Cyberpunk is certainly worthwhile: it deals with very real issues; it fits neatly into Frye's framework of literary history, and even answers a few questions he did not. It suggests a return from the hopeless, ironic world we live in back to a more mythic, hopeful time. What does it tell us, however, about what is to come? At the end of Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell asks "What is - or what is to be - the new mythology?" He answers the question as follows:
It is...the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its "subjective sense," poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of "peoples," but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves...each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons. (266)By erasing objective moral biases, and entering a subjective, individual world, the cyberpunk character transcends limiting horizons along with the prejudices which limit humanity. Haraway suggests that erasing the man/woman distinction would be a benefit to all (178); imagine if other distinctions were erased along with notions of good and evil: racial bias, ageism, religious bias, etc. Cyberpunks want nothing more than to get rid of all objective, outdated ideas and limiting morals left over from now dead gods. Sponsler suggests that cyberpunks are
set adrift in a world in which there is no meaning, no security, no affection, and no communal bonds - except for those they themselves tenuously create. [They are a]ntifoundational, skeptical of authority...and fascinated by the way technology and material objects shape consciousness and moderate behavior... (627)Cyberpunks refuse to give up; rather than accept dead gods and dead moralities, they create new, individual ones. There is a lot to be said about freedom from restriction and bias, even if it does make the cyberpunk world a bit more dangerous. After all, with the technology to deal with the new challenges, the opportunities given to the Neuromantic in cyberpunk fiction far outweigh the dangers.
With the hope of a new heaven in the distance, the risks are far more acceptable than a continued existence in a very real hell. Rather than die, they take Nietzsche's advice and evolve into something stronger, the �bermensch. In her essay "Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism," Veronica Hollinger asserts that "the postmodern condition has required that we revise SF's original trope of technological anxiety - the image of a fallen humanity controlled by a technology run amok...we and our technologies 'interface' to produce what has become a mutual evolution" (218). This is precisely what cyberpunks achieve.
Cyberpunk writers, faced with horrific future visions such as Orwell's 1984, in which freedom is relinquished to the state "machine," revolted. Through their revolt, they offered the technology to those who were most in danger of being subjugated by the system, the punks. The Neuromantic was born from this fusion of technology and punk, and with him, a new hope for humanity. No longer will cyberpunk citizens be content to be slaves; as Lucifer says, "Better to reign in hell, than to serve in Heav'n" (Milton I: 263). They can make hell into a better place, or escape it by creating a new heaven in their minds, making "a Heav'n of Hell" (I:255); certainly there is nothing miserable or depressing about this. Critics were correct to fear the cyberpunk's godless, hopeless world, but what they failed to do was to recognize the cyberpunk character's transcendence through technology. God may be dead in the cyberpunk world, but His death leaves the Neuromantic a path to heaven. As Nietzsche tells us in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
Before God! But now this god has died. You higher men, this was your greatest danger. It is only since he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected. Only now the great noon comes; only now the higher man becomes - lord...In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx suggests that "the machine bring[s] myth" (164), and that "machine power is fulfilling an ancient mythic prophecy" (201). Whereas Satan fell from heaven, the Neuromantic flies upwards towards silicon stars and into the new heaven of cyberspace, and thus completes the cycle of literature and history that Frye suggests. Morality and society have failed the cyberpunk character, and with technology and anarchy, he strives to build his own myth and religion; one of freedom, power, and individuality.
God died: now we want the �bermensch to live. (398-9)