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23 Legal Stud. F. 293 (1999)
Lyres against the Law: Orpheus as Cyberpunk Outlaw

handle is hein.journals/lstf23 and id is 303 raw text is: LYRES AGAINST THE LAW: ORPHEUS AS CYBERPUNK OUTLAW WILLIAM PENCAK7 I. SCIENCE FICTION AND ORPHEUS: A LONG TRADITION In 1990, William Gibson noted that writers and film-makers of the cyberpunk movement launched in the 1980s' looked around the world outside of fine arts and imported whatever they could use into the literary ghetto of science fiction. Himself called the godfather of cyberpunk, a genre where outlaw hackers turn contemporary technology against itself to liberate rather than control, Gibson began the movement with his pioneering novel Neuromancer (1984). In Neuromancer Case, a street-wise young man on the periphery of high- tech society, battles the zaibatsu, or multi-national corporations, which control the world economy and compel obedience as the price of personal survival and prosperity.2 Notwithstanding their postmodern themes, cyberpunk and science fiction' belong to a literary tradition that stretches back to the ancient world. The Greek myths, with gods flying from Olympus to earth and wielding supernatural though arbitrary power, and heroes like Prometheus and Orestes combating them and bringing fire and justice to humankind, were the first science-fiction tales.4 The miracles of medieval saints, aided by angels, who defied death and tyranny to establish a Christian world were their successors. The age of Renais- sance and Enlightenment, repudiating the superstitious past, assigned mystical powers to liberty, reason, and those who championed * Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University. I dedicate this essay to the members of my band, The Irreconcilable Differences: Dan Beaver, Barry Kernfeld, Dan Letwin, Mary Ann Maslak, and On-cho Ng, contemporary Orphic bards. ' The term first appeared in a 1982 story by Damien Broderick called The Judas Mandala, and by 1995 it commanded an entry of twenty-four column-inches in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Thomas M. Disch, THE DREAMS OUR STUFF Is MADE OF 216 (New York: The Free Press, 1998). 2 Marianne Trench, director, Cyberpunk (New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1990). For a history of science fiction as a literary movement that transformed itself from a cult ghetto to the literary vehicle which has the greatest freedom to create metaphors that speak of the nature and experience of humanity, setting the stage for the arrival of cyberpunk, see, Thomas D. Clareson, UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION: THE FORMATIVE PERIOD, 1926-1970, at 265 (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). ' For a survey of mythic archetypes that pervade modern science fiction, see Josepha Sherman, ONCE UPON A GALAXY (Little Rock, Arkansas: August House, 1994).

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