Ask Dr. Cyberpunk • with your host, Bruce Bethke

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Today’s question comes from Lars, who leads into his question with a quote from what someone else had written about me: 

“When coining the term for his 1983 story “Cyberpunk,” Bruce Bethke reportedly matched up words for technology and words for troublemakers until he found a pair that seemed right, rather than singling out punks as a crucial countercultural group for the new genre.”

Any chance you could enlighten us about the origin of the term? She is arguing that “punk” did not specifically and politically reference the “punk movement” (connotations of anarchy, anti-establishment, etc.) but [you] needed a term that generally referenced something “troublemakers.” We would love to hear how this came about.

Yeah, that looks like a translation of a paraphrase of something I’ve said many times in many interviews, and used to have posted on my website in an article entitled, “The Etymology of ‘Cyberpunk’.” I took the article down because I got tired of dealing with science fiction fans who wanted to talk, and talk, and talk about cyberpunk fiction without paying any attention to what I’ve been doing in the 40 years since I wrote the story. I’d re-post the article if I could find it now, but the file—well, it’s somewhere around here, buried in about 4TB of poorly organized data.

When I came up with the title: first off, I was just trying to come up with a catchy one-word title for my short story. I really wasn’t thinking about anything beyond that. So the way I came up with the title was by experimentation, by putting together various terms for technology—cyber, techno, und so weiter—and terms for “socially misdirected youth,” until I came up with a word that just plain sounded right. 

That was my critical consideration: that it sounded right. I tried a lot of word combinations, and even experimented with Japanese borrow-words—for example, bōsōzoku got really close to my concept—but there’s no way to turn that into an English-language expression without making it sound silly. “Cyberbozos?” Sounds like an Alan Dean Foster novel.

The other key thing to know is that I didn’t set out to become a science fiction writer. I am by training and inclination a musician, which is why how the word sounded was extremely important to me.

Note the photo. That thing behind my head is my ARP 2600, and that, as we musicians say, is my axe. And I keep writing and rewriting and deleting this part of my reply, but let’s just leave it at: if you go to the wikipedia articles on Contemporary Classical music, electronic music, and computer music—well, a lot of the names you’ll see there are people I met, knew, studied, or worked with. Some were even friends. An important part (to me) of my bio, that flies right over the heads of most people in the science fiction world, is that I spent a couple of years working for Passport Designs and was on the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine, among other things. If you really want to understand me, go find and watch the movie, I Dream of Wires.

So yes, in the latter part of the 1970s, I was acutely aware of the punk rock music scene. And that is where the “punk” part of cyberpunk came from.

“...punks as a crucial countercultural group...”

Seriously? Countercultural? Hell no. In the US, punk was mostly just counterdisco.

I get the impression that at the time, punk meant something very different in the UK and Europe than it did in the US. In the UK, there seemed to be an authentic working class/proletariat/anarchist/revolutionary thing going on. (Though let’s face it, the Sex Pistols were the Monkees of punk.) There may even have been something authentically political about the New York punk rock scene, circa'76~'77. But by the time punk hit the rest of the US I was living in Los Angeles, trying to break into recording studio work, and the LA punk scene was entirely about affecting the look, the pose, and the fashion. For a year or three there anyone could get a record contract, no talent required, if they just had a lead singer with a mohawk and a guitarist who wore lots of black leather, studs, and chains. (The studs and chains scratch the hell out of the backs of guitars, by the way.)

That is what the American punk rock scene was all about: not James Dean’s “Rebel Without a Cause” but Tom Petty’s “Rebel Without a Clue.” There may have been a few specimens of the real thing in the wild, but at least 90% of American punks were poseurs, pure and simple: affluent white suburban kids, dressing in punk style and going downtown to dance and get drunk on Saturday night, and then back to school or work on Monday. They were McPunks, and that is why Billy Idol became the quintessential “American” punk rock star. He had the hair, the clothes, that little bit of a snarl in his voice, and made great-looking music videos that played well on MTV. But if you close your eyes and listen to his music, and especially to the arrangements and the studio production values in the recordings, you could be listening to any arena rock band of the time. There is nothing threatening—absolutely nothing “countercultural”—in a Billy Idol single. 

Which is why Billy Idol’s songs live on forever in FM airplay, while bands like The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Television, and Siouxsie and the Banshees are for all practical purposes forgotten now.

Except for “Rock the Casbah.” That one comes back on the radio on a regular basis, every time our government is trying to start another war with Iran.

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About Bruce Bethke: In the early spring of 1980 Bruce wrote a little short story about a gang of teenage hackers. From the very first draft the story had a one-word title—a new word, one that he’d made up in a deliberate attempt to grok the interface between the emerging high technology scene and teenage punk attitudes, and this word was—

Oh, surely you can guess. 

Half a lifetime later Bruce is still getting questions about this story, so rather than answer them privately and one at a time, he’s decided to make answering questions about cyberpunk a regular feature on this site. If you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask him, post it in the comments here, IM him on Facebook, or email it to brb[at]rampantloonmedia[dot]com. He can’t guarantee that he’ll answer, but he’ll certainly give it a good try.

Categories: ask dr cyberpunk