Isolating the precise essence of cyberpunk is a tricky business, because like the SF virus itself, it’s continually reduplicating itself from the DNA up, changing to meat each new environmental challenge. Everybody’s got their own two cents to throw in. Gibson talks about the generation of writers who were taking William Burroughs for granted when they were thirteen (and if you’ve read NAKED LUNCH, you know what a scary idea that is); while CP pioneer Sterling points to the bewildering transformations—mental and physical—that technology exerts on us; and goofball information theorist Rudy Rucker measures the data-density in CP prose. Founding zygote John Shirley summed it up best, with: “I think it’s characterized by writers who have @ global worldview; who write with an attitude informed by information arising from the so-called “underground”; who write with a certain intensity of tone that’s sometimes taken for punk; who are influenced by writers outside the SF genre, and by certain aspects of rock culture (the better aspects); who realize that anti-heroes are not really anti-heroic; who search for real honesty in characterization; and who write with a perspective of o new, constantly transforming, global flux of worldwide media/information/imagery.”
