Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

A collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures in cyberpunk culture, this outstanding guide charts the rich and varied landscape of cyberpunk from the 1970s to present day.

The collection features key figures from a variety of disciplines, from novelists, critical and cultural theorists, philosophers, and scholars, to filmmakers, comic book artists, game creators, and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include: J. G. Ballard, Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, Charlie Brooker, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Donna J. Haraway, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Annalee Newitz, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Sadie Plant, Mike Pondsmith, Ridley Scott, Bruce Sterling, and the Wachowskis. The editors also include an afterword of ‘Honorable Mentions’ to highlight additional figures and groups of note that have played a role in shaping cyberpunk.

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Nominated as Best Non-Fiction for the BSFA Award 2022

Synopsis

Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture is an extended appendix to The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture in its focus on those makers of our cyberpunk cultural formation. In our focus on the fifty key makers of cyberpunk culture, we’ve chosen our entries with an eye to giving the reader a flavor for the diverse ways in which specific actors working with cyberpunk have helped shape our cyberpunk culture, even if their work may have pre-dated cyberpunk’s official codification. We do, of course, offer a number of entries on those actors who were instrumental in the Movement’s earliest days as it transitioned to cyberpunk, all of whom are included in Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology: Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and Lewis Shiner, for example, all feature here, as well as William Gibson whose novel Neuromancer (1984) is cyberpunk’s ur-text, making him the honorary godfather of cyberpunk. We have also attempted to show the transmedia power of cyberpunk imagery, including figures from film (Mamoru Oshii), comic books (Warren Ellis), tabletop role-playing games (Mike Pondsmith), video games (Warren Spector) and performance art (Stelarc). We also wanted to showcase the feedback between cyberpunk and critical theory because the former has engaged in conversations with the latter and acted as a form of theory in science-fictional form, evidenced in such texts as J. G. Ballard’s proto-cyberpunk Crash (1973) or Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999). In other words, cyberpunk has been inspired by futurologists like Alvin and Wendy Toffler, internet researchers and activists such as Sadie Plant, critical posthumanists like Donna J. Haraway, and transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, and these close connections between (cyberpunk) fiction and (cyberpunk) theory are instrumental in understanding how the genre has evolved into a cultural mode.

Reviews

Table of Contents

Introduction
Anna Mcfarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink
1. J. G. Ballard
Jaak Tomberg
2. Steven Barnes
Isiah Lavender Iii
3. Jean Baudrillard
Michał Kłosiński
4. Lauren Beukes
Lars Schmeink
5. Rosi Braidotti
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
6. Charlton ‘Charlie’ Brooker
Filip Boratyn
7. Pat Cadigan
Ritch Calvin
8. David Cronenberg
Matthew Flisfeder
9. Samuel R. Delany
Jędrzej Burszta
10. Philip K. Dick
Francis Gene-Rowe
11. Cory Doctorow
Benjamin Franz
12. Warren Ellis
David. M. Higgins And Matthew Iung
13. William Gibson
Keren Omry
14. Donna J. Haraway
Julia Grillmayr
15. N. Katherine Hayles
María Goicoechea
16. Nalo Hopkinson
Rebecca J. Holden
17. Sogo Ishii
Sasha Myerson
18. Ray Kurzweil
Nicholas Laudadio
19. Jaron Lanier
Leighton Evans
20. Marshall Mcluhan
D. Harlan Wilson
21. Syd Mead
Pawel Frelik
22. Misha
Stina Attebery
23. Moebius
Nicolas Labarre
24.Janelle Monáe
Lidia Kniaź- Hunek
25. Richard K. Morgan
Adam Edwards
26. Annalee Newitz
Wendy Gay Pearson
27. Mamoru Oshii
Brian Ruh
28. Katsuhiro Ōtomo
Shige ‘CJ’ Suzuki
29. Marge Piercy
Christopher D. Kilgore
30. Sadie Plant
Ania Malinowska
31. Mike Pondsmith
Evan Torner
32. Thomas Pynchon
Rob Latham
33. Rudy Rucker
Jonathan Thornton
34. Joanna Russ
Jeanne Cortiel
35. Melissa Scott
Robin Anne Reid
36. Ridley Scott
Simon Spiegel
37. Lewis Shiner
Graham J. Murphy
38. Masumune Shirow
Mark Player
39. Warren Spector
Christophe Duret
40. Stelarc
Agnieszka Kiejziewicz
41. Neal Stephenson
Anna Mcfarlane
42. Bruce Sterling
Paul Raven
43. Allucquére Rosanne ‘Sandy’ Stone
Anna Kurowicka
44. James Tiptree, Jr.
Anya Heise-Von Der Lippe
45. Alvin and Wendy Toffler
Doug Davis
46. Shinya Tsukamoto
Mark Bould
47. Vernor Vinge
Sébastien Doubinsky
48. Lana and Lilly Wachwoski
Dan Hassler-Forest
49. Norbert Wiener
Willian Perpétuo Busch
50. Shoshana Zuboff
Jo Lindsay Walton
Honourable Mentions
Anna Mcfarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink

From classic Movement sf writers like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan to key precursors like Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., and Philip K. Dick and contemporary practitioners like Charlie Brooker, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Lauren Beukes, and Janelle Monáe — with a truly global collection of writers, filmmakers, scientists, and philosophers spanning every field of art and innovation over more than a century — McFarlane, Murphy, and Schmeink’s Fifty Figures lays any possible doubt to rest: cyberpunk still rules our world.

Gerry Canavan

Associate Professor of English, Marquette University

Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture brings together a truly diverse and global array of entries that explodes the limits of cyberpunk’s perceived “monocromatism,” and heteronormative, masculine biases. The entries gathered here reveal cyberpunk to be a key cultural formation for investigating the racial, class, gender, and sexual intersections of our increasingly techno-saturated late capitalist present. Your favorite “deep-cut” author might be missing, but you’ll discover far more than you’ll miss.

Hugh O'Connell

Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts Boston

Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture is an excellent introduction to some of the writers, artists, theorists, and scientists whose influence has helped to shape today’s technocultural imaginary. Readers will (re)discover cyberpunk culture’s makers, from J.G. Ballard to Rosi Braidotti, from Marshall McLuhan to Richard K. Morgan, from Rudy Rucker to Joanna Russ, from Vernor Vinge to Norbert Wiener. Fifty Key Figures is both an exciting supplement to MacFarlane, Murphy, and Schmeink’s recently published Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture and an important contribution to cyberculture studies in general.

Veronica Hollinger

Prof. em. of Cultural Studies, Trent University