This article proposes to explore the questions and perplexities of urban dynamics and the future of cities by drawing on fictions of a particular type, those of cyberpunk literature, selected here for their heuristic potential and their ability to problematize certain major trends as a time of an expanding technocapitalism and diffuse forms of social disintegration. Treating this subgenre of science fiction, which renewed its aesthetics and some of its themes in the 1980s, as a laboratory, the article begins by highlighting the representations that cyberpunk novels by authors like William Gibson, Walter Jon Williams, John Shirley, etc. convey about the dynamics that seem to permeate the metropolises of these future worlds, in particular in order to specify the conditions and situations that tend to be problematized in this way. The article goes on to show the tensions that arise or re-emerge out of the productions of this literary movement, and the resources it offers for discussions around the evolution of territorial and social relations associated with the urban condition.
- cyperpunk
- future
- technocapitalism
- city