• DOI:10.2307/1208645
• Corpus ID: 163362863

Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson

@article{Sponsler1992CyberpunkAT,
  title={Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson},
  author={Claire Sponsler},
  journal={Contemporary Literature},
  year={1992},
  volume={33},
  pages={625}
}

• Claire Sponsler
• Published 24 January 1992
• Art
• Contemporary Literature

n recent years science fiction has with some success struggled against its ghettoization as lowbrow genre fiction. Readers and critics have defended science fiction as having not only a tradition of its own but also considerable overlap with modernist and postmodernist literature. Simultaneously, theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway have turned to SF as, in Annette Kuhn's words, "a privileged cultural site for enactments of the postmodern condition" (178). Indeed, for many cultural critics, SF has become the pre-eminent literary genre of the postmodern era, since it alone seems capable of understanding the rapid technological and cultural changes occurring in late capitalist, postindustrial society. In spite of this highbrow interest in science fiction, borders are still policed, and the SF ghetto endures. Even an apologist for SF like Darko Suvin can say dismissively that only "5 to 10 percent of SF" is "aesthetically significant" in contrast to the ninety to ninetyfive percent that is "strictly perishable stuff" (vii). As Roger Luckhurst notes, in the postmodern discourse about SF, science fiction is seen as borrowing from the mainstream "always belatedly, derivatively, and in degraded form" (362). SF may have acquired a new visibility outside its own coterie, especially among theorists, but old value hierarchies still work to keep SF books out of the hands of highand middlebrow readers. Hence, like the New Wave and ecofeminist SF of the 1960s and 1970s, cyberpunk, the most significant development in science fiction in the 1980s, is not widely known