Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives

In this collection of essays, contributors consider the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world'shaped by information technology. Contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. Essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.

In this collection of essays, contributors consider the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. Contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. Essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.

Graham J. Murphy teaches with Trent University’s Cultural Studies Department and its Department of English Literature as well as Seneca College.

Sherryl Vint is Associate Professor of English at Brock University. She is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.