Destroying Angel

"One of the recurring questions about cyberpunk is, didn’t it end in the 80s? Does cyberpunk still even exist today? Is it still relevant at all? The five books I’ve chosen are deliberately tracking cyberpunk through the ages up to now, to prove its continued relevance. So our trip to the early 90s is Richard Paul Russo’s Destroying Angel . This is a noir thriller in a near-future San Francisco, where a dissolute policeman is tracking down a serial killer. Cyberpunk and noir go hand in hand. They are often conflated. I think that’s probably because they both have a lot of rain and cities in them. I think the real parallel is that they’re both genres where the themes are often mistaken for the aesthetic and vice versa. Destroying Angel is actually one of the few moments where the centre of the Venn diagram is perfect: it is a brilliant piece of cyberpunk and it is undeniably noir. It’s incredibly claustrophobic and suffocating, and it’s within a collapsing system. Despite being set in a world where space travel exists, you can just feel the walls start to collapse around you. Like Neuromancer , it creates a fully realized, entirely plausible, but just a little bit weird world, which feels a tiny bit out of reach in the future, and it talks about how ordinary people try to thrive and survive. It’s absolutely soul-destroying. It will break your heart. But it is a terrific, incredibly tense thriller, and also great cyberpunk. Yes, cyberpunk takes place in difficult worlds. These stories really push the bounds of what we think of when we think about escapism, and they’re very rarely heroic. But there’s a challenging plausibility, I suppose. They allow us to look at what lies ahead, and use fiction as a sandbox to build emotional resilience, and prepare us for the worst – or possibly best – eventualities. It is important to note that cyberpunk worlds have that element of hope in them. Even Neuromancer , if you’ll pardon the spoiler, has a happy ending. A broken world isn’t magically healed, but there’s a sense of healing and progress at smaller, more personal levels. That possibility of change, amongst other things, is what prevents cyberpunk worlds from ever becoming pure dystopia . If there’s one theme that goes throughout cyberpunk, it’s the relationship between humanity and technology, but it is about the persistence of humanity as well. However overwhelming or pervasive or robust these technological systems are, there’s always that spark of human life and humanity’s ability to challenge; the glorious randomness of human nature. So in a weird way, however bleak or despairing these worlds are, humans still prevail and challenge and resist. They’re a sort of survivor fiction in that way. Cyberpunk worlds always have the possibility of change in them, and that might be small and local and personal, or that might be global and epic, but there is always that spark of hope."