Introduction

The impetus for this paper came from our attendance at Warwick University's Virtual Futures II conference in May 1995. There, we noticed that despite the remit of the conference—virtuality—the body and its future was one of the main issues to be addressed time and again. We also noted that there was unease around the notion of bodily transcendence, expressed most commonly by feminist writers and theorists. Traditionally for feminism, being able to define clearly the subject for liberation has been vital; this may account for the reluctance to give up the body that we noted at Warwick, since the body is both historically associated with the feminine and commonly understood to be integral to self-identification. In addition to this, we were forced to acknowledge that there is as yet little in the way of female presence in the canon of cyberpunk, the literature of the virtual. Why would that be so? To find some answers we determined to focus on embodiment and transcendence, the sense of the body within cyberpunk science fiction.

Although cyberpunk is the subject of this paper, the concerns we address have not originated in cyberpunk. Science fiction, which is a literature of possibilities, has always reacted to the body as a confining space, and therefore generated the impulse to transcend the body's limitations. Classic science fiction narratives of space travel compensate for human limitation by means of the technological apparatus of the spaceship which functions as an invulnerable ‘outer body’ or exoskeleton. Another common expression of this theme is the immortal machinic body of the cyborg which exists at one remove from the human, experiencing neither weakness nor pain, an enabled body capable of anything that the mind could imagine.

Cyberpunk science fiction is about the mind. Technology, new inventions, computer advances, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are all staples of cyberpunk sf plotlines, and all ‘in the mind’. Typically they are in a network—the ‘Net’, the ‘Matrix’—like a giant brain that covers the entire planet and negates the need for actual, physical travel as the subject traverses the computer/neurological Net-works.