Future City : Tokyo After Cyberpunk

Abstract

Surveying the debates around William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) almost forty years since the moment of cyberpunk, this essay proposes a new reading of Gibson’s fiction, and treatments of Tokyo in post-cyberpunk SF more generally. Drawing on, and critiquing, insights from Marxism and Asian/American studies, this essay locates in Gibson’s representations of Tokyo a neoliberal ambience. Gibson’s novels, with their fascination for commodities, gadgets, and the consumer details of consumerism, create in Tokyo an image of a potential American future, but this is a vision undercut intermittently by their anxieties around the status of the American presence in Tokyo, and of its reminders of a history of occupation. This argument is developed, finally, by way of a comparative reading of some postcyberpunk SF texts, Misha’s Red Spider White Web (1990), Pat Cadigan’s Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Eli K P William’s Cash Crash Jubilee (2015)