24 Cyberpunk, Postmodernism, and Beyond Lecture

#Literature #Fantasy #FairyTale Popular genres change slowly. In the 1960s, key British editors, calling for a New Wave of science fiction, published powerful literary experiments, such as J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World and The Atrocity Exhibition. Americans, including Philip K. Dick (Ubik) and Harlan Ellison (“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”), and Europeans, including Stanislaw Lem (The Futurological Congress), experimented, too. When William Gibson’s Neuromancer conjoined head-snapping rhetoric with Kafkaesque cynicism about the information age, the New Wave morphed into cyberpunk. But cyberpunk is a science fictional variety of Postmodernism. Now we can see a line from Nobelist William Golding (The Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors) to Nobelist José Saramago (Blindness). Science fiction, the most important of the fantastic genres, is a historical response to the rise and conquest of technology. Hereafter, we will live in a science fiction world.