From: Tavia Chalcraft tavia@btinternet.com

What exactly is cyberpunk, could you define it, give some examples ? It might help to have a few examples of B7 stories by a range of authors that you consider to be cyberpunk as well....

It's a term that emerged about twenty years ago to describe a school of SF writing that focussed on social disintegration and technological development in a near future setting, emphasising amorality, mercenarism, streetwise attitude and extrapolation of contemporary social and political trends.

Probably the best known exponent of the genre is William Gibson (who first coined the term 'cyberspace'), author of the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive trilogy, essentially a set of late 21st Century technothrillers. Various other authors have dabbled in it (Bruce Sterling, I think). The genre is echoed in films like Bladerunner, Johnny Mnemonic (screenplay by Gibson, from his original short story) and presumably The Matrix too though I haven't actually seen that yet. I came to it through roleplaying games, which were more an unwitting litany of cyberpunk's cliches. These days it's all a bit passe and obsolete in mainstream SF, from what I gather (I don't read all that much).

In fanfic it's pretty rare. My 'A Casting of Swords' (Stadler Link) is probably the nearest thing I can think of to B7 cyberpunk, mainly because it's a deliberate pastiche of Gibson's style. Most of my other stuff is cyberpunk-influenced. Other elements of the genre creep in with eg Nickey Barnard's 'Dreamshadow' (also in Stadler Link), or Helen Parkinson's 'Virtual Reality' (Gambit #14). The latter - not a cyberpunk story as such - just goes to show how out of touch fanfic can be, since it opens with what I considered a quite needless description of what virtual reality is, as if either we needed telling or its inclusion in a B7 story needed apologising for. Neither, IMO, is necessary.

I think what really distinguishes cyberpunk is the style in which it's written - sharp, smart, sassy, or at least aspiring to be (or simply pretending to be). That cuts out 90 per cent of fanfic from the start.

There are proto-cyberpunk elements in the series itself - the cynicism and amorality, the dystopian tone, Travis, mutoids, virtual reality/cyberspace in Terminal and I would argue also Deathwatch.

I'm surprised that more writers haven't exploited the possibilities opened up by cyberspace, since it lets you put the characters virtually anywhere you could imagine.

Neil