Declining interest in cyberpunk is perplexing in light of how much of it has come to pass and how much more is soon likely to do so. This is especially so given that, though cyberpunk lends its name to steampunk, (as noted by a recent RAFOlk poster whose name I regretfully forget) and William Gibson Sprawl stories created the term “cyberspace”, the latters discussions of the former reduce both facts to trivia. I do not begrudge steampunks place, but do find it inexplicable that glances over the horizon have given way to peering backward at a world that never was except as their product. So much of cyberpunks vision has proven prescient, so many of its elements of increasing relevance, that such neglect on the cusp of its realization is baffling. It is thus only right to also indulge a little nostalgia for and review of the Sprawl Trilogy; if looking forward led to looking back perhaps looking back will remind us how science fiction looks forward, and cyberpunk to a radically altered future we could witness in months rather than centuries.

The most distinguishing characteristic of cyberpunk is an evolutionary (or devolutionary, depending on ones perspective) biomechanical union that todays transhumanists eagerly anticipate without achieving (though we are coming closer). It sets the genre apart from broader science fiction tales like 2001: A Space Odyssey that maintain a distinction, sometimes assert an inevitable conflict, between machine and maker. In cyberpunk conflicts with machines are as likely as conflicts with other people, but no more so. Far more common are cooperative relationships like those between hackers and cyberdecks, or street samurai with cybernetic prosthetics and augmented nervous systems (only Stan Lee has inspired more fantasies of retractable clawed brawlers than William Gibson has). Voluntary technological interfaces are just as typical for nonprofessionals, whether housewives jacking into their favorite stars senses to view soaps, addicts savoring a machine designed drug of choice or people slipping chips with a foreign language or flight training (or a buzz) into slots behind their ear. Genetically engineered software and biological hardware blur the line between living circuits and flesh in the plausible near future that is cyberpunks hallmark.

The counterpart to inserting machines into men is inserting men into machines, and the best example of a Sprawl denizen become real cyberspace itself, a term Gibson almost incidentally authored. When he published his eighties opus a conversation like this was unimaginable to most outside DARPA and the small cyberpunk community because of the medium, not the subject. Cyberspace is now integral to industrialized culture, and even where reality lags fantasy most are as familiar as any console cowboy with the concept of “jacking into” a “virtual” reality. Wireless internet facilitates viewing increasingly versatile cell phones as prototypical cyberdecks; the limiting factor is not computer science, but neuroscience (perhaps requiring a Neuromancer).

Electronic societies Gibson, Bruce Sterling and other cyberpunk pioneers envisioned in the seventies and eighties have become as common and unconscious to most now as it was incomprehensible then, but our dawning awareness of and search for ways to exploit the expansive new vista largely lacks awareness of our searchs pioneers. Feature films are greeted as groundbreaking for mysteriously intoning that “no one can be told what the matrix is” and portraying it as a prison wholly distinct from the physical world. Our two dimensional “net” is increasingly integrated with peoples daily lives but the idea that might develop into a three (or more) dimensional “matrix” extending the physical world through human and mechanical nodes remains foreign to most. Yet expanding the physical world with a duplicate virtual ply is far from novel, and a given in most cyberpunk (including the Sprawl Trilogy), where “surfing the net” means gliding through an unbounded world that surrounds residents with tangible images of vast data.

Growing public access to already ample data has also brought non-authorized access and the consequent security needs, rudimentary example of corporate and government computer espionage a staple of the Sprawl Trilogy. Firewalls and anti-virus software presage and yet were presaged by cyberpunks Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (midway through Neuromancer the protagonist had to explain to another character, and most readers, what a virus was). If jacking their brains into the net is the modern hackers dream, black ICE reaching back through the data stream to flatline them is surely their nightmare. Todays prototype security flags and sometimes even traces intrusions; tomorrows ICE will counterattack those brash enough to dare an assault, damaging or destroying their computers—and anything (or anyone) wired into them. Yet despite old warnings current online adventures fear, and have cause to fear, little more than prison.

Two imminent tropes of the Sprawl Trilogy could change that, the first being true residents of cyberspace largely confined to it: Artificial Intelligences. Fear malevolent machines will attack humanity is as old as the word “robot”, predating both cyberspace and modern computers. While Skynet is unlikely to seize your car through the GPS and drive it off a cliff, such villainous characters reflect and encourage the unease instilled by increasing independence in and reliance on computers. Villains and vigilantes, however, have diverse forms; hacking that to us represents an inconvenience motivating archives and data security would, to an AI, represent a potentially mortal threat motivating self defense by any means. As long as software depends on hardware storage no such entity can act with complete impunity (a fact vital to Neuromancers plot, and the Turing Polices raison d’être) but AIs would have the means, motive and perhaps the justification to repel most intrusions with destructive, even lethal, force their owners encouraged.

As the internet becomes more pervasive and interwoven with our lives the originally imagined threat could materialize: Servers are easily severed from cyberspace (sometimes they do it themselves… ) but if an AI secreted its program into a thousand servers how would one find it, to say nothing of isolating and removing it? Completely deactivating the internet might suffice, if the AI could not prevent it, but losing GPS alone would even today jeopardize countless deployed soldiers and traveling passengers around the world, and still might not prevent a program advanced to the point of sentient autonomy implanting itself into the dizzyingly complex system of electrical circuits that constitute global power grids. That would pose a Luddite ultimatum: Accept subservience to sentient programs with no reason to consider our needs, or give up electricity itself, since sufficiently strong radio waves will alter any electrical system. Our brains are as much electrical networks as any computer, and an AI with enough knowledge, antennae and power could conceivably operate most animal life with no need for the physical interface of the “Matrix” films. Obviously this has not happened (as far as we know, not that we would), yet the likelihood attracts the least interest when most possible, somehow topical and untopical at once.

Hackers have more to fear, however, than just AIs; current corporations and governments are nearly as vengeful toward predation, and government that must nominally respect human life and liberty is ceding corporations ever more of the power constraining them to share that respect. Populations intimidated by government regulations impact on cyberspace can theoretically demand change from those accountable to them; multinationals owe allegiance only to shareholders, and can evade government restraint by simply exporting offensive practices. The WTO in particular not only allows such behavior but can and does penalize enforcement of member nations laws, beginning its Environmental Issues page, “Environmental requirements can impede trade and even be used as an excuse for protectionism”. Present national laws overruled by commercial considerations make it easy to imagine corporations gaining privileges on the same basis to harshly resist penetration to expensive computers controlling their companies. If hundreds of American hackers projecting their consciousnesses into the US Federal Communications Commission perished in the process, public outcry and Congressional investigations would doom the agency; should hacking a corporate mainframe in Burma kill as many of its citizens the US would have no authority to act. Retaliation would violate international law, making other multinationals better suited to it than any government.

Ebbing government influence against cresting corporate international influence is not confined to hacking; it is another current trend developed and extrapolated in most cyberpunk, including the Sprawl Trilogy. Gibsons multinationals habitually wage cyberattacks on each other as well as governments, seduce “defectors” from competitors (complete with black op extraction teams) and outright paramilitary warfare is always an option. Multinationals with more reach, money and technology fully supersede most governments, while unaccountability to civil law blurs the line between them and a “multinational” yakuza that absorbed the Triads and, by implication, the Mafia as well. A single powerful family in Neuromancer builds and owns an entire space station with artificial terrestrial gravity, but no terrestrial law (as a group of law enforcement is reminded at one point). The books protagonist, noting a deathmatchs zaibatsu spectator, assumes it was approved by a “company recreational committee” and muses about life consisting of “company housing, company hymn, company funeral”. Cyberpunks potent and inescapable multinationals are more threatening than AIs, to whom they are often creator and mortal foe. Companies like those would claim far greater allegiance from employees more dependent on them than on less useful governments, and from consumers with little say in their operation but dependent on their products and services. This cyberpunk element may be most imminent, and thus does remain a topic of discussion, but primarily in politics and sociology rather than fiction.

Governments diminishing significance with continuing urbanization together encourage the megaregions nearly as prominent as the matrix in cyberpunk. Megaregions are a logical progression from modern megalopolises like the US Northeast, whose merger with our Piedmont Atlantic Megaregion replaces an anemic and shrinking federal government with the Sprawl of the trilogies title. The center, but not the heart, is Washington DC, the surrounding infrastructure exploited but its federal founders otherwise largely ignored. Where Audubon said that a squirrel could once have crossed from Atlantic to Pacific without ever leaving the trees, in Gibsons Sprawl the Atlantic seaboard can be crossed without seeing a tree.

The Sprawl is no deliberate monolith like Asimov and Lucas’ global cities, but a conurbation whose prototype is more Amsterdam than New Amsterdam, no more confined to the US than are present forerunners. In the Sprawl Trilogy Tokyos exemplar is renamed for nearby Chiba City, but its current 1200 km length already suggests a similar image. Even the sky of Gibsons Chiba City is foreign to residents literally contained, not due to environmental contamination, but to their surrounding technological environments expansion. A major thread in the second volume, Count Zero, begins where present day Amsterdam and Brussels are tightly joined at the geographic and civil center (but again not necessarily the heart) of a potential European Sprawl. Gibson never mentions many sites in our world, from India to Mexico, equally poised to become encapsulated state-cities. Chinas Pearl and Yangtze deltas already hold populations larger than all but about a dozen nations within borders larger than most countries.

Degraded national and local governments, rising populations staffing unstoppable superhuman multinationals and an omnipresent cyberindustrial habitat (complete with machine neighbors) all coalesce into alienation that is cyberpunks most familiar feature. Social scientists like Lewis Mumford, whose 1938 The Culture of Cities first used "megalopolis" in the modern sense, ceased prophesying and began documenting alienation decades ago, but what is common now is epidemic in the Sprawl. Countless critics reduce cyberpunk to dystopia, but the corporate structure (usually) ensures zaibatsu employee-residents feel no isolation or lack of purpose, while skilled console cowboys and street samurai who scorn the zaibatsu earn places within their brotherhoods. Nonetheless, a strong noir element manifests in the teeming forgotten hosts. Rockefellers may still find their American Beauties, but the process nips millions of others in the bud; in cyberpunk they are routinely and anonymously recycled at the nearest organ bank. The most chilling villains are not machine intelligences but even more inhuman men and women produced by the social order and empowered by technological wealth. Yet the castoffs provide more accessible protagonists than either villains or drones living cradle to grave in corporate arcologies. Many lack Single Identification Numbers; “SINlessness” makes them hard to track and able to turn their very alienation from a liability into the very kind of asset for which AIs yearn amid relentlessly enforced servitude.

Cyberpunks sometimes stark and sometimes wondrous is more plausible daily; many of its fictions have already become reality and more are doing so, yet most remain just out of reach, as tantalizing to science fans as they once were to science fiction fans. There is the rub: Cyberpunk has traveled from “chic” to “passé” while most of it is still on the way to “accomplished”. Had you told someone thirty years ago that you got a virus in cyberspace, the few who knew what that meant would have told you to read less pulp fiction; now everyone knows what but few know why, making Snow Crash perhaps the most prescient cyberpunk of all. Has it become stale because Keanu Reeves is the limp lead in too many cyberpunk movies? Is it as simple as The Difference Engine (co-authored by Gibson) sounding cyberpunks death knell even as it brought steampunk to new heights? Whatever the cause, it is disappointing to think “twenty minutes into the future” has become so bleak and chilling that an impossible past is more appealing.

EDIT: To increase clarity and reduce confrontation.

EDIT II: As a final note, while I put little stock in awards, it would be remiss in any overview of the Sprawl Trilogy to omit mentioning that Neuromancer is the only novel to win The Nebula, Hugo and Phillip K. Dick Awards (a third place finish in the Campbell Awards prevented a sweep). How the mighty have fallen....