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Popular Culture Review
Veronica Hollinger, and Jenny Wolmark have praised women and criticized
men for using the same generic conventions. This yields the kind of ideological
reading that results from clinging too tightly to an entrenched, theorized
position.
One of the primary complaints about the subgenre has been its lack of
strong female characters who receive any subjectivity or even psychological
examination. What these critics often miss is that the male characters, while they
may be the protagonists of the novels, are often psychologically very flat and
receive only the thinnest characterizations. If this is a problem with the genre, it
goes both ways. However, it is not a problem because part of the flashy,
accelerated nature of the postmodern condition is the lack of an opportunity to
slow down and examine one’s thoughts and motivations. Likewise, the
movement’s oft-commented-upon focus on surface detail is reflective of
postmodernity’s reliance on exteriority for detemiining demographics and
culture. The conventions surrounding the scholarship on women’s science
fiction are proof of this.
Another common c omplaint about cyberpunk is that it recreates older
forms of literature like the detective novel and other literatures that feature
conquering male adventurer-types. Stockton says it is “cyberpunk’s project to
remythologize an earlier, powerfully autonomous subject through a literary fonn
that is, in effect, a latter day version of adventure romance” (Stockton 588). This
is, as with the above problem of gender and characterization, part of the efficacy
of the literature. Contemporary culture forces people to grow more
interdependent with each passing year, so a disconnected protagonist who is
beholden to no one is an attractive figure to those who yearn for the idea of
exploration and pioneering. That cyberpunk protagonists are not part of a
community or a web of relationships is partially an attempt for these writers to
reinvoke the sense of exploration, expansion, and wonder that was a part of the
brave new world of science fiction in generations past. The isolation also
conveys the alienating of technology. However, this push into the frontier of
cyberspace is another problem for cyberpunk’s detractors. Again, Stockton is
critical of what she calls
. . . the rhetoric of phallic projection and passive field—
encompassing as it does Western paradigms of both gender
and capitalism—[which] is precisely the structuring base of
cyberpunk fiction. The protagonist hackers ‘project’ into a
feminized field; the plot complication consists in the revolt of
this terrain which should be passive. (591)
This is true to a point, but as will be demonstrated below, Piercy’s cyberpunk is
Just as guilty of this transgression, but without its attendant fallout from those
who have analyzed the book. What has obviously been a source of strength for
the movement—for it has been very successful in terms of attracting readers—
has brought it critical wrath when written by men.