Customer Reviews

Cyberpunk & Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson

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This book has a lot of valuable information on the cyberpunk movement, and Gibson's critical contribution to the genre. A little more history of cyberpunk would have been welcome -- for example, the book briefly deals with cyberpunk's roots in Victorian Gothic and hard-boiled detective fiction without really going into much detail. This is nit-picky, I know, but a definitive book on the subject would deal with the movement's history.

I'd also recommend Bruce Sterling's instrumental introduction to the cyberpunk anthology _Mirrorshades_, and _Storming_the_Reality_Studio if you're really too lazy to go out and actually read cyberpunk.

I was hoping that Dani Cavallaro's "Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson" would offer more of an introduction to and historical survey of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, its origins, and the seminal role which William Gibson's work occupies. For example, I found her treatment of cyberpunk's literary origins a bit too cursory, barely skimming over science fiction's 19th Century history, and acknowledging some of the mainstream and crime noir genre literary influences on Gibson's work. Much to my surprise, her examination of Gibson's literary colleagues like Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, and Pat Cadigan is also a bit terse. Cavallaro is more successful in exploring the movement's musical and cinematic influences, exploring its connections to punk music, and noting its relative success in cinema, ranging from Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (which is adapted from Philip K. Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") to Robert Longo's "Johnny Mnemonic" (based on the classic William Gibson short story of the same title) and Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days". At best, Cavallaro's book is a barely useful, quite terse, and yet, frantic introduction (It's frantic in the sense that she tries to cover too much in such a short space.) to cyberpunk, and may be more useful to those unfamiliar with this important 20th Century literary movement.