word, he defines the electronic age as a paradox. He notes “Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.” psychphiscam has certainly used that technology to maintain zher privacy but has simultaneously used it to disseminate zher message. Furthermore, zhe argues strongly that science fiction writers must embrace these changes and incorporate the attenuating changes they bring—to humans, to the environment, to the subject, and to the ways in which and the limits to which we can represent the world around us (assuming it exists).
Post-Punk SF
Although the canon of post-punk sf is quite small, it is growing (though almost entirely in retrospect). As with other (all?) subgenres or “movements,” works that predate the manifesto have been identified. In the case of post-punk, several works by Joanna Russ and Jeanette Winterson have been singled out. The Female Man serves as a sort of liminal text. In the novel, Russ acknowledges the breakdown of the representation system; challenges stable, received gender categories; and fundamentally redefines the notion of the subject. However, the novel does remain trapped in some ways in the old binary system—the two colored handbooks, the battle between Manland and Womanland, etc. Similarly, Winterson challenges basic assumptions about identity, gender, sexuality, and representation. Through these limit texts and other P-PSF texts, psychphiscam identifies several key characteristics of P-PSF, though, like Sterling and others, notes that a single work need not have all the characteristics but must be characterized as having several of them or “of being defined and determined by” these characteristics. The four characteristics below replicate, even if not explicitly, Sarup’s characteristics of poststructuralism.
Time. One of the key components of post-punk science fiction is a disassociation from time. This disassociation works in several ways, including setting and chronology. Most science fiction is located at a particular moment in time, and as we have seen, many of the current subgenres set that moment in time closer and closer to the NOW. Examples abound: Ursula K. Le Guin places the events of the Ekumen and the Hainish novels into a consistent temporal framework and provides dates within that framework (e.g., the events of The Left Hand of Darkness occur in 1490–97 Ekumenical). C.J. Cherryh has constructed a detailed map and chronology of Alliance-Union space and the events of her many interconnected (one might say “braided”) novels (e.g., the events of Downbelow Station occur in 2352–53). The narrative of Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) take place in 1976 New York and 2037 Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. And so on....
Post-punk sf, on the other hand, avoids temporal location. As psychphiscam argues, a specific temporal location traps the writer, the protagonists, and the narrative into a progressive notion of history, one that is tied to (most often) Western, capitalist “progress.” On the other hand, displaced from that very particular history and from that particular conception of time and progress, P-PSF is freed to posit new modes of time. For example, in D.H. Wilton’s The Wise Ant (2013), the narrative takes place in an indeterminate moment in time (though even that is uncertain). The reader may well be tempted to attempt to locate it in time, may well scour the text for clues regarding scientific developments and knowledge, technological approaches and concepts, social and political models, and pop culture and fashion styles. The attempts will be both in vain and contrary to the very ethos of P-PSF.
Furthermore, P-PSF tends to be achronological, or what psychphiscam calls “time-fucked” (in one tweet, zhe also calls the subgenre “postcoital sf” though zhe never pursues that particular label).4 In keeping with the undermining of linearity and “progress,” temporal diagetic markers are in short supply. Do the events of chapter two of The Wise Ant follow chapter one?5 Was the ant’s intelligence and object awareness prior to the EMP, or were they consequences of it? The former might suggest a familiar notion of individuality and subjectivity while the latter might suggest a particular model of temporality and causality. Given the paucity of diegetic markers in the text, the reader must exist in a state of epistemological uncertainty.
Finally and unsurprisingly, P-PSF linguistically plays with tense. In English (and many Indo-European languages), temporality of an utterance is indicated in the verb (or sometimes by adverbs and so on). Children struggle with conjugating verbs, particularly irregular verbs. Anyone who has attempted to learn another language has had the experience of memorizing verb conjugations. If an event occurred in the past, the locutor denotes that by means of the use of the past tense of the verb. Certainly not all languages do so. But as P-PSF texts employ English (so far), they would be expected to use consistent verb tenses. Quite generally, a novel told in the past tense remains consistently in the past tense. Any shifts in the tense indicate a shift in perspective or emphasis. A text told in the present tense remains consistently in the present, though it, too, may shift to the past or future. Any shift indicates similar shifts or emphases. A consistent use of tense assists the reader to reconstruct the chronology of the narrative in her head.
P-PSF rejects this practice. For one, the consistent use of tense suggests a model of chronology that is anathema to P-PSF. For another, it focalizes the narrative through a subject (did the event occur before, during, or after the character’s perception of it?). In The Wise Ant, just as the chapters slip and slide through time, the narrative within any given chapter slips and slides through tense. At particular moments, the reader believes that she recognizes a pattern only to have it fall apart upon closer inspection.
Post-identarian politics. Another characteristic of post-punk sf is a post-identarian politics. In the Manifesto, psychphiscam argues that, while posthumanism (depending on the version) was a beginning of thinking about post-identity, it ultimately collapsed back onto the very ontologies it was trying to supplant. Instead zhe advocates for a complete and utter conflation (if not annihilation) of received categories of identity. A tall order. And fraught with consequences.
In order to avoid categories of identity, P-PSF characteristically avoids the use of gendered pronouns. Certainly, P-PSF is not the first subgenre of literature (let alone sf) to play with gendered pronouns. In an essay on Tor.com, Alex MacFarlane suggests that sf writers and readers need to get used to nonbinary and nongendered pronouns. MacFarlane suggests getting used to a singular and plural “they,” to using Spivak pronouns, and to consulting the list of nongendered pronouns on Wikipedia. A few sf novels have addressed the issue, including Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (using “person” and “per”), Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man (1995) (using five pronouns for the five sexes), and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), in which Breq comes from a culture without gender and, therefore, has trouble gendering other people. In some ways, these novels are “gender-fucked” though even that term traps the reader into the notion of gender itself. (As the Goodreads poster “Outis” notes, not everyone would be in favor of a genderless future: “Some readers object to the mere mention of gender-neutral posthumans in sf.”) In Nerek Yrmo’s The Bat Lashes: A Novel Novel (2012), the narrative alternates between two plotlines, one in which the characters have a collective identity, united via a ubiquitous, ethereal network, which obliterates the notion of the individual self. They can no longer think of themselves as selves, as individuals—which fundamentally alters our notions of gender and sexuality and obviates the need for gendered pronouns. In the other plot line, the characters do recognize differences among one another, but those differences tend to be centered around behaviors and practices and not categories of being. Consequently, categories of identity and pronoun usage are always in flux.
Similarly, P-PSF tends not to identify race/ethnicity. Although Octavia Butler was reluctant to make race an (unnecessary) issue, she did, nevertheless, assign her characters a race or ethnicity. She would introduce those elements of identity only when necessary to the plot. P-PSF avoids the concept altogether. This particular aspect of P-PSF has drawn some sharp criticisms, in particular that such a strategy erases history, roots, culture, and difference (e.g., Lissa Riviera 111). While P-PSF novels are the melting pot metaphor made material, some fear that the amalgam simply stands in for white, Western, heternormative. Predictably, psychphiscam rejects the notion. In the Manifesto, in a passage responding to José Vasconcelos (a decidedly not-postmodern writer), zhe argues that “the races and ethnicities and cultures of Earth will intermix at an exponentially increasing pace and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of characteristics from each of the races/ethnicities/cultures already in existence” (3). (Compare that with this passage from Vasconcelos: “The central thesis of this book is that the various races of the earth tend to intermix at a gradually increasing pace, and eventually will give rise to a new human type, composed of selections from each of the races already in existence” [3].)
Unrepresentability of/in Language. The third characteristic of P-PSF identified by psychphiscam is another element at the heart of postmodernism. In his essay, “Postmodern Turns,” Hugh Silverman recapitulates some of the twists and turns in the development of postmodern thought and terminology. He notes that the modern episteme was a moment of “representation” while the postmodern episteme is one of the “unrepresentable.” Silverman would describe the postmodern as that which was outside the frame. Ihab Hassan writes that “postmodern literature ... often seeks its limits, entertains its ‘exhaustion,’ subverts itself in forms of articulate ‘silence’” (191), and “It becomes luminary, contesting the modes of its own representation” (191).
On the one hand, this articulation would seem to leave literature out of the picture—how does a medium that is predicated upon representation through language (and, science fiction, perhaps, more than other modes) get outside of meaning through language? How does it rupture the sign? Julia Kristeva, however, suggests that “‘unrepresentability’” is that “‘which, through language, is part of no particular language.... That which, through meaning, is intolerable, unthinkable: the horrible, the abject’” (qtd. in Hassan 191). psychphiscam picks up on Kristeva’s final point regarding “the unthinkable.”
The New Wave sought the limits of representation in sf: e.g., Zoline nonlinearly, nonnarratively represents the entropic effects of dullness on a housewife. Cyberpunk sought new forms and new spaces in sf: e.g., Gibson paints and frames the heretofore unimagined cyber-space—cowboys and AIs riding off the frame of known space. In Ran K. Oyewumí’s De Dao of D’oh (2014), zhe writes of a liminal presence, an entity (though never physically described) that exists (or not) around the edges of a settlement. The entity allows/compels inhabitants to share perceptions, experiences, emotions of others in the settlement. The language slips-slides among English, borrowed lexical terms, and invented terms. The narrative oozes around the presence/events but offers no chronology or causality. In the end, everything collapses.
Post human. One final (for our purposes here) characteristic of P-PSF the representation of the posthuman. In zher Twitter feed, in particular, psychphiscam gets agitated about this. As zhe notes, in a novel set hundreds of years into the future, humans will not be the same as they are now. Even assuming an arithmetic change vector, humans in the twenty-first century are profoundly different from humans of the eighteenth. Given that the two figures above demonstrate an exponential rate of change (though—admittedly—change in technology and change in humans are not the same, they are related), then humans in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century will likely be unrecognizable. The utilization and integration of technology into the lives and the bodies of human beings will profoundly alter our notion of self and of Other.
In her groundbreaking work, How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles notes that, in the “computer age,” one of the signifiers of “intelligence” has shifted from “enaction in the human life world” to an ability to manipulate symbols (xi). Hayles then defines the “posthuman view” by four characteristics: favoring the “informational pattern” over the material instantiation, the human “consciousness” is a sideshow, that the body is a prosthesis (and therefore replacing it with another prosthesis is not a big deal), and humans can be configured alongside intelligent machines (2–3). In his monograph, The Posthuman Condition, Robert Pepperell offers a similar definition. He notes that the “post-” signifies “after Humanism,” and that the posthuman condition refers to a moment in which “the convergence of organisms and technology” render them “almost indistinguishable” (i). In the same year (1995), Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston define the “posthuman condition” as one in which humans have become mixtures of machines and organisms.
In her 2013 monograph, Rosi Braidotti suggests that the post-human is post-naturalistic and post-anthropocentric. Braidotti hopes to break down the nature-culture/given-constructed arguments upon which much posthuman theory had been based. Near the end of her Introduction, though, Braidotti writes: “Posthuman knowledge—and the knowing subjects that sustain it—enacts a fundamental aspiration to principles of community bonding, while avoiding the twin pitfalls of conservative nostalgia and neo-liberal euphoria” (11). Indeed, the P-PSF Manifesto and the fiction seems to stand astride these two poles.
As I noted above, Neuromancer and several of the other prominent cyberpunk texts demonstrate a gender conservatism in particular (which Neal Stephenson ratchets up in The Diamond Age). Instead, Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian trilogy (though written a few years after the prime cyberpunk years) offers a more radical challenge to subjectivity. Or consider Fluency (2014) by Jennifer Foehner Wells, in which a linguist is taken on a mission to meet an alien space ship approaching the solar system. Once there, she encounters an alien/machine entity that then offers her the option to become part of the ship—an alien/machine/human hybrid. Similarly, in Pauł Frelk’s The Grasshopper Lies (2013), the narrative imagines a series of (perhaps) disconnected events involving a group of entities that contain DNA, body parts, experiences, senses, and memories from a number of entities. Unlike Octavia Butler’s Oankali that biologically incorporate information about every species it meets, the Phlegm are organic/biologic hybrids, though that distinction is meaningless to them. The Phlegm do not just incorporate biological information but sensory, embodied, experiential memories as well. No single identity, name, gender, or sexuality could contain them.
(Note that three of the four novels named above—The Wise Ant, The Bat Lashes, and The Grasshopper Lies—feature nonhuman beings in their titles, an up-front signal of the novels’ decentering of the human subject.)
Post Scriptum
After all that, why so little fiction? Why did psychphiscam shut down zher Twitter account and pull the Manifesto? Does that signal the end of a movement? Hardly. Unlike Bruce Sterling, who was both a producer and chronicler, psychphiscam (as far as anyone has been able to determine) only commented upon the movement and the fiction. So, when psychphiscam folded up shop, it hardly signaled the end. Indeed, had Sterling folded up shop, it would not have meant the end of cyberpunk or NOWpunk. Further, as psychphiscam notes, the texts preceded the Manifesto, and they will continue. Subgenres do not come and go; they emerge at particular historical moments, and then they rise and fall in popularity and frequency. The fiction of P-PSF and the ideas that those fictions represent emerged at a particular moment of technological accretion and synthesis and at a particular moment of cultural and social change. P-PSF tries to make sense of change, the possibility of change, and the consequence of change. (Without resorting to an intentional argument, I suggest that) psychphiscam argued with sf as a mode of representation because zhe believed in the promise of monsters, believed that sf has the potential to lead the way, to offer a new (lower case) enlightenment). And, more importantly, zhe believed that P-PSF held the potential to take sf where it had not gone before, that it had the potential, if not to see beyond the singularity, to get right up to it and imagine the beyond. P-PSF took the risk of imagining beyond the NOW.
Ritch Calvin professes at SUNY Stony Brook. The origins of this project reside at ICFA 2014 and in a late-night poolside conversation with Jason Embry and Ben Robertson.
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1 Neither of these two charts is without complications. While a complete history of these two phenomena would be of interest, they are not my prime concern here.
2 Sarup makes a fourth point—“a critique of philosophy” (3)—that is less germane to this discussion.
3 Hegarty and Halliwell differentiate between “progressive” and “prog,” with the latter being a broader terms than the original “progressive.” According to them, prog includes a “wider palette” than that of the 1970s progressive artists (9).
4 Which is not to say that the narrative employs anisochrony or anachrony—psychphiscam has very little to say about the narrative form and focuses on content. I would argue that this omission is one of zher failures, especially since the emerging technologies make possible new ways of organizing and delivering text and since technologies make possible new ways of interacting with and internalizing these texts.
5 Of course, P-PSF could employ the narrative tricks of the Latin American Boom writers such as Julio Cortázar or the Chicana writer Ana Castillo. In both cases, in Rayuela and The Mixquiahuala Letters respectively, the writers offer multiple suggested reading orders, not alternate chronologies. However, to date, I have not seen any P-PSF narratives employ this technique.
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