Power relations and cyborgs: the treatment of power, domination, and resistance in four cyberpunk novels: Neuromancer, Mona Lisa overdrive, Synners, Fools.

Abstract

Cyberpunk as a postmodern genre is an interzonal point of negotiation between the postmodern present and a multiplicity of possible futures. The genre demonstrates a special resonance with postmodern eclecticism opening itself to modes of existence from a lost past, and recycling those lost modes with a volatility that both embodies and exceeds the limits of nostalgia, embracing the multiple possibilities of fragmentation. Therefore, this is not a genre that laments the passing of any 'golden age,' and so avoids "the ominous proliferation of postapocalypse stories, sword-and-sorcery fantasies, and those everpresent space operas in which galactic empires slip conveniently back into barbarism" that typified Seventies SF prior to the arrival of cyberpunk. (Sterling, Burning Chrome 2-3) Rather cyberpunk recognises the necessity of coming to terms with our postmodern present by imagining its future manifestations. This it achieves contextually and stylistically, cyberpunk futures continually reiterating their participation in the environment of their construction and consumption without implying a privileged perspective of that environment and instead exploring its myriad possibilities.