Fiction 2000 and Beyond

deadline for submissions: 
January 8, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction

To mark the fortieth anniversary of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in 2024 Foundation will be publishing a special summer issue devoted to the legacy of cyberpunk in the twenty-first century. Cyberpunk culture is conspicuously everywhere – from books and films to videogames, pop videos, TV shows, fashion, advertising, and the visual arts. If cyberpunk was once ‘cutting-edge’, what future does it have when AIs and virtual/augmented realities are increasingly part of everyday life? When global corporations such as Facebook are encouraging its customers to inhabit ‘the Metaverse’, what function does cyberpunk have? Do the spiralling uses of the ‘punk’ suffix (steampunk, solarpunk, hopepunk, etc.) suggest a new afterlife for cyberpunk, or do they describe a loss, fragmentation or dissolution of its original identity? Instead of focusing on cyberpunk’s heritage, we want to concentrate in this special issue on its legacy, and what cyberpunk means now in the context of the twenty-first century as its association with the high watermark of postmodernism has waned. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

 

  • The novels of William Gibson since 2000
  • Cyberpunk and women writers – Madeline Ashby, Pat Cadigan, Annalee Newitz, Justina Robson, etc.
  • After The Matrix: cyberpunk cinema since 2000
  • Cyberpunk TV – Altered Carbon, Black Mirror, Electric Dreams, etc.
  • Cyberpunk and the video games industry
  • Cyberpunk and the graphic novel
  • Decolonising cyberpunk – postcolonial responses in art, literature and film
  • Cyberpunk and Afrofuturism
  • Commodifying cyberpunk in fashion and advertising
  • Body horrors: cyberpunk and the medical humanities
  • Into ‘the Metaverse’: cyberpunk, virtual reality and AI
  • After Haraway: cyberpunk, cyborgs and posthumanism
  • Cyberpunk, solarpunk and climate change fiction
  • Ghosts of the Digital Age: cyberpunk, the city and hauntology
  • After the Singularity: cyberpunk and transhumanism

Articles of 6000 words in length (plus 10% leeway) should be submitted, alongside a short bionote, to the editor (see email above) by 8 January 2024. Submissions should be laid out in accordance with the style guide available at https://www.sf-foundation.org/style-guide They will then be assessed by the editor and the guest editors, Anna McFarlane and Will Slocombe. Final revisions will be due for May 2024 with publication in that summer's issue (no. 148).