From Punk to Cyberpunk

Billy Idol was born on November 30, 1955. If he were an American, that would make him a Baby Boomer. Maybe that makes him a Boomer in his native country, too. Despite that, he belonged to a band called Generation X, or Gen X. Generation X was not named for Generation X, the truncated generation that came after the Baby Boom of 1946 to 1964. Instead the band was named for a book called Generation X by British journalists Jane Deverson and Charles Hamblett, published in 1964, or the last year of the Baby Boom. Billy Idol was a fan of the Sex Pistols. They were all Boomers, too. The Sex Pistols were of course punk rockers. Generation X was a punk band, too.

Billy Idol is more well known for his solo career, which began in 1981. One of his songs was "Eyes Without a Face," released in 1984. The title is from the film of the same name, Les yeux sans visage in the original, which was released in 1960. That was during the Nouvelle Vague era of French cinema, but I'm not sure that it was in the mode of Nouvelle Vague. I have never seen Eyes Without a Face. It's considered a horror movie, but as we know, weird fiction is called horror because nobody knows what weird fiction is. Maybe Eyes Without a Face is actually a weird story. Anyway, the film is supposed to have been influenced by Jean Cocteau. Without knowing it, he lent his name to Cocteau Twins, who were not a punk band exactly but who were supposed to have been punk-influenced in their early days. Early on, music critics compared them to Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Bauhaus. Like the Thompson Twins, Cocteau Twins were not twins, there weren't two of them (after 1981), they weren't related, and none of them was named Cocteau (or Thompson). By the way, the Thompson Twins got their name from the comic strip Tintin. By the way, Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins collaborated with Harold Budd, about whom I wrote on February 4, 2021, here.

Billy Idol's sixth album was called Cyberpunk. It was released on June 28, 1993, so 33 years ago today. Since then, the earth has made as many trips around the sun as an LP makes around its spindle in a single minute, minus one-third. Cyberpunk is a concept album, but it was more than that at its release. Reading about it now leads me to think that it was a multifaceted and extremely complex project. But I have never heard it and don't remember its release. Cyberpunk was of course based on the culture of the same name from the 1980s and '90s, if there really was such a thing. William Gibson was a seminal figure in cyberpunk. There is a song on Cyberpunk called "Neuromancer." Cyberpunk wasn't very well received, I guess. I'm not sure that the real cyberpunks, if that was a term, would have recognized themselves or their culture in it. Whatever else might be true, you can't ding an artist for trying something really big and ambitious. If nothing else, Cyberpunk is a museum piece from the 1990s, a decade--the Generation X decade--that now, sadly, lies more than a quarter-century in the past.

So the first part of Billy Idol's career spanned from punk to cyberpunk.*

* * *

This entry is Wikipedia-ized research. It's a cheap kind of research, but oh well. It's better than AI research and better than AI writing. Anyway, Wikipedia has a list of supposedly cyberpunk films. One of them is Freejack, from 1992. One of the stars was Mick Jagger, who did not after all bail Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols out of jail in 1979. Freejack was based on Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley (1959). As it turns out, George Harrison watched an adaptation of Immortality, Inc. on British television in January 1969. I wrote about that encounter in this space on December 5, 2021. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Robert Sheckley was not explicitly a New Wave author, but he might have been closer to that movement than to the more positive science fiction of the Golden Age that preceded it. (If the Golden Age was like the Baby Boom, then maybe the New Wave was like Generation X.) Strangely, Sheckley lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, which is where Sid Vicious lived as a child. They were there at two different times, but time travel would have allowed them to live there at the same time. Maybe the past is all one time all wrapped up together.

I have just completed two long series on the British New Wave in science fiction, punk music, New Wave music, and cyberpunk. This has been going on since April. I have written about William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (1984). I have also written about J.G. Ballard, who was a New Wave author. Now I have another connection among these various topics. From "An Interview with William Gibson," conducted by Larry McCaffery, at the following URL:

http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html

[Larry McCaffery]: How consciously do you see yourself operating outside the mainstream of American SF?

[William Gibson]: A lot of what I've written so far is a conscious reaction to what I felt SF--especially American SF--had become by the time I started writing in the late '70s. In fact, I felt I was writing so far outside the mainstream that my highest goal was to become a minor cult figure, a sort of lesser [J.G.] Ballard.

And that will have to do for now. [Update: Except for one more coda and the following essay-length footnote.]

-----

A pre-publication update:

*Billy Idol was also the inspiration for the look of the original cyberpunk, Rayno in Bruce Bethke's story "Cyberpunk," published in Amazing Stories in November 1983. See "The Etymology of 'Cyberpunk'" by Bruce Bethke (1997). By the way, the editor of Amazing Stories at the time--the man who bought "Cyberpunk"--was George H. Scithers (1929-2010), later the co-editor of Weird Tales, from 1988 to 1990 and from 1998 to 2007.

In his forward to "Cyberpunk," from 1997, Mr. Bethke wrote:

IMPORTANT POINT! I never claimed to have invented cyberpunk fiction! That honor belongs primarily to William Gibson, whose 1984 novel, Neuromancer, was the real defining work of "The Movement." (At the time, Norman Spinrad argued that the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly Imitation Neuromancer.) [Boldface added.]

The reference appears to be to "The Neuromantics" by Norman Spinrad, published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in May 1986. Gardner Dozois was the editor. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:

[. . .] Spinrad argued cogently that the "romance" component of Gibson's triple-punning title Neuromancer ("neuro" as in nervous system; "necromancer"; "new romancer") is basic to the cyberpunk form. Spinrad proposed ingeniously that the cyberpunk authors should in fact be called "neuromantics" (nobody seems to have taken him up on this), for their fiction is "a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology." (Spinrad sees romanticism and science as having been damagingly split during the New Wave vs Hard SF [c.f.] debates of the 1960s; only with cyberpunk, he argues, did they fuse together again.)

That goes along with what I have been writing lately, but like I said before, there aren't very many original ideas left. Most of the time we just rework what others have written before us. Maybe that's what I have done regarding Norman Spinrad's essay from forty years ago. But I confess I have never read it. (In what I have written lately, I have not touched at all on the detective--specifically Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe--as a romantic hero--a knight errant--and an inspiration for later science fictions, but that idea has continued to occupy a spot in my little brain.)

Anyway, I have three more things:

First, Bruce Bethke (born in 1955, he is the same age as Billy Idol) is (or was) a musician. In his introduction to "Cyberpunk," George Scithers wrote: "His avocation is computer/electronic music." He is also a software developer, and so we have another example of the fusion of music and technology as in the British New Wave of the late 1970s and 1980s. (By the way, composer, pianist, electronic musician, and sound designer Suzanne Ciani was born 80 years ago this month--in Indiana no less--and so I would like to say happy birthday to her.)

Second, in reading the beginning of "Cyberpunk," I was reminded of the song "Slip Kid" by The Who, originally part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse project--can we call that project an example of proto-cyberpunk?--less so of "A Day in the Life" by the Beatles.

Third, I just remembered that I wrote a dystopian/detective/computer-hacker science fiction story at around the same time that "Cyberpunk" and Neuromancer were published without having known about either one. Now I'll have to dig it out and read it again.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Coda

Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) opens like George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and of course other books, too, with an establishment of mood, atmosphere, tone, and setting. In Neuromancer, as the protagonist Case enters a bar, the sky is "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." In 1984, on a bright, cold, windy day in April, Winston Smith walks up to his flat where a telescreen is droning its ceaseless streams of information. He looks out the window and sees that "though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything [. . .]." There is in the beginning of both works colorlessness and the imagery of the electronic screen. (1, 2)

There are brandnames in Neuromancer. I remember that from my first and only reading of it many years ago. I thought I had remembered the bartender's arm as having a brandname. Instead there is only a description of it, but that works just as well:

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.

That sounds like a commercial. Get yours today.

There is a branded place of the future in Neuromancer. It's called Chatsubo. It's a bar, a place for people to gather, drink, and talk. There is also a branded drink, Kirin, which exists in our world of today. There are other brandnames after that. Just keep reading.

In 1984, there is also a branded drink, Victory Gin, a "colourless liquid" that gives off "a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit." (Drinks in these colorless places originate in the Orient. I wonder what that could mean.) Most of the other proper nouns in that story have to do with Big Brother, the organs of the State, and the institutions of slavery, hatred, and oppression. There aren't any choices to be made. You take exactly what's given to you.

Neuromancer takes place in what I guess you could call a capitalistic society. It's no wonder that there would be brandnames and futuristic product placement. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in a monopolistic society. There isn't any need for brandnames, for there is only one of everything and sometimes zero of everything, for there are usually shortages, an identifying feature of socialist economies.

The branded products in Neuromancer are of the imagination, even if they might be real today. The author may have partaken of Kirin, but his purpose in mentioning it isn't to get you to buy it, or to put his own status or knowing or consumer skills on display. It is instead literary or artistic. It has nothing to do with himself. If he has seen nine billion commercials in a lifetime of watching TV, he isn't letting us know that. It's clear that commercialism and consumerism haven't gotten into his brain.

In contrast, brandnames and product placement are everywhere today, in people's everyday language and perhaps most annoyingly in their fiction-writing and storytelling. People that you meet will even show you on their branded phones pictures of the branded products they have consumed, and they will tell you the brandnames of the places where they purchased those branded products.

The use of brandnames in Neuromancer doesn't serve the same purpose as in genre fiction of today, which is, truth be told, wholly consumeristic and commercialistic. Genre writers, for example those in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023), seem unaware that their brains have been taken over by large corporations and that they are offering free advertising for the various brands they have placed in their stories. They have been the watchers of nine billion commercials in which the nine billion names of products have been catalogued, and they can't or won't turn off their TV brains long enough to write, simply, a story. They just have to include their favorite brandnames in their prose. If I can stretch that metaphor past the breaking point, although their televisions have never been "tuned to a dead channel," their thoughts are as dull as the Neuromancer sky and as colorless as Victory Gin. I want to tell them: physical objects are not characters. They don't need names. They do not take action. They are inert. We as readers do not take any interest in them. And yet contemporary authors expect that brandnames will offer color and carry the weight of description, or even the weight of the story for them, completely oblivious to the fact that brandnames are not up to the task.  And these are professional writers.

Science fiction has as one of its purposes satire. Dystopian fiction is very often satirical, even when it is grim. Nineteen Eighty-Four is both grim and bitterly satirical. Neuromancer can be seen as satirical, too, though slightly less grim. At the end of April this year, at around the time the clock struck nineteen, we gathered in a bar for our monthly weird fiction/science fiction bookclub. (The bartender there does not have a prosthetic arm.) This April we read stories by J.G. Ballard, an author associated with the British New Wave. One of the stories we read is "The Subliminal Man," originally in New Worlds Science Fiction in January 1963. "The Subliminal Man" is about advertising and marketing, moreover about mindless and inexhaustible consumption. It's a funny, pointed, and utterly accurate story about the future, i.e., our present. For example, in the story, so many boxes arrive so rapidly at the protagonist's house that he and his wife don't even know what's in them. They sit unopened as more boxes arrive. Consider that in your own life. As you have been reading this, there have probably been more boxes arriving on your doorstep. You'd better fetch them soon so that there's enough room for the next box to arrive.

By the way, as we were discussing "The Subliminal Man," a song came on the stereo. It was "Thieves Like Us" by New Order. We did not request it. We were talking about a New Wave author and a New Wave song simply played and came into our ears. These are the things that happen in this world of circles and webs, of nexuses, matrixes, and connections, of serendipity and coincidences. Or maybe it's planning. By the way again, the words cyberspace and matrix show up in the first few pages of Neuromancer.

The point of this is that product placement and the use of brandnames in contemporary fiction is not satirical, nor is it ironic. It is in fact completely unironic, for its authors seem completely unaware that they have allowed their brains to be taken over by consumerism and commercialism. They have programmed themselves to be this way--programmed in the computer sense rather than in the TV sense. Having programmed themselves, they have made themselves unselfconscious, just as machines are unselfconscious. They have become robotic instruments of the corporations that produce and sell branded products. In short, they have ceased to think and should probably not be considered true artists or even hack writers or the authors of potboilers, for even hacks are self-aware. (It's one of the things that turns them to drink.) This is among the worst kinds of writing because it's completely unthinking and at the same time very apparently in earnest. These writers won't change their ways because they simply can't. They don't know that they're committing an offense, and they lack the ability to do anything differently. If you were to tell them that they have to change, they would probably start crying. Either that or they would lash out. This is not a good situation. What does it bode for the future of writing?

* * *

George Orwell completed work on 1984 in 1948, the year in which William Gibson was born. Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in 1984, the year in which Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer was published. I didn't intend to write about him exactly today, but June 25, 2026, is the 123rd birthday of George Orwell, or, as he was christened, Eric Arthur Blair. Happy Birthday to him, one of the essential authors of the twentieth century.

Notes

(1) In the TV series The Big Bang Theory, the elevator doesn't work, just as in 1984. Winston Smith doesn't have a Penny across the hall, but he has his Julia. Penny saves. Julia tries but fails. Rats!

(2) Television was the name of a pre-punk or sort-of punk band from New York City. Their first album was released in 1977, or Year One of the punk calendar.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Seven

A Gothic Science Fiction

It has taken a lot of writing to get here, but my idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction, also a science fiction of decadence rather than of ascent. Romanticism and Gothicism are about the past. Very often they are about decadence and descent, as in weird fiction. Both science fiction and weird fiction descended (no pun intended) in part from the Gothic and Romantic works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. But I think the Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell, Jr. type of science fiction is more nearly an innovation. It is, I think, a break with the past and is discontinuous with other types of genre fiction.

My idea is that Gothic or Romantic science fiction is an attempted return to the past, to a time before there were discontinuities in fiction or literature. Again, science fiction is an innovation. Rather than evolutionary, as conservative institutions are or tend to be, science fiction is more nearly revolutionary, as modern science is in the real world. In contrast, a Gothic or Romantic science fiction would appear reactionary. Reaction is one way of being conservative.

If there are spectra, then Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe are, in this interpretation, on the conservative side of the spectrum. Scholar Lee Sterrenburg opened his essay "Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein" (in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, edited by George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher and published by the University of California Press, 1979) with what reads like a conclusion:

     Mary Shelley was the daughter of two of England's foremost intellectual radicals, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. For a number of reasons--not all of which can be considered here--she rejected her utopian and radical heritage and opted for a more conservative and pessimistic view of the world. [Boldface added.]

As for Poe, American conservative author and poet Peter Viereck considered him among our culturally conservative authors. I won't argue.

I have written on these topics before. Here are titles and links to three entries:

• "Pipe Dreams and Premonitions-Part Three" (Aug. 9, 2015)

• "Skilled Destroyers" (May 20, 2017)

• "Frankenstein: A Monster of Gothicism and Science" (Aug. 11, 2015)

The last of those entries was supposed to have been the lead-in to the current series on Neuromancer and William Gibson. Well, better late than never. Besides that, I have brought in a lot of topics that I would not have had I written in 2015. This series is better--though longer--for it, I think.

I imagine there are other authors of Gothic and Romantic science fiction. Maybe William Gibson took the lead. If there is a category of Gothic or Romantic science fiction, then maybe its authors are like the Pre-Raphaelites in British art, i.e., a somewhat conservative or reactionary movement, or an attempted return to the past, before change and innovation had set in. The paradox is that the Pre-Raphaelites were not evolutionary. I don't know whether they ever published a manifesto--maybe their official publication The Germ was it--but their movement was conscious and intellectual, and it had a set beginning. In a way, it was revolutionary, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established in 1848, a year of revolution in Europe and the year in which Karl Marx issued his regrettable and disastrous Communist Manifesto.

By the way, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelites was William Morris. He was also a socialist, though utopian rather than "scientific" as in Marx's case. As we have seen, socialism is an essentially reactionary movement rather than an innovation, for socialists seek a restoration of the feudalistic past in which there are only two classes of men, the few on top and the very many below. They also of course seek complete stasis, as in the feudal ideal, with everyone fixed in his current status and no change permitted. In one sense, Nazis were more forward-looking and less reactionary than were their communist counterparts. One thing that Nazis and Bolsheviks shared is their hatred of the Jewish people. If you doubt that Marxism began with anti-semitism among its strains of thought, read what Marx had to say about Jews and the so-called "Jewish question" in the 1840s. (Why is there always a "Jewish question" but no equivalent questions regarding other groups?) Remember, too, that the worst villain in 1984 by George Orwell (completed in the centennial year of The Communist Manifesto) is named Emmanuel Goldstein and was undoubtedly based on Leon Trotsky.

In 1926 when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published, science fiction was an innovation. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, its various authors, artists, editors, and fans developed science fiction into a specific type--or two types, the hard science fiction type of Astounding Science-Fiction and what I guess you could call the adventurous or romantic science fiction or science fantasy of Planet Stories, Fantastic Adventures, etc. If there were two types, hard science fiction was the respectable one, at least in literary terms. It was or became the mainstream type. For example, in 1947, Robert A. Heinlein broke out of the pulps and into mainstream slick magazines with "The Green Hills of Earth," published in The Saturday Evening Post. (It's a story about music by the way.) Meanwhile, in 1947, the Shaver Mystery, a shabby chronicle based on the ravings of a real-life madman, was still the rage in Amazing Stories and related titles. Astounding Science Fiction started going the same way in May 1950 with the publication of "Dianetics: The New Science of the Mind" by L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe a process of decay had set in and the Golden Age of Science Fiction was thereby ended.

Pulp magazines faded in the 1950s. In 1960 came the question Is science fiction dying? (That same year, Astounding Science Fiction became Analog Science Fact & Fiction. Name changes in popular culture often indicate trouble.) I wonder whether the British New Wave of science fiction was the first sub-genre of the post-1950s or post-Golden Age. Cyberpunk followed the British New Wave. I wonder whether it was the second. Anyway, were New Wave and cyberpunk reactionary? If so, does that mean that they were or are conservative in some way? Were the authors of New Wave and cyberpunk in particular attempting a return to the past, to a time before the innovations of hard science fiction, before the innovation of science fiction itself, or even before the splitting of fiction or literature into recognizable and nameable genres and sub-genres? Finally, was that past Gothic or Romantic in its orientation, themes, and so on?

My idea is that Neuromancer by William Gibson and perhaps cyberpunk in general is a kind of decadent, Gothic or Romantic science fiction, oriented on the past and returning to the Gothic and Romantic origins of science fiction in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, among others, before genrification set in, and when there was still continuity in literature. Neuromancer was a new romance and the work of a new romancer, a phrase from Hugo Gernsback's introductory essay of 1926. Mr. Gibson was fully aware of Gernsback and his brand of science fiction, for before there was Neuromancer, there was his story "The Gernsback Continuum," from 1981, in which there is talk not only of Gernsbackian science fiction--illustrated by Frank R. Paul--but also of Nazis and what a character in the story refers to as "raygun Gothic."

Innovations and revolutions very often begin with a gnosis or a priori systems of thought, very often expressed in a manifesto. Manifestos are very often intellectualized works, or they are pseudo-intellectual, as in Hubbard's "Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind." (Again, if we're looking for an end date to the Golden Age of Science Fiction, we might set it to May 1950 when "Dianetics" was published.) They are often visionary and sometimes seemingly mad and full of fury. They are often angry, aggressive, incoherent, or inarticulate. Science fiction is a field in which a pre-action manifesto was put forth in Hugo Gernsback's essay "A New Sort of Magazine," published in Amazing Stories in April 1926. Gernsback afterwards enacted his ideas. Unlike with other manifestos and the actions based upon them, nobody died as a result. Karl Marx had his manifesto, too. It was the basis of what he called "scientific socialism." Countless millions have died as a result of that idea. Nice work, Marxists. Marxism in general has been a model and an inspiration for science fiction authors since then, for example, Isaac Asimov and his  concept of "future history." A more immediate manifesto in the arts was the Futurist manifesto of 1909 with its emphasis on speed, newness, youth, technology--and destruction of the past and all old things. Italian Futurism is supposed to have influenced Italian Fascism. If it did, that wouldn't be much of a surprise to me. We should always remember, by the way, that Mussolini was a socialist.

I have been writing about music in parallel to science fiction. Cyberpunk was obviously named after punk music and punk culture. Did punk have a manifesto? I don't know. A more interesting question is this: was punk an innovation, or was it a reaction? If Neuromancer is an example of cyberpunk; and cyberpunk is or was an attempted return to the past; and cyberpunk took after punk music and punk culture; did it then depart from punk by being a reaction? Or did it actually follow punk, which may have also been a reaction? If it followed punk, does that mean that punk was also an attempted return to the past, a kind of Pre-Raphaelite movement except that it was Pre-Beatle-ite? In British music of the 1970s and 1980s, there were punk, New Wave, Goth, and New Romantic strains or genres. (Bauhaus, a British goth band, was named for the revolutionary and futuristic Bauhaus movement in art and design, founded in--when else--1919. Bauhaus had its manifesto, too, written by Walter Gropius.) The same strains and genres seem to have been in science fiction. Nothing stands alone in the arts. Music and science fiction must have fed off of each other during the 1970s and '80s. And it all makes for the most fascinating of ideas and speculations.

I have a coda still to come, and now something else has come up, too, so I'll have another coda after that. In the meantime, I would like to say: Happy 100th Anniversary to Pulp Science Fiction and Happy 50th Anniversary to Punk Music!

Amazing Stories, September 1928. The framework of the mechanistic logo of Scientifiction must be a cross section from the inside of a spaceship, but it takes a shape approaching that of a Gothic arch, and the planet-and-star studded blue background looks like a wizard's hat. Maybe the gears driving the writing pen should include "ROMANCE" and "MYSTERY."

And speaking of Gothic arches, a Gothic arch is a negative space. The positive shape that might fill it is the rocketship standing on its launchpad, ready to blast off, or on the surface of a distant planet, already having arrived on a new world.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Six

The Novel & the Romance

In April 1926, Hugo Gernsback opened his new science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, with an essay--a manifesto--entitled "A New Sort of Magazine." He wrote:

It is entirely new--entirely different--something that has never been done before in this country.

And:

a magazine of "Scientifiction" is a pioneer in its field in America.

And:

By "scientifiction" I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story--a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. [Boldface added.]

And this:

It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. Two hundred years ago, stories of this kind were not possible. Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etc., enters so intimately into all our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science, that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted. Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.

Science fiction, then, was an innovation in 1926, a type of literature that would not have been possible one hundred years before. (1) That wasn't just hype on Gernsback's part. I think we have to accept it as fact.

Science fiction in 1926 was a fusion of romance and science, as well as a kind of fiction focused on the future instead of the past. That, too, was an innovation.

Even though science fiction is a fusion of romance and science, it would seem to have introduced discontinuity into the pulp genres and into literature as a whole, for all other genres originated in the pre-science past, whereas science fiction breaks from the past. All other genres are continuous with each other. As a genre, science fiction--pure science fiction--stands alone. Another innovation.

There has been a very long discussion regarding the differences between the novel and the romance in American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne made the distinction. Edgar Allan Poe may have made it before him. American literary scholar Joel Porte (1933-2006) wrote on the subject in The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James, published in 1969. I don't have that book available to me, but Charles N. Watson, Jr., of Syracuse University wrote a review of it. Entitled "The American Romance and Its Critics," his review appeared in Poe Studies in December 1971 and is available online at the following URL:

https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1971218.htm

Please note that Watson repeatedly referred to authors in his essay as "romancers," just as Hugo Gernsback called nascent science fiction authors "new romancers."

The upshot is that, in America at least, the romance is a separate genre than is the more realistic novel. In other words, there are two types of stories or books, the romance and the novel. The novel is realistic and is bound to the world as it is. The romance is not tightly bound to the world; its landscape is that of the human heart. Even the words tell us about these two forms, for romance refers to the historic (and pre-science) past, while the root of novel is "new." The word Gothic of course also refers to the past, and there is a clear connection between Gothic and romantic or Romantic. Sometimes, in fact, they are joined and the Gothic romance emerges.

If this distinction holds, then Gothic novel, romance novel, and romantic or Romantic novel would seem self-contradictions. So would romantic or Romantic science fiction and Gothic science fiction. And yet we have the scientific romances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) We also have Neuromancer, a possibly new kind of romance written by a new romancer, William Gibson (1984). Hugo Gernsback predicted Mr. Gibson in his manifesto of 1926. Or maybe William Gibson self-consciously applied Gernsback's term to his own new romance of nearly sixty years later. 

British and French authors of the nineteenth century typically wrote novels. The most well-known and well-liked American authors of that same century more often wrote romances. Here is William Dean Howells, an American realist, on one difference, at least in American literature:

  Yet every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in. Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story; "no promenade, no band of music, nossing!" as Mr. Du Maurier's Frenchman said of the meet for a fox-hunt. Yet it is all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.

If there are parallels in the pulp genres or in genre fiction, then the older genres, or genres that are oriented towards the past (as well as on descent or decay)--weird fiction, horror, adventure, historical romance--can be seen as romances, whereas science fiction, being bound to science and the real, material world, takes as its proper form that of the novel. These aren't perfect parallels, of course, and we should never let ourselves be hidebound by our scholarly ideas, categories, or theories. In any case, certain other genres are or may be realistic--Westerns, detective stories, war stories, railroad stories, sports stories--but these genres were probably more often romanticized in the pulps rather than allowed to remain in a purely realistic mode. For example, Hungry Men by Edward Anderson (1935) is a very realistic novel about hobos riding the rails and looking for work in Depression-era America. It could have been in a pulp magazine such as a railroad story magazine (I don't think that it was) except that it was probably too realistic for that kind of publication. The lives of the men in the story are in no way romanticized. They are in fact somewhat grim. (Grimness can be romanticized, too, and often is.) (3) To use examples from the cinema: with its weird atmosphere and apparently supernatural manifestations, High Plains Drifter (1973) is clearly a romance or a Gothic story in the American mode. In contrast, another of Clint Eastwood's Westerns, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), which is really astonishing in recapturing the feel of the historical past (in our nation's bicentennial year no less), is far more realistic. I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.

One point of all of this is that new romance, more particularly Gothic science fiction, would seem contradictions in terms. How can these two seeming opposites be forced together? In his story "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981), author William Gibson used a like expression "raygun Gothic." Does that work? Can there really be a Gothic science fiction? Not only can there be, I guess, but there really is such a thing, or at least people have tried it.

A final point for today: if there was going to be a science fiction magazine with stories written by "new romancers," could it have happened anywhere else but in America? I'm not sure that it could have, and I wonder why Hugo Gernsback, born in Luxembourg, emphasized that his magazine was new for "this country," the United States. Could there have been a previous magazine of science fiction or new romances published in Europe or elsewhere? Could he have been familiar with and referring to the German magazine Der Orchideengarten, first published in--when else--1919?

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) One hundred years before--in 1826--John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, men of the eighteenth century and among the last of the revolutionary generation, reached their ends.

(2) I have just learned about a book called The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance by British author Christopher Priest (1943-2024). It was published in 1976, or Year Zero in the punk music calendar. The Space Machine is set in Victorian England and is of a piece with the science fiction novels or scientific romances of H.G. Wells. Christopher Priest's first science fiction story was published in 1966, that essential pop-cultural year. He was influenced in his work by J.G. Ballard. On April 23, 2026, Bloomsbury Continuum published his study of Ballard's work, The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, a posthumous collaboration with his wife, Nina Allan. Note the word in the publisher's name: continuum.

(3) Edward Anderson (1905-1969) also wrote Thieves Like Us (1937), which was made into a movie in 1974. His title is the source of the song title "Thieves Like Us" by New Order. This is how circles are made. I have been writing about New Order and Joy Division. I'm planning to write more.

By the way, Edward Anderson had five stories in pulp magazines during the 1930s. Thieves Like Us appeared in its entirety in the pulp magazine Speed Mystery in December 1945. That title mixes the Italian Futurists' speed with the romance of mystery. (Notice how once a word is set in italics it seems to move forward and with greater speed.) Maybe American stories of cars and the road are also made by new romancers. Maybe they belong next to science fiction as realistic romances. Astoundingly enough, Edward Anderson also had three letters in Astounding Stories in 1931-1932. When his first was published, he shared a letters page with Gertrude Hemken (1912-1992) of Weird Tales fame.

A final by-the-way: when I read Thieves Like Us, I found out that the word Hoosier can be used as an insult, as in "Those guys are a bunch of Hoosiers," meaning "a bunch of amateurs." Today we would say "losers." Then, when I worked in Missouri, I heard people use Hoosier in the same sense. I felt like my cultural heritage was being insulted. Do I have to remind everybody that Steve McQueen, Bill Blass, Robert Wise, Twila Tharp, Edith Hamilton, Connie Booth, and Scatman Crothers were or are all from Indiana? There are more where they came from--literally. You know what else was from Indiana? Weird Tales.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Five

Manifestos

Manifestos are the work of intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals), artists, and theorists, at the very least of people who see themselves at the leading edge of forward-evolution, progress, and new, fast-moving or fast-arriving developments. Manifestos precede action. Very often the action never arrives, but at least there is the manifesto.

One of the most famous--or infamous--of manifestos is Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, issued in 1848, or one hundred years before George Orwell wrote his dissection of socialism and the socialist's unceasing quest for ultimate power. (In Edgar Allan Poe's story, M. Valdemar's nom de plume is Issachar Marx. Ironically, given the context, one meaning of Issachar is "hired man.") Communism, or scientific socialism, is supposed to be about the future and the "force" of History. It is actually more nearly about the past. Marx's manifesto begins with a demonstrably false proposition regarding human society and historical events. What Marx proposed was actually a new-old class structure, with him on top and everybody else below him--preferably with his boot stamping on their faces forever.

Charles Fort wrote a kind of manifesto in the opening paragraphs of The Book of the Damned (1919). Like the Manifesto of Futurism, it reads as the work of a visionary, either that or a man gripped by fever. Alternatively, it's the work of a crazy person, or as H.G. Wells described Fort's writing, like that of a drunkard. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting by Umberto Boccioni (1910) declares: "That the name of 'madman' with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honor." It also stated: "Nothing is immoral in our eyes," a statement anticipating the moral relativism of the twentieth century. And, like Fort, it argued in favor of continuity among all things, or in a lack of barriers between one thing and another.

Otis Adelbert Kline wrote "Why Weird Tales?" as a kind of manifesto. It came at the first ending of "The Unique Magazine," in the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. In The New Weird (2008), editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (not Valdemar) introduced their work with a kind of manifesto. Theirs takes the form, more or less, of a corporate mission statement and is just as obscure. It uses words, but together they have little or no meaning. At least there is poetry in Martinetti's manifesto. By the way, both his surname and Marx's are from the god of war. Five years after Martinetti wrote, in the year that the Great War began, Gustav Holst wrote "Mars, the Bringer of War." A theme from "Mars" is almost repeated in the attack on the Death Star by speedy X-Wing fighters in Star Wars, which was released in 1977, or Year One of the new punk calendar. I will add that The New Weird was published by Tachyon Publications. Tachyons are for speed. And I guess I might as well add that Star Wars was retitled A New Hope. There must always be new things.

I don't know whether there was ever a New Wave manifesto. If there was, Michael Moorcock would seem its logical author. (Like William Gibson in "The Gernsback Continuum" [1981], Michael Moorcock made a connection between fascism and science fiction of the Golden Age in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers," from 1977, or, again, Year One.) I also don't know whether there was ever a punk manifesto, at least at its beginnings. There were, however, post-action punk manifestos. ("Why Weird Tales?" was a kind of post-action manifesto, too.) Again, a proper manifesto comes before the action and as a guide to action. It has to be thought out. It should be the work of a writer, a poet, or an articulate thinker. Punk rock rises to the anger necessary for a proper manifesto, but it seems to me inarticulate. It seems to me that it wasn't and isn't an intellectual or artistic movement. But there are punk songs and punk lyrics that might be interpreted as like a manifesto, for example "Anarchy in the U.K." (1976) or "God Save the Queen" (1977), which closes with these words:

No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future
No future for me
No future
No future
No future for you
No future
No future for you

Instead of the Soup Nazi, the singer sounds like the Future Nazi: "No future for you!" he cries. His lyrics could almost be sung to "Mars, Bringer of War" by Holst. In any case, they are not the lyrics of science fiction, for they turn from the future and deny the future. They are not hopeful but despairing. They are apocalyptic, as in an irrational and violent disaster-fantasy, a Romantic or Gothic work taken to the extreme, or the climax of an epic weird tale.

That leaves cyberpunk. So was there a pre-action cyberpunk manifesto? According to American science fiction author Bruce Sterling (b. 1954) in an online essay entitled "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" (originally in Interzone #48, June 1991):

"The New Science Fiction" [in Interzone #14, Winter 1985/1986] was the first manifesto of "the cyberpunk movement." The article was an analysis of the SF genre's history and principles; the word "cyberpunk" did not appear in it at all.

Note the emphasis again on newness.

The author of  of "The New Science Fiction" was also Bruce Sterling, writing under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas. His "Cyberpunk in the Nineties" is also something of a manifesto, but it was a post-action manifesto. Like the manifesto of the Italian Futurists, it predicted the artistic decline, demise, or replacement of its own members: "The Nineties will belong to the coming generation, those who grew up in the Eighties." In other words, I guess, Generation X, those who would go on to create the so-called "New Weird."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Four

The New Romancers

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

--from Manifesto of Futurism by F.T. Marinetti (1909)

It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. [. . .] Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations--impossible 100 years ago--are brought about today. It is in these situations that the new romancers find their great inspiration.

--from "A New Sort of Magazine" by Hugo Gernsback

in Amazing Stories #1 (Apr. 1926)

Science fiction: the work of the new romancers!

And could there be this equation as a result:

New romancer ≈ Neuromancer

Is that where William Gibson got the title for his seminal cyberpunk novel first published in 1984?

The operative word in science fiction is science. It would seem in opposition to romance, and yet science fiction began as a kind of romance. Long before the term scientific romance was applied to stories of this type, what we can call proto-science fiction was the work of artists with a romantic (and conservative) cast. Hugo Gernsback wrote:

Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of "scientifiction." It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. [Boldface added.]

Gernsback included "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Although Poe's story is proto-science-fictional, it is more nearly a weird tale or horror story. Today we might split genres even more finely and call it a tale of body horror. (The narrator's description of Valdemar's bodily plight reads like the details of a post-mortem medical examination.) But then it was written before there were pulp genres, and so it slides easily from one genre to another along a continuum. In other words, it crosses the boundaries that were constructed only after the twentieth century began, just as the mesmerized Valdemar crosses boundaries between life and death.

Speaking of genres and sub-genres, cyberpunk is supposed to have been a successor to the British New Wave science fiction of the 1960s. The leading New Wave magazine was of course New Worlds, the plural of the new world identified by Hugo Gernsback in his manifesto in the first issue of Amazing Stories. Note the roots of later magazine titles, too: Wonder and Fantastic. Also note that the mathematical symbol that lies between the two expressions shown above, and that signifies their relationship, looks like waves on the ocean. New waves would seem to have thrown cyberpunk upon the shores of science fiction like Odysseus washed up in Scheria, from which seagoing ships of unsurpassed speed sail forth. The Italian Futurists sought speed--the speed of the automobile, "a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot." In science fiction, there is the speed of super-light-speed tachyons, of rocketships driven by anti-acceleration, the warp speed of starships, and the instantaneous speed of psychic communications, jaunting, subspace radio, and the real-world force of gravitation, which bends light and allows travel through time by way of the trusty slingshot effect. The inhabitants of Scheria are the Phaeacians. Like Slans and the other superior men of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, they possess psychic powers--or else their ships do, for their ships understand what they are thinking and know where they want to go. Are they alive? Or is some strange and mysterious science or technology at work here? How have the Phaeacians built machines of such wonder that they can read their minds and respond to their wishes? The Phaeacians must surely be among the first science-fictional people in our literature. Their science is so fantastic that it would seem indistinguishable from magic.

The Italian Futurists issued their manifesto in 1909, at the outset of a century of speed and violence and aggression. Their emphasis was on newness, youth, and the destruction of the past and of all old things. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback offered his own much gentler manifesto in the introductory pages of Amazing Stories. He emphasized newness, too, even if he turned to the works of the past to fill his pages. But there was speed in his magazine as well, exemplified in H.G. Wells' story "The New Accelerator," from 1901. That inaugural issue closes, however, with "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a Gothic tale of death and decay, one told in extremis. It is slow rather than fast, decadent rather than ascendant, focused on ultimate limits and the failings of life and the human body rather than on limitless futures. Unlike the Phaeacians and their ships, the "science" of mesmerism, in operation between two minds and two wills in Poe's tale, is unequal to the task. The whole thing breaks down, ending with a quite literal breakdown in the subject's body. There is no superior man, nor any superior science here. There is only the descent of the weird-fictional character into the most gruesome of endings. Ironically, Valdemar's name is a compound of "power" and "fame."

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Neuromancer-Part Three

Gernsbackian Innovation & Gothic Reaction

I have been working with the idea that what I call genrification began at around the time of the Great War, definitely by 1919 when some of the first specialty pulp titles were published. Some other events of that seminal year included the Eddington experiment, which set the stage for moral relativism as the central concept of twentieth-century politics and belief systems, and the arrival of J.C. Henneberger (1890-1969), future co-founder of Weird Tales magazine, in Indianapolis, that magazine's first home.

The first science fiction magazine was Amazing Stories, and it was first published a century ago, in April 1926. The editor and publisher was Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). I don't think Gernsback was a trained scientist and perhaps not even a trained engineer. He seems to have been "self-taught," a descriptor applied to old-time weird fiction authors by a more recent member and theorist of the so-called "New Weird." (The implication is that writing is better left to academically trained authors.) Gernsback used his own word, Scientifiction, as a label for the kind of fiction that he published. The term science fiction wasn't used in print until 1929.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have lasted from 1938 to 1950 or so. That age began when John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) assumed the editorship of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell and Astounding were known for their so-called hard science fiction. (Say what you will, psychic powers are not science fiction, let alone any hard science fiction.) Gernsback and Amazing were forerunners of Campbell and Astounding, but science fiction wasn't fully formed in the 1920s and probably not in the early 1930s, either.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then the British (or Anglo-American) New Wave of the 1960s may have been the first sub-genre of science fiction to come along after the Golden Age. There have since been other sub-genres, including cyberpunk, which is supposed to have grown out of or succeeded New Wave science fiction. The roots (or, to use a mechanistic metaphor, wiring) of cyberpunk can be traced to New Wave. William Gibson (b. 1948) and his novel Neuromancer (1984) are exemplars of cyberpunk. Coincidentally, Mr. Gibson was born in the year in which George Orwell completed 1984 and published his novel in the year in which 1984 is set.

Previous to Neuromancer, Mr. Gibson had a short story, "The Gernsback Continuum" in Universe 11 (1981). It was later reprinted in other magazines and books. "The Gernsback Continuum" is an essential story, at least for my purposes. It's a fascinating meta-science-fictional work, a science fiction story that is fully aware of the history, imagery, and culture of science fiction. The "Gernsback" part of the title refers to the editor of Amazing Stories and--in part--an association that the first-person narrator of the story makes between Gernsbackian science fiction and the historical imagery of Nazis and fascism. He in fact has visions of what are called "semiotic ghosts" caused by his knowledge and acute awareness of American popular culture, art, and design of the past.* The "Continuum" part of the title refers, I assume, to an unbroken link made within the story between fiction and fact, or between the science fiction of the past and the in-story real world of the present. During these past several weeks, I have been using the concepts of continuity and continuums in a different sense, but these are close enough for my purposes.

There's another phrase used in "The Gernsback Continuum." This one is "raygun Gothic." I don't associate the bright, new, shiny, perfect, futuristic or forward-looking imagery of Gernsbackian science fiction with anything at all Gothic. "Raygun Gothic" would appear a non sequitur, an oxymoron, or a self-contradictory phrase. Science fiction and Gothics (my pretty new word) don't seem to go together. The rayguns and rocketships of the science fiction novel would appear anachronisms among the rattling chains and ruined castles of the Gothic romance. And yet here they are together in a single phrase. Now recall that one of its reviewers called Neuromancer "decadent," a descriptor that we would think of as exactly opposite of science fiction. Gernsbackian and Campbellian science fiction are ascendant in our imaginations and not at all decadent. It is in weird fiction, supernatural horror, and related genres or sub-genres that we encounter decadence. If there is decadence--if there is an emphasis on the past--if there are Gothic or Romantic elements in a science fiction story, they would seem out of place in that ascendent genre. So is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction possible?

To be continued . . .

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*Maybe semiotics was in the air: Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which includes a lot on semiotics, was published in 1983.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley