SOURCE: “Beyond the Ruins: The Geopolitics of Urban Decay and Cybernetic Play,”¹ in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, July, 1993, pp. 251-65.

In the following essay, Sponsler discusses dystopic predictions in cyberpunk.

For better or for worse, “cyberpunk” no longer needs much introduction. Used as commonly and casually as its cousins “cyborg” and “postmodernism,” “cyberpunk” has become a widely accepted term for describing a specific kind of cultural production found in music, film, and fiction in 1980s America.² A fusion of high-tech and punk counterculture characterized by a self-conscious stylistic and ideological rebelliousness, cyberpunk can perhaps best be defined as a reinterpretation of human (and especially male) experience in a media-dominated, information-saturated, post-industrial age. Debate now centers less on what cyberpunk is than on what its value has been, with opinions ranging from Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's sardonic criticism of cyberpunk as “the vanguard white male art of the age” (267) to...