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From: g-humphr@gumby.UUCP
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Cyberpunk Definitions
Message-ID: <1039@gumby.wisc.edu>
Date: Fri, 25-Sep-87 20:01:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: gumby.1039
Posted: Fri Sep 25 20:01:05 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Sep-87 08:46:18 EDT
Reply-To: g-humphr@gumby.WISC.EDU (Bill Humphries)
Distribution: alt
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 25

Subject: Cyberpunk Definitions
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk
Keywords: Cyberpunk, NASfiC, Rudy Rucker, Arguments, Drunken Moderators


In so far as defintions for cyberpunk go, I'm tempted to fall back on the one   
created by Rudy Rucker in the infamous Cyberpunk panel at the 1985 NASfiC in
Austin, Texas.
To paraphrase, "Cyberpunk is like the punk rock movement.  The writers took 
S/F and stripped it down then sped it up."
So what qualifies as "stripped down and sped up?"
I dont think that grimy urban settings have anything to do with it.  Just look  
at Bruce Sterling's _Schizmatrix_.  The settings are man-made worlds, the      
characters are movers and shakers of ideaological movements.
What made it "stripped down and sped up" was how it reached back to the sense of
wonder.  Early S/F had it easy when creating a sense of wonder, all you needed
was a spaceship or an alien.  We're used to those things now.  Popular culture
has iconized them via -StarTrek/Wars/ET- ad naseum.
In an interview with Andy Mc Quiddy that was published in the Texas S/F Inquirer,r
, Sterling described what constitutes a sense of wonder these days as,     
paraphrasing again: "getting in bed with the technology".  The cyberpunk writers
take the tack of "if this goes on..." to its wildest extremes.
To synopsize, I would say that cyberpunk is not about "low life and high tech",
but about living in a world where technology has gone from shaping to controlingg
the world.