Ghost Busting. The Role of Literary Cyberpunk in the Development of Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century

Since the exhaustion of postmodernism in the first half of the 1980s, when its production could no longer provide an accurate interpretation of its immediate social reality, a number of literary attempts to deviate from the postmodernist dictum have appeared, claiming to be successors. From the perspective of the zeitgeist-based typologies, the rightful successor to postmodernism should already function according to the metaphysical premises of the postmodern epoch. In view of that, the article examines the phenomenon of literary cyberpunk, a movement formed in America at the beginning of the 1980s within the science fiction genre. The investigation of the position of cyberpunk in its original environment of science fiction, the relation between cyberpunk and its mainstream contemporary postmodernism, and the analysis of the specifics of the cyberpunk subject, literary worlds and style reveal the decisive role of cyberpunk in the development of the foundation upon which the Avant-Pop movement of the early 1990s successfully anchored literature within the new epoch.