Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative [Paperback]

George Slusser (Editor)
GEORGE SLUSSER is a professor comparative literature and director of the Eaton Program for Science Fiction and Fantasy Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, including Styles of Creation (Georgia).

Tom Shippey (Editor)
TOM SHIPPEY is a professor of English and medieval literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author or editor of five books, including the recent Fictional Space.

Will novels and stories be relevant in the next millennium, when the boundaries between illusion and reality, and observer and observed, may dissipate in a whirl of images, signals and data? This essay collection divines the prospects of fiction in the information age by examining cyberpunk literature. A movement less than a decade old, cyberpunk is driven by deep concerns about society, ethics, and new technology and has been defined as the literature of the first generation of science-fiction writers actually to live in a science-fiction world.

These essays were first presented at the 1989 annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. They address concerns common not only to cyberpunk and traditional science-fiction scholars, critics, and writers but to their counterparts outside the genre as well. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the essays consider the origins of cyberpunk, the appropriation of its conventions by the mass media, the literature's paradoxical retrogressive/iconoclastic nature, cyberpunk's affinities to and deviations from both traditional science fiction and postmodernist literature, the parameters and components of the cyberpunk canon, and the movement's future course.

Some essays are theoretical, but alllÃ*