The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture

"This companion collects original entries that engage cyberpunk's diverse 'angles' and its proliferation in our life worlds. With technology seamlessly integrated into our life and our selves, and social systems veering towards globalization and corporatization, cyberpunk has become a ubiquitous cultural formation that dominates our 21st century techno-digital landscapes. To put it directly: we are living in inescapable cyberpunk futures bleeding into the interstices of our present, and these cyberpunk realities intersect with our mainstream culture at every possible angle. The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture traces cyberpunk through its historical developments as a literary science fiction subgenre to its spread into other media such as comics, film, television and video games. Moreover, seeing cyberpunk as a general cultural practice, the Companion provides insights into photography, music, fashion, and activism. Cyberpunk, so the chapters presented here argue, is integrated with other critical theoretical tenets of our times, such as posthumanism, the Anthropocene, animality, or empire. And lastly, cyberpunk is a vehicle that lends itself to the rise of new futurisms, occupying a variety of positions in our regionally diverse reality and thus linking as much as differentiating our perspectives on a globalized technoscientific world. An international range of contributors examine with the cultural formation of cyberpunk from micro-level analyses of example texts to macro-level debates of movements, providing readers with a snapshot of cyberpunk culture and also cyberpunk as culture"--