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Most computer users are content to visit cyberspace now and then, to read their electronic mail, check the bulletin boards and do a bit of electronic shopping. But cyberpunks go there to live and play -- and even die. The WELL, one of the hippest virtual communities on the Internet, was shaken 2 1/2 years ago when one of its most active participants ran a computer program that erased every message he had ever left -- thousands of postings, some running for many pages. It was an act that amounted to virtual suicide. A few weeks later, he committed suicide for real.
The WELL is a magnet for cyberpunk thinkers, and it is there, appropriately enough, that much of the debate over the scope and significance of cyberpunk has occurred. The question "Is there a cyberpunk movement?" launched a freewheeling on-line FLAME-fest that ran for months. The debate yielded, among other things, a fairly concise list of "attitudes" that, by general agreement, seem to be central to the idea of cyberpunk. Among them:
-- Information wants to be free. A good piece of information-age technology will eventually get into the hands of those who can make the best use of it, despite the best efforts of the censors, copyright lawyers and DATACOPS.
-- Always yield to the hands-on imperative. Cyberpunks believe they can run the world for the better, if they can only get their hands on the control box.
-- Promote decentralization. Society is splintering into hundreds of subcultures and designer cults, each with its own language, code and life- style.
-- Surf the edges. When the world is changing by the nanosecond, the best way to keep your head above water is to stay at the front end of the Zeitgeist.
The roots of cyberpunk, curiously, are as much literary as they are technological. The term was coined in the late 1980s to describe a group of science-fiction writers -- and in particular WILLIAM GIBSON, a 44-year-old American now living in Vancouver. Gibson's NEUROMANCER, the first novel to win SF's triple crown -- the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards -- quickly became a cyberpunk classic, attracting an audience beyond the world of SF. Critics were intrigued by a dense, technopoetic prose style that invites comparisons to Hammett, Burroughs and Pynchon. Computer-literate readers were drawn by Gibson's nightmarish depictions of an imaginary world disturbingly similar to the one they inhabit.
In fact, the key to cyberpunk science fiction is that it is not so much a projection into the future as a metaphorical evocation of today's technological flux. The hero of Neuromancer, a burned-out, drug-addicted street hustler named Case, inhabits a sleazy INTERZONE on the fringes of a megacorporate global village where all transactions are carried out in New Yen. There he encounters Molly, a sharp-edged beauty with reflective lenses grafted to her eye sockets and retractable razor blades implanted in her fingers. They are hired by a mysterious employer who offers to fix Case's damaged nerves so he can once again enter cyberspace -- a term Gibson invented. Soon Case discovers that he is actually working for an AI (artificial intelligence) named Wintermute, who is trying to get around the restrictions placed on AIs by the TURING POLICE to keep the computers under control. "What's important to me," says Gibson, "is that Neuromancer is about the present."