SOURCE: “Feminist Cyberpunk,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, November, 1995, pp. 357-72.

In the following essay, Cadora contrasts early, male-dominated, cyberpunk with the later wave of the movement led by feminists.

Rumor has it that cyberpunk is dead, the victim of its own failure to live up to its extravagant pretensions (Easterbrook 378). Initially touted as an imaginative engagement with the postmodern condition, cyberpunk envisions human consciousness inhabiting electronic spaces, blurring the boundary between human and machine in the process. Cyberpunk's deconstruction of the human body first appeared to signal a revolution in political art. However, closer examinations of the movement have revealed that its politics are anything but revolutionary. In his study of William Gibson's quintessential Neuromancer (1984), Neil Easterbrook concludes that the novel's worldview is “wed to exploitive technologies, obeisance to authority, and the effluence of fashion” (391). Furthermore, Nicola Nixon points out that cyberpunk is guilty of a...