While itās important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.
Yes, itās true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate stateās efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, itās dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.
However, itās equally true that the āprosthetics eat your soulā horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isnāt a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work ā itās a shift in attitude thatās present in the literature itself.
Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genreās history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!
The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 ā and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary ā doesnāt give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent āprosthetics eat your soulā stuff, and it certainly doesnāt mean that the two thirds of the genreās entire history can be excused as ānot real cyberpunkā on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first youāve got to own it!
