Cyberpunk is dead, long live cyberpunk! Humanity has made it to the year 2019 in which the cyberpunk dystopia of Blade Runner used to take place. In the real world today, we lack its neon-noir aesthetics in the views outside, but we can feel it deeply embedded within our markets, our entertainment, our virtual spaces, we can feel it, in fact, in our very selves.

ShadowDance #1: CYBERPUNK is the first printed issue of our 20+ years old digital fanzine. In a world of increasing digitalization, we took the other way and chose to tell a story between two covers, as means of stepping back from the virtual and allowing ourselves and our readers a space and a time to reflect upon where our society is heading.

Want to dive in? Meet our cyberlibrian creation, read the excerpts we did for you in English, and celebrate with us the story of our giveback to our incredible readers. So that at the far edge of this hyperplane, you can rightfully call yourself an expert on all things CYBERPUNK.

THE STORY

We started with a simple goal.

To offer a detailed and world-class deep dive in one of science fiction’s most celebrated and enigmatic subgenres. To concentrate on the careful reading approach and connect to the living past of SFF journalism, while also staying true to our goals of enriching the Bulgarian fantasto-sphere and bringing people together to imagine better futures. To extend our network of friends and liven up the conversation about SFF. To help raise the bar on how printed publications can look and should look in a modern environment. To give back to our community of readers, fellow fans and friends who have supported us immensely throughout the years. To bootstrap a libary of texts that can help us all think about society in the unique mindset that SFF offers to all of us.

Why cyberpunk?

Blade Runner hit the cinema screens back in 1982. The emblematic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, came out in 1984. The first issue of the groundbreaking Akira manga series in Japan came out in 1982. The word cyberpunk itself was coined in 1980. These works mark the main ideas that have remained as the genre’s cornerstones in cultural memory: the lone, often marginalized protagnoist, embedded in a complex tangle of ties with incredibly powerful corporations, set against the background of broken societies, lost in cyberspace delirium.

It would seem, at face value, that cyberpunk’s world is dystopian, dark, rainy, isolated and even doomed; but in fact it seethes with unexplored dynamics of tension. Today we think of the genre in terms of cyber-implants, virtual realities, quasi-anarchist mini-societies, black markets for questionable experiences. But cyberpunk’s unexpected revival today across virtually all the entertainment media reveals a much more subtle and important asset of the genre: its deep explorations of the unavoidable relationship between man and the machine. While today, we talk about algorithms, rather than bio-nano-high-tech imagery (that we were expected to by the original cyberpunk works), the underlying motif and its understanding are much the same. Is man lost in this space of technological takeover, or are they on the path to a trans-human future that cannot be easily expressed in the terms we talk with today?

All of this seems very important to discuss and discuss at length.

THE CONTENTS

Simply put, no corners were cut. CYBERPUNK has it all. This is more than 250 pages of high-quality material and modern design, and it spans the genre across all dimensions: history, topics, art forms and media. If we were going to do this, it had to be done the right way. So here’s what you can find inside.
 

William GibsonA Neuromancer of What is to Come(read the excerpt)

WILLIAM GIBSON

Meet the father of cyberpunk. William Gibson is easily one of the most enigmatic SFF authors of our times. A mind, immersed in the language of things. A laser pen, whose grand vision defined a decade of science fiction and then changed aesthetics and pop-culture forever. Read all about his story, his journey into the world of writing and the slow burn of his imagination throughout his illustrous career to this very day. Breathe in the stench of gomi and go back to Winter Market, one of his most celebrated short fiction works, that we translated for the first time in Bulgarian.

A JET DRIVE DOWN HISTORY LANE

Trace the origins of cyberpunk in the early SFF works since the 50’s to the day Neuromancer was brought into the world, and then follow it beyond to our times. Start with our article about The precursors to Cyberpunk and then go back to the Atlas of Cyberpunk which lays down in no simple terms the manifest of the genre and its aesthetic interpretations. Then stop and take a breath. It was not just Neuromancer, was it? There was also Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s magnum opus that brought us cyberpunk’s neon glow, dark streets, eternal rain and of course Rutger Hauer’s unforgettable end words. All has been said on both of these grand works. But not nearly enough has been said on Blade Runner 2049 and so we do. Immerse into the insightful interpretation of all things symbolic in the new movie and then dial back.

Read celebrated cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling’s somewhat pessimistic review on the Cyberpunk in the 90’s and witness the genre’s slow ebb and flow under the surface of science fiction. Investigate the post-cyberpunk genre, of which Neil Stephenson was a very important voice (and so we wouldn’t skip over him, would we), and take a side step to East European Cyberpunk, often dubbed the „humanities“ cyberpunk: that of Victor Pelevin, Sergey Lukyanenko, Ivan Popov and others. Then circle back to our day and age with the cyberpunk renessaince and revisit our founding thesis: the society of today lives through the same tensions and fears that defined the cyberpunk of the 80’s, only now it’s a bit less overt and a bit more sinister.

But wait, is that all of cyberpunk? What happened during all these years? Well, we’ve got you covered.

CYBERPUNK cinemaAssorted selection(read in English)

THE MEDIA SLICE

Remember we are a team that looks for the fantastical across all art forms? Why deny ourselves here. We ran the whole gamut. Check out our selection of your favorite Cyberpunk Cinema and then remember it’s the golden age of TV now, so read up also on the Cyberpunk TV Shows. Not enough? More of a gamer? We’ve got Cyberpunk Videogames and Cyberpunk Boardgames both, with some extra obscure titles thrown in the mix (for extra delight). Of course, we wouldn’t leave the genre behemoths with a mention in a collection article, would we. A much more focused look awaits you on Ghost in the Shell, on roleplay legend Shadowrun, and also on the genre-defining videogame of all videogames Deus Ex. But that is not all. Cyberpunk Comics walks us through some really important titles and we even touch cyberpunk’s influence music with twin articles on Synthwave and on Futurepop.

Intimacy Algorithmsby Haralambi Markov(read in English)

FICTIONAL WORLDS

A SFF magazine is usually not deemed worthy if it doesn’t also serve as a vehicle for new fiction. Such was the tradition back in the 50’s and it’s been kept alive to this very day. Not so in Bulgaria, but we did our best. Our mission to showcase young Bulgarian genre authors and artists is having the spotlight throughout the pages. Six short stories, four of them by Bulgarian authors, and all of them illustrated by Bulgarian artists, plus some of the non-fiction texts. Algorithms of Intimacy by Haralambi Markov is a really crazy story on sex, software and danger. Georgi Nikolaev’s Panthera takes us back to classic cyberpunk – you will feel most at home. Sarah Ellis’ Snow on Snow is a tender yet twisted lovestory, while Andrey Velkov’s The Last Perfect Day to Catch a Banana-Fish is an evocative meditation on transhumanism and age. There’s also Konstantin Georgiev’s Johny, where cybernetics rules supreme, and of course William Gibson’s Winter Market of which no more needs be said.

THE WORLD IS OUR 牡蠣

Wait, was the t-word mentioned above? Yes, transhumanism is among the most important tenets of cyberpunk psyche and so we have naturally devoted it our The stretched rope of Transhumanism article that revisits the movement’s history and reflects upon its philosophical foundations and mirrorings in science fiction, from Nietzche to Rajaniemi. Our breadth-first approach to genre, however, runs even wider than that. How about two articles on rock legend David Bowie? Sure, why not, everything you throw at David Bowie’s feet would be appropriate and cyberpunk is more appropriate than most. Or how about Bycicles as punk and bikers as cyborgs? We’ve got that too, because, well, you might be a biker but up until now you didn’t know you were a cyberpunk fan too, did you? Of course, we can’t miss Contemporary Japan and investigate how this [imagined] haven of cyberpunk has interpreted its messages in the real world.

Finally, why stop at cyber-punk in particular? Its moniker has birthed monsters: every subgenre of science fiction is now some sort of punk. But fear not. In our Genre block diagram of punks we trace them all on a very generous pagecount and sort them out for you: those are fake and those aren’t. Starting with fan-favorite steampunk which can in many ways be considered not a child, not even a sibling, but more of a parent to cyberpunk itself, and then slashing through dieselpunk, biopunk, nanopunk, sandalpunk, elfpunk, silkpunk and your-cat’s-a-punk for good measure, to finally end up on solarpunk, the hope of our desolate times.

PUTTING CYBER IN CYBERPUNK

Paper is good. But cyberpunk needs its cyberspace image, doesn’t it. And we said no corners were cut, but we wanted to cram even more pages around those corners. And so, the digital edition. It was devised as a special perk for our crowdfunding campaign (more on that below) and it has some minor goodies like interactive links. But most of all, it has extended content in the collection articles on cinema and tv shows with even more cyberpunk legends in the mix.

That’s where we started. But the digital edition ended up having an even more ambitious asset and that is an entire section devoted to tracing cyberpunk in Bulgaria: from madbyte’s Cyberpunk Manifesto through the romantic age of Bulgarian cyberpunk choose your own adventure books (if you didn’t know it, Bulgaria used to be extremely huge on these gamebooks, they were akin to religion when we were all kids and PCs hadn’t entered the scene en masse) right to 2019’s Ukraine born Bulgarian Nicholas Dimitroff and his Dealer of realities. All sprinkled with more cyberpunk art from Bulgarian creators.

THE CAMPAIGN

So how did all of this happen? Being an NGO without any sort of income or previous commercial activities, we opted for crowdfunding. We didn’t any other way to finance this dream in a way that would have turned it into what it deserved to become. But also, we were itchy to try our hands at crowdfunding and we also realized that it’s a great venue for popularizing the magazine before it even came to be. So, it was to be our first test whether this project makes sense at all, so we put quite a bit of effort.

And was it indeed highly successful! Not only did the crowdfunding campaign secure its goal in just two weeks, eventually overstretching the original financial goal by a half over. But it also quite literally managed to weave a pocket reality of its own with story-ladden merchandise, a network of events, the establishment of an elite club of perpetual subscribers to our work (and love) and above all, the promise of new issues to follow on CYBERPUNK.

The magazine was eventually published in December 2019, catching the last train to land in the year Blade Runner‘s dark future is set, as was of course the plan all along. A crazy premiere with an amazing cosplay display by Bulgarian cosplay star the Irstress made the genre news and was followed by promotional interviews and media articles well into the next year and even the one after. The net result was optimistic for science fiction in Bulgaria: CYBERPUNK surpassed most genre publications in terms of sales and keeps getting attention today.

In 2021 CYBERPUNK was nominated for Best Fanzine in the Achievement Awards category for the EUROCON 2021 Convention in Fiuggi, Italy, and this is the main reason the current page exists. We have translated some of the fanzine in the exceprts below – not only so that delegates may get acquainted but also in order to be able to promote the work of Bulgarian authors and artists to a wider audience. If you are thrilled about it and don’t mind trying your hand at Bulgarian, don’t hesitate to drop us a line – we can send you the paper edition.

PROJECT ZERO, PROJECT FUTURE

This project was a celebration of our commitment and deep relationship with our readers and fans. It marks the threshold of our slow evolution over the years from an entirely fan-made initiative to an incorporation of more and more academic and cross-cultural modes of thinking and writing, while remaining true to our original 20-year old spirit that defined the early Internet. Our team has grown: in numbers, but also in experience, and as we have put more and more focus on the immense value the speculative genres and their stories bring to society in general, we have striven to embed this experience in our work. We are proud with CYBERPUNK as the result of these efforts and we are humbled to have the overwhelming positive reaction its publication has entailed.

Rest assured, new horizons await for the ShadowDance printed series. Stay tuned!