SOURCE: McHale, Brian. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique 33, no. 3 (spring 1992): 149-75.

In the following essay, McHale delineates the relationship between the “postmodernist poetics of fiction and cyberpunk poetics.”

Cyberpunk science fiction is clearly on the postmodernist critical agenda. If it had not been already, it surely is now with the appearance of the new book on postmodernism by Fredric Jameson, whose contribution to the setting of that agenda can hardly be overestimated. In the new book's first endnote, Jameson laments the absence of a chapter on cyberpunk, “henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (Jameson [1991] 417). If I understand the tenor of this somewhat enigmatic note and the other scattered allusions to cyberpunk (28, 286, 321), Jameson seems to be identifying cyberpunk as the literary manifestation of postmodernism, otherwise predominantly a nonliterary, visual, and spatial cultural phenomenon, whose preferred...