Cyberpunk as Naturalist Science Fiction

Urban Naturalism for the Computer Age

Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), depicts a world Emile Zola, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Raymond Chandler might have claimed as their own. The film opens with a panoramic view of an industrial megalopolis identified in screen captions as 2019 Los Angeles. Viewers discover a tangle of urban canyons, fire-spouting oil refineries, and huge pyramid-shaped high-rises. Los Angeles streets bathe in the glare of ubiquitous advertising graphics—neon signs, giant screens on the face of skyscrapers, floating dirigibles blaring out commercial messages. The city’s crowds make up a multilingual mass exhibiting a dazzling plurality of ethnic or subcultural dress codes. Above all, the cityscape proclaims through its manifold logos that it is a construct of powerful corporations. In the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction, the film’s first scenes follow a private investigator (Harrison Ford) as he calls on some of the masters of this capitalistic world. Whereas in Dreiser or Chandler such figures would include steel, oil, or newspaper magnates, in Blade Runner they comprise corrupt policemen, genetic engineers, and robotics tycoons.

Ridley Scott’s film reworks the thematics of urban naturalism and hard-boiled novels not only by scrutinizing the power structure of the urban-industrial scene but also by raising questions about the make-up of the human subjects inhabiting this dystopian environment. The pessimism of classic literary naturalism was due to novelists’ suspicions that modern subjects are human beasts—characters like Frank Norris’s McTeague, superficially trained into the decorum of civilization, yet driven by atavistic urges. Instead, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century science-fiction attributes the disquieting hybridity of humans to their ever more intimate relation to machines. Most humans and animals in Blade Runner are cyborgs, compounding biological processes, industrial refitting, and artificial intelligence. At one point, the private investigator, who specializes in hunting down rogue androids, is asked to gauge the biological status of the robotics tycoon’s secretary. It takes a personality test of more than a hundred questions, accompanied by eye scans and blush-response monitoring, for him to ascertain that the young woman fails to elicit proper levels of human empathy and is therefore an engineered organism. She is similar to 2019 Los Angeles pet snakes or fishes: the latter are handcrafted artifacts whose genes display serial numbers.

In early 1980s popular culture, Blade Runner marked the advent of cyberpunk, the science-fiction subgenre mapping the social relations generated by information and computer technologies. In an anecdote familiar to sf fans, William Gibson—who would become the major novelist of the budding movement—tried to see Ridley’s Scott’s film on its release, yet soon had to flee from the movie theater because he felt the movie was uncomfortably close to his own vision of the future. The publication of Gibson’s award-winning first novel Neuromancer (1984) marked the breakthrough of cyberpunk’s literary production. The text—the first installment of Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy”—popularized a thematic feature that would prove definitional for all later instances of the genre: the evocation of polities electronically interlinked by what Gibson was the first to call “cyberspace” (Gibson, “Burning” 197). The label cyberpunk itself, coined by sf writer Bruce Bethke, refers to postmodern sf’s concern both with the socio-technological aspects of information-based societies and with the latter’s capacity to generate subcultures comparable to those spawned by rock music. Two years after Neuromancer, the short-story collection Mirror-shades (1988), edited by Bruce Sterling, publicized previous works by other members of the cyberpunk group—Sterling himself, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Mark Laidlaw, and Greg Bear. In addition to the Mirrorshades authors, later writers such as Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow joined the movement, expanding it toward what is sometimes labeled postcyberpunk. Though cyberpunk sf has found its most sociologically and technologically sophisticated expression in literature, it has inspired a significant film corpus comprising, beyond Blade Runner, Steven Lisberger’s Tron...