Neoliberalism And Cyberpunk Science Fiction

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault’s biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault's biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Cyberpunk and Cyberculture explores the work of a wide range of writers- Acker, Cadigan, Rucker, Shierley, Sterling, Williams and, of course, Gibson - setting their work in the context of science fiction, other literary genres, genre cinema - from Metropolis to Terminator to The Matrix - and contemporary work on the culture of technology.

For We Are Young and Free is a collection of meta-fictional cyberpunk and supporting documents set in a pseudo-libertarian dystopian Australia. It extends the familiar tropes of cyberpunk to unfamiliar settings, including towns and small Australian cities, using the 'high-tech, low-life' aesthetic of the genre as a tool for comment on the economic and political realities of life in contemporary Australia. Neither strictly sci-fi nor experimental literature, unambiguously satirical or entirely dystopian, For We Are Young and Free creates a hybrid space between the genres, designed to make us speculate on the similarities between the world we live in and the worlds of science fiction, and what that might imply about the future of Australia.Tackling everything from metadata retention to philosophy of language, and income inequality to computer games, For We Are Young and Free is a bristling attack on the ideology of neoliberal capitalism, inspired by the Federal Australian government's continual attempts to re-define reality in the service of our privileged upper classes. Inspired by a combination of contemporary sci-fi, late-stage capitalism, and modernist dystopias like Brave New World and 1984, it simulates its fictional society at every level, showing the subcultures, social issues, and popular culture of a very dark portrayal of Australia in 2069. It also shows us how we got there, and hopefully what we can do to stop it happening.

In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.

A mysterious hum turning people into killers, a perfect city ruled by AI, a ghost in the machine and boomers vs. robots! Welcome to the world of Neo Cyberpunk- Volume 3! Once again fifteen of the hottest contemporary cyberpunk authors have joined forces to bring you the best the genre has to offer. With a foreword from Bruce Bethke the man who invented the term Cyberpunk. This collection is another development in the evolution of the genre, inspired by science fiction and cyberpunk but with a modern perspective. Today's technology is a portal to a possible future. Each story is a fun and interesting angle on how we might, as humans, respond. Dive into worlds of tomorrow that could become a reality sooner than you think. If you love Cyberpunk 2077, Edge runners, Cyberpunk Red, or if you just like near future science fiction, there are stories for you. Edited by Anna Mocikat & James L. Graetz

Vision, Technology and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature interrogates an array of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk science fiction novels and short stories from Mexico whose themes engage directly with visual technologies and the subjectivities they help produce - all published during and influenced by the country's neoliberal era. This book argues that television, computers, and smartphones and the literary narratives that treat them all correspond to separate-yet-overlapping scopic regimes within the country today. Amidst the shifts occurring in the country's field of vision during this period, the authors of these cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk narratives imagine how these devices contribute to producing specular subjects-or subjects who are constituted in large measure by their use and interaction with visual technologies. In doing so, they repeatedly recur to the posthuman figure of the cyborg in order to articulate these changes; Stephen C. Tobin therefore contends that the literary cyborg becomes a discursive site for working through the problematics of sight in Mexico during the globalized era. In all, these "specular fictions" represent an exceptional tendency within literary expression-especially within the cyberpunk genre-that grapples with themes and issues regarding the nature of vision being increasingly mediated by technology.

This book is a collection of essays that considers the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. The essays in explore our cyberpunk realities to soberly reconsider Eighties-era cyberpunk while also mapping contemporary cyberpunk. The contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.

Fictional narratives produced in Latin America often borrow tropes from contemporary science fiction to examine the shifts in the nature of power in neoliberal society. King examines how this leads towards a market-governed control society and also explores new models of agency beyond that of the individual.