Description:
This book provides critical analysis and aesthetic interpretations of exactly those visual elements that define cyberpunk today, moving beyond the limitations of text to also focus on the meaningfulness of images, forms, and compositions that are the heart and lifeblood of cyberpunk graphic novels, films, television shows, and video games.
Review Quotes:
"Since its inception, cyberpunk has been haunted by the notion that it represents only a very brief moment of the science fictional imagination, a moment which quickly passed. Murphy and Schmeink's smart collection proves the opposite is true: cyberpunk never ended, and in fact its vast transmedia landscape of images, icons, visual artifacts, and technological apparatuses has completely taken over our world." -Gerry Canavan, Marquette University
"The report of cyberpunk's death was an exaggeration, clearly, as the essays in this vibrant collection demonstrate. The ambiguities, complexities and excitements of this intermedial genre are explored here in riveting detail: the legacy of Gibson's 'lines of light' are demonstrated to be, indeed, unthinkably complex." -Stacy Gillis, Newcastle University
"In addition to offering the fullest documentation to date of the range of visual media infiltrated by and responsive to the cyberpunk aesthetic, this collection offers bold new arguments about the relation between print and visual narratives and the convergent, cross-media character of contemporary science fiction in general." -Thomas Foster, University of Washington
"This collection demonstrates the breadth and depth of the subgenre through intriguing and accessible essays on the diversity of cyberpunk media, offering unique and important new arguments about the visuality of cyberpunk." - Kathryn E. Heffner, University of Iowa, in FOUNDATION: The International Review of Science Fiction
"Murphy and Schmeink's edited collection of 15 essays commendably engages with a profusion of media formats to highlight the visual styles iconic to Cyberpunk and argue for the centrality of such aesthetic paradigms within contemporary 'realistic' settings. Through this targeted focus the selected chapters exhibit a coherence of thought and criticism that is often lost within other broader collections, marking this title as both an important contribution to critical debate and companion to our current Cyberpunk-inflected times."- Kerry Dodd, in SFRA Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 243-47