Backscatter X-ray

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray 

 

Backscatter technology produces an image that resembles a chalk etching.

Backscatter X-ray is an advanced X-ray imaging technology. Traditional X-ray machines detect hard and soft materials by the variation in x-ray intensity transmitted through the target. In contrast, backscatter X-ray detects the radiation that reflects from the target. It has potential applications where less-destructive examination is required, and can operate even if only one side of the target is available for examination.

The technology is one of two types of whole-body imaging technologies that have been used to perform full-body scans of airline passengers to detect hidden weapons, tools, liquids, narcotics, currency, and other contraband. A competing technology is millimeter wave scanner. One can refer to an airport security machine of this type as a "body scanner", "whole body imager (WBI)", "security scanner" or "naked scanner".

Deployments at airports

In the United States, the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 required that all full-body scanners operated in airports by the Transportation Security Administration use "Automated Target Recognition" software, which replaces the picture of a nude body with the cartoon-like representation. As a result of this law, all backscatter X-ray machines formerly in use by the Transportation Security Administration were removed from airports by May 2013, since the agency said the vendor (Rapiscan) did not meet their contractual deadline to implement the software.

In the European Union, backscatter X-ray screening of airline passengers was banned in 2012 to protect passenger safety.

Technology

Backscatter technology is based on the Compton scattering effect of X-rays, a form of ionizing radiation. Unlike a traditional X-ray machine, which relies on the transmission of X-rays through the object, backscatter X-ray detects the radiation that reflects from the object and forms an image. The backscatter pattern is dependent on the material property and is good for imaging organic material.

In contrast to millimeter wave scanners, which create a 3D image, backscatter X-ray scanners will typically only create a 2D image. For airport screening, images are taken from both sides of the human body.

Backscatter X-ray was first applied in a commercial low-dose personnel scanning system by Dr. Steven W. Smith. Smith developed the Secure 1000 whole-body scanner in 1992 and then sold the device and associated patents to Rapiscan Systems, who now manufactures and distributes the device.

Large scale

Some backscatter X-ray scanners can scan much larger objects, such as trucks and containers. This scan is much faster than a physical search and could potentially allow a larger percentage of shipping to be checked for smuggled items, weapons, drugs, or people.

There are also gamma-ray-based systems coming to market.

In May 2011, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed suit against the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming that DHS had withheld nearly 1000 pages of documents related to the Z backscatter vans and other mobile backscatter devices.

Concerns

See also: Full body scanner § Controversies

Legality

Since in addition to weapons, these machines are designed to be capable of detecting drugs, currency and contraband, which have no direct effect on airport security and passenger safety, some have argued that the use of these full body scanners is a violation of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be construed as an illegal search and seizure.

Privacy

An image of Susan Hallowell, Director of the Transportation Security Administration's research lab taken with backscatter x-ray system.

Backscatter x-ray technology has been proposed as an alternative to personal searches at airport and other security checkpoints easily penetrating clothing to reveal concealed weapons. It raises privacy concerns about what is seen by the person viewing the scan. Some worry that viewing the image violates confidential medical information, such as the fact a passenger uses a colostomy bag, has a missing limb or wears a prosthesis, or is transgender.

The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center are opposed to this use of the technology. The ACLU refers to backscatter x-rays as a "virtual strip search". According to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in one trial 79 percent of the public opted to try backscatter over the traditional pat-down in secondary screening.

It is "possible for backscatter X-raying to produce photo-quality images of what's going on beneath our clothes", thus, many software implementations of the scan have been designed to distort private areas. According to the TSA, further distortion is used in the Phoenix airport's trial system where photo-quality images are replaced by chalk outlines. The TSA has also commented that screening procedures such as having the screener viewing the image located far away from the person being screened could be a possibility.

In light of this, some journalists have expressed concern that this blurring may allow people to carry weapons or certain explosives aboard by attaching the object or substance to their genitals.

The British newspaper The Guardian has revealed concern among British officials that the use of such scanners to scan children may be illegal under the Protection of Children Act 1978, which prohibits the creation and distribution of indecent images of children. This concern may delay the introduction of routine backscatter scanning in UK airports, which had been planned in response to the attempted Christmas Day 2009 attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

The Fiqh Council of North America have also issued the following fatwa in relation to full-body scanners:

It is a violation of clear Islamic teachings that men or women be seen naked by other men and women. Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of faith. The Quran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.

In August 2010, it was reported that U.S. Marshals (part of the Department of Justice), saved thousands of images from a low resolution mm wave scanner: This machine does not show details of human anatomy, and is a different kind of machine from the one used in airports. TSA, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said that its scanners do not save images and that the scanners do not have the capability to save images when they are installed in airports, but later admitted that the scanners are required to be capable of saving images for the purpose of evaluation, training and testing.

Health effects

Unlike cell phone signals, or millimeter-wave scanners, the energy being emitted by a backscatter X-ray is a type of ionizing radiation that breaks chemical bonds. Ionizing radiation is considered carcinogenic even in very small doses but at the doses used in airport scanners this effect is believed to be negligible for an individual. If 1 million people were exposed to 520 scans in one year, one study estimated that roughly four additional cancers would occur due to the scanner, in contrast to the 600 additional cancers that would occur from the higher levels of radiation during flight.

Since the scanners do not have a medical purpose, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not need to subject them to the same safety evaluations as medical X-rays. However, the FDA has created a webpage comparing known estimates of the radiation from backscatter X-ray body scanners to that of other known sources, which cites various reasons they deem the technology to be safe.

Four professors at the University of California, San Francisco, among them members of NAS and an expert in cancer and imaging, in an April 2010 letter to the presidential science and technology advisor raised several concerns about the validity of the indirect comparisons the Food and Drug Administration used in evaluating the safety of backscatter x-ray machines. They argued that the effective dose is higher than claimed by the TSA and the body scanner manufacturers because the dose was calculated as if distributed throughout the whole body, whereas most of the radiation is absorbed in the skin and tissues immediately underneath. Other professors from the radiology department at UCSF disagree with the claims of the signing four professors.

The UCSF professors requested that additional data be made public detailing the specific data regarding sensitive areas, such as the skin and certain organs, as well as data on the special (high-risk) population. In October 2010, the FDA and TSA responded to these concerns. The letter cites reports which show that the specific dose to the skin is some 89,000 times lower than the annual limit to the skin established by the NCRP. Regarding the UCSF concerns over the high-risk population to sensitive organs, the letter states that such an individual "would have to receive more than 1,000 screenings to begin to approach the annual limit".

John Sedat, the principal author of the UCSF letter, responded in November 2010 that the White House's claim that full-body scanners pose no health risks to air travelers is in error, adding that the White House statement has "many misconceptions, and we will write a careful answer pointing out their errors."

In a December 2, 2010 letter to the House of Representatives, Dr. Steven Smith, inventor of the body scanner in 1991, stated that the concerns of Brenner and UCSF regarding the skin dose of backscatter scanners is incorrect and the result of a confusion between dose and imaging penetration. Smith demonstrated this difference with two experiments using plastic (with a similar rate of absorption as body tissue), copper (the image subject), and an x-ray scanner. The dose-penetration experiment shows that 5 and 50 mm (0.20 and 1.97 in) plastic samples absorb 5% and 50% of the beam intensity respectively, whereas the imaging penetration experiment shows that 4.8 and 10 mm (0.19 and 0.39 in) plastic samples reduce the image darkness by 23% and 50% respectively. Dr. Smith states that those who calculate high skin dosage have incorrectly used the shallow imaging penetration value of a few millimeters (c. 0.16 in), whereas the actual dosage is calculated by the deeper dose penetration.

The TSA has also made public various independent safety assessments of the Secure 1000 Backscatter X-ray Scanner.

Radiation safety authorities including the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, The Health Physics Society and the American College of Radiology, have stated that there is no specific evidence that full-body scans are unsafe. The Secure 1000 Backscatter X-ray scanner was developed in 1992 by Dr. Steve Smith. The scanner has been studied extensively for almost 20 years by the leading independent radiation safety authorities in the United States. Experimental and epidemiological data do not support the proposition, however, that there is a threshold dose of radiation below which there is no increased risk of cancer.

The UK Health Protection Agency has completed an analysis of the X-ray dose from backscatter scanners and has written that the dose is extremely low and "about the same as people receive from background radiation in an hour".

The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 μSv (0.005 mrem) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 μSv (0.009 mrem). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six-hour flight is 20 μSv (2 mrem) – 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits radiation exposure to the public to less than 1 mSv (100 mrem) per year from nuclear power plants. While this is not specifically for airline-associated radiation, the limit is an effective proxy for understanding what level is deemed safe by a regulatory agency.

According to a draft standard on the United States FDA website, the allowable dose from a scan would be 0.1 μSv, and that report uses a model whereby a 0.01 μSv dose increases an individual's risk of death by cancer during his or her lifetime by 5×10⁻¹⁰. Since the dose limit is ten times higher than 0.01 μSv, their model would predict one additional cancer death per 200 million scans. Since the airports in the UK handled 218 million passengers in 2009, if all passengers in the UK were scanned at the maximum dosage, then each year this would produce on average one additional cancer death (since there would be 200 million scans per year that the scanners were in operation), though usually each death would not occur in the same year as the particular scan that caused it, since the cancer may take years to grow. In addition, additional people would be given cancer but would die from other causes.

There may not yet be evidence of hereditary effects of x-rays administered by backscatter scanners, but backscatter scanners use the same kind of x-ray photons as are produced in medical x-ray machines but expose the subject at a considerably lower dose, so it is possible that the results from medical radiology may be relevant, at least until a study is done of any effects specific to backscatter x-ray machines. Fathers exposed to medical diagnostic x-rays are more likely to have infants who contract leukemia, especially if exposure is closer to conception or includes two or more X-rays of the lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract or lower abdomen. In medical radiography the x-ray beam is adjusted to expose only the area of which an image is required, so that generally shielding is applied to the patient to avoid exposing the gonads, whereas in an airport backscatter scan, the testicles of men and boys will be deliberately subjected to the direct beam in order to check for weapons in the underpants, and some radiation will also reach the ovaries of female subjects. A linear dose-response relationship has been observed between x-ray dose and double-strand breaks in DNA in human sperm.

Extrapolations of cancer risk from minuscule exposures to radiation across large populations, however, are not supported by analysis by the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP). On May 26, 2010 NCRP issued a press release to address such comments about full body scanners that are compliant with ANSI N43.17. In Commentary No.16 issued on May 26, 2010, it reads as follows:

As stated in NCRP Report No. 121 (1995), Principles and Application of Collective Dose in Radiation Protection, the summation of trivial average risks over very large populations or time periods into a single value produces a distorted image of risk, completely out of perspective with risks accepted every day, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

According to NCRP, the use of statistical extrapolations that predict 1 death for every 200 million persons scanned for example (as above) is an unrealistic over-estimation.

Other scientists at Columbia University have made the following statements in support of the safety of body scanners:

"A passenger would need to be scanned using a backscatter scanner, from both the front and the back, about 200,000 times to receive the amount of radiation equal to one typical CT scan," said Dr. Andrew J. Einstein, director of cardiac CT research at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

"Another way to look at this is that if you were scanned with a backscatter scanner every day of your life, you would still only receive a tenth of the dose of a typical CT scan," he said.

By comparison, the amount of radiation from a backscatter scanner is equivalent to about 10 minutes of natural background radiation in the United States, Einstein said. "I believe that the general public has nothing to worry about in terms of the radiation from airline scanning," he added.

For moms-to-be, no evidence supports an increased risk of miscarriage or fetal abnormalities from these scanners, Einstein added.

"A pregnant woman will receive much more radiation from cosmic rays she is exposed to while flying than from passing through a scanner in the airport," he said.

Furthermore, other scientists claim the health effects of backscatter are well understood whereas those from millimeter wave scanners are not:

"From a radiation standpoint there has been no evidence that there is really any untoward effect from the use of this device [backscatter scanner], so I would not be concerned about it from a radiation dose standpoint – the issues of personal privacy are a different thing," he said.

The health effects of the more common millimeter wave scanner are largely unknown, and at least one expert believes a safety study is warranted.

"I am very interested in performing a National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements study on the use of millimeter-wave security screening systems," said Thomas S. Tenforde, council president.

However, no long-term studies have been done on the health effects of millimeter wave scanners.

Experts evaluating backscatter x-ray machine technology have also argued that defects in the machines, damage from normal wear-and-tear, or software errors could focus an intense dose of radiation on just one spot of the body. For example, Dr. Peter Rez, a professor of physics at Arizona State University, has said, "The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn't", adding that a potential malfunction of the machine could increase the radiation dose.

The designers and manufacturers of backscatter X-ray scanners claim that the scanners are designed to prevent the occurrence of these kinds of errors. The scanners' safety requirements include fail-safe controls and multiple overlapping interlocks. These features, combined with fault analysis, ensure that failure of any subsystem results in non-operation of the x-ray generator to prevent accidental exposures. In the United States, the TSA requires that certification to the ANSI N43.17 safety standard is performed by a third party and not by the manufacturer themselves.

The European Commission issued a report stating that backscatter x-ray scanners pose no known health risk, and that "assuming all other conditions equal", that backscatter x-ray scanners, which expose people to ionizing radiation, should not be used when millimeter-wave scanners that "have less effects on the human body" are available.

However, the European Commission report provides no data substantiating its claim that "all other conditions are equal". One area where backscatter X-ray scanners can provide better performance than MM wave scanners, for example, is in the inspection of the shoes, groin and armpit regions of the body.

In a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on March 28, 2011 researchers at the University of California "calculated that fully implementing backscatter scanners would not significantly increase the lifetime risk of cancer for travelers." The researchers calculated that for every 100 million passengers who flew seven one-way flights, there would be one additional cancer.

Efficacy

In March 2012, scientist and blogger Jonathan Corbett demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the technology by publishing a viral video showing how he was able to get a metal box through backscatter x-ray and millimeter wave scanners (including the currently-used "Automated Target Recognition" scanners) in two US airports. In April 2012, Corbett released a second video interviewing a TSA screener, who described firearms and simulated explosives passing through the scanners during internal testing and training.

Backscatter scanners installed by the TSA until 2013 were unable to screen adequately for security threats inside hats and head coverings, casts, prosthetics and loose clothing. This technology limitation of current scanners often requires these persons to undergo additional screening by hand or other methods and can cause additional delay or feelings of harassment.

The next generation of backscatter scanners are able to screen these types of clothing, according to manufacturers; however, these machines are not currently in use in public airports.

In Germany, field tests on more than 800,000 passengers over a 10-month trial period concluded that scanners were effective, but not ready to be deployed in German airports due to a high rate of false alarms. The Italian Civil Aviation Authority removed scanners from airports after conducting a study that revealed them to be inaccurate and inconvenient. The European Commission decided to effectively ban backscatter machines. In a 2011 staff report by Republican Members of Congress about the TSA, airport body scanners were described as "ineffective" and "easily thwarted".

Safety regulations and standards

In the US, manufacturers of security related equipment can apply for protection under the SAFETY act, which limits their financial liability in product liability cases to the amount of their insurance coverage. The Rapiscan Secure 1000 was listed in 2006.

In the US, an X-ray system can be considered to comply with requirements for general purpose security screening of humans if the device complies with American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Standard #N43.17.

In the most general sense, N43.17 states that a device can be used for general purpose security screening of humans if the dose to the subject is less than 0.25 μSv (25 μrem) per examination and complies with other requirements of the standard. This is comparable to the average dose due to background radiation (i.e. radioactivity within the surrounding environment) at sea level in 1.5 hours; it is also comparable to the dose from cosmic rays when traveling in an airplane at cruising altitude for two minutes.

Many types of X-ray systems can be designed to comply with ANSI N43.17 including transmission X-ray, backscatter X-ray and gamma ray systems. Not all backscatter X-ray devices necessarily comply with ANSI N43.17; only the manufacturer or end user can confirm compliance of a particular product to the standard.

ANSI standards use a standard of measurement algorithm called "effective dose" that considers the different exposure of all parts of the body and then weights them differently. The interior of the human body is given more weight in this survey, and the exterior, including the skin organ, are given less weight.

Technical countermeasures

Some people wish to prevent either the loss of privacy or the possibility of health problems or genetic damage that might be associated with being subjected to a backscatter X-ray scan. One company sells X-ray absorbing underwear which is said to have X-ray absorption equivalent to 0.5 mm (0.020 in) of lead. Another product, Flying Pasties, "are designed to obscure the most private parts of the human body when entering full body airport scanners", but their description does not seem to claim any protection from the X-ray beam penetrating the body of the person being scanned.

Isotope analysis

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_analysis 

 

Magnetic sector mass spectrometer used in isotope ratio analysis, through thermal ionization

Isotope analysis is the identification of isotopic signature, abundance of certain stable isotopes of chemical elements within organic and inorganic compounds. Isotopic analysis can be used to understand the flow of energy through a food web, to reconstruct past environmental and climatic conditions, to investigate human and animal diets, for food authentification, and a variety of other physical, geological, palaeontological and chemical processes. Stable isotope ratios are measured using mass spectrometry, which separates the different isotopes of an element on the basis of their mass-to-charge ratio.

Tissues affected

Isotopic oxygen is incorporated into the body primarily through ingestion at which point it is used in the formation of, for archaeological purposes, bones and teeth. The oxygen is incorporated into the hydroxylcarbonic apatite of bone and tooth enamel.

Bone is continually remodelled throughout the lifetime of an individual. Although the rate of turnover of isotopic oxygen in hydroxyapatite is not fully known, it is assumed to be similar to that of collagen; approximately 10 years. Consequently, should an individual remain in a region for 10 years or longer, the isotopic oxygen ratios in the bone hydroxyapatite would reflect the oxygen ratios present in that region.

Teeth are not subject to continual remodelling and so their isotopic oxygen ratios remain constant from the time of formation. The isotopic oxygen ratios, then, of teeth represent the ratios of the region in which the individual was born and raised. Where deciduous teeth are present, it is also possible to determine the age at which a child was weaned. Breast milk production draws upon the body water of the mother, which has higher levels of ¹⁸O due to the preferential loss of ¹⁶O through sweat, urine, and expired water vapour.

While teeth are more resistant to chemical and physical changes over time, both are subject to post-depositional diagenesis. As such, isotopic analysis makes use of the more resistant phosphate groups, rather than the less abundant hydroxyl group or the more likely diagenetic carbonate groups present.

Applications

Isotope analysis has widespread applicability in the natural sciences. These include numerous applications in the biological, earth and environmental sciences.

Archaeology

Reconstructing ancient diets

Archaeological materials, such as bone, organic residues, hair, or sea shells, can serve as substrates for isotopic analysis. Carbon, nitrogen and zinc isotope ratios are used to investigate the diets of past people; these isotopic systems can be used with others, such as strontium or oxygen, to answer questions about population movements and cultural interactions, such as trade.

Carbon isotopes are analysed in archaeology to determine the source of carbon at the base of the foodchain. Examining the ¹²C/¹³C isotope ratio, it is possible to determine whether animals and humans ate predominantly C3 or C4 plants. Potential C3 food sources include wheat, rice, tubers, fruits, nuts and many vegetables, while C4 food sources include millet and sugar cane. Carbon isotope ratios can also be used to distinguish between marine, freshwater, and terrestrial food sources.

Carbon isotope ratios can be measured in bone collagen or bone mineral (hydroxylapatite), and each of these fractions of bone can be analysed to shed light on different components of diet. The carbon in bone collagen is predominantly sourced from dietary protein, while the carbon found in bone mineral is sourced from all consumed dietary carbon, included carbohydrates, lipids, and protein.

To obtain an accurate picture of palaeodiets, it is important to understand processes of diagenesis that may affect the original isotopic signal. It is also important for the researcher to know the variations of isotopes within individuals, between individuals, and over time.

Sourcing archaeological materials

Isotope analysis has been particularly useful in archaeology as a means of characterization. Characterization of artifacts involves determining the isotopic composition of possible source materials such as metal ore bodies and comparing these data to the isotopic composition of analyzed artifacts. A wide range of archaeological materials such as metals, glass and lead-based pigments have been sourced using isotopic characterization. Particularly in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, lead isotope analysis has been a useful tool for determining the sources of metals and an important indicator of trade patterns. Interpretation of lead isotope data is, however, often contentious and faces numerous instrumental and methodological challenges. Problems such as the mixing and re-using of metals from different sources, limited reliable data and contamination of samples can be difficult problems in interpretation.

Ecology

All biologically active elements exist in a number of different isotopic forms, of which two or more are stable. For example, most carbon is present as ¹²C, with approximately 1% being ¹³C. The ratio of the two isotopes may be altered by biological and geophysical processes, and these differences can be utilized in a number of ways by ecologists. The main elements used in isotope ecology are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sulfur, but also include silicon, iron, and strontium.

Stable isotope analysis in aquatic ecosystems

Stable isotopes have become a popular method for understanding aquatic ecosystems because they can help scientists in understanding source links and process information in marine food webs. These analyses can also be used to a certain degree in terrestrial systems. Certain isotopes can signify distinct primary producers forming the bases of food webs and trophic level positioning. The stable isotope compositions are expressed in terms of delta values (δ) in permil (‰), i.e. parts per thousand differences from a standard. They express the proportion of an isotope that is in a sample. The values are expressed as:

δX = [(R_sample / R_standard) – 1] × 10³

where X represents the isotope of interest (e.g., ¹³C) and R represents the ratio of the isotope of interest and its natural form (e.g., ¹³C/¹²C). Higher (or less negative) delta values indicate increases in a sample's isotope of interest, relative to the standard, and lower (or more negative) values indicate decreases. The standard reference materials for carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur are Pee Dee Belamnite limestone, nitrogen gas in the atmosphere, and Cañon Diablo meteorite respectively. Analysis is usually done using a mass spectrometer, detecting small differences between gaseous elements. Analysis of a sample can cost anywhere from $30 to $100. Stable isotopes assist scientists in analyzing animal diets and food webs by examining the animal tissues that bear a fixed isotopic enrichment or depletion vs. the diet. Muscle or protein fractions have become the most common animal tissue used to examine the isotopes because they represent the assimilated nutrients in their diet. The main advantage to using stable isotope analysis as opposed to stomach content observations is that no matter what the status is of the animal's stomach (empty or not), the isotope tracers in the tissues will give us an understanding of its trophic position and food source. The three major isotopes used in aquatic ecosystem food web analysis are ¹³C, ¹⁵N and ³⁴S. While all three indicate information on trophic dynamics, it is common to perform analysis on at least two of the previously mentioned 3 isotopes for better understanding of marine trophic interactions and for stronger results.

Hydrogen-2

The ratio of ²H, also known as deuterium, to ¹H has been studied in both plant and animal tissue. Hydrogen isotopes in plant tissue are correlated with local water values but vary based on fractionation during photosynthesis, transpiration, and other processes in the formation of cellulose. A study on the isotope ratios of tissues from plants growing within a small area in Texas found tissues from CAM plants were enriched in deuterium relative to C4 plants. Hydrogen isotope ratios in animal tissue reflect diet, including drinking water, and have been used to study bird migration and aquatic food webs.

Carbon-13

Carbon isotopes aid us in determining the primary production source responsible for the energy flow in an ecosystem. The transfer of ¹³C through trophic levels remains relatively the same, except for a small increase (an enrichment < 1 ‰). Large differences of δ¹³C between animals indicate that they have different food sources or that their food webs are based on different primary producers (i.e. different species of phytoplankton, marsh grasses.) Because δ¹³C indicates the original source of primary producers, the isotopes can also help us determine shifts in diets, both short term, long term or permanent. These shifts may even correlate to seasonal changes, reflecting phytoplankton abundance. Scientists have found that there can be wide ranges of δ¹³C values in phytoplankton populations over a geographic region. While it is not quite certain as to why this may be, there are several hypotheses for this occurrence. These include isotopes within dissolved inorganic carbon pools (DIC) may vary with temperature and location and that growth rates of phytoplankton may affect their uptake of the isotopes. δ¹³C has been used in determining migration of juvenile animals from sheltered inshore areas to offshore locations by examining the changes in their diets. A study by Fry (1983) studied the isotopic compositions in juvenile shrimp of south Texas grass flats. Fry found that at the beginning of the study the shrimp had isotopic values of δ¹³C = -11 to -14‰ and 6-8‰ for δ¹⁵N and δ³⁴S. As the shrimp matured and migrated offshore, the isotopic values changed to those resembling offshore organisms (δ¹³C= -15‰ and δ¹⁵N = 11.5‰ and δ³⁴S = 16‰).

Sulfur-34

While there is no enrichment of ³⁴S between trophic levels, the stable isotope can be useful in distinguishing benthic vs. pelagic producers and marsh vs. phytoplankton producers. Similar to ¹³C, it can also help distinguish between different phytoplankton as the key primary producers in food webs. The differences between seawater sulfates and sulfides (c. 21‰ vs -10‰) aid scientists in the discriminations. Sulfur tends to be more plentiful in less aerobic areas, such as benthic systems and marsh plants, than the pelagic and more aerobic systems. Thus, in the benthic systems, there are smaller δ³⁴S values.

Nitrogen-15

Nitrogen isotopes indicate the trophic level position of organisms (reflective of the time the tissue samples were taken). There is a larger enrichment component with δ¹⁵N because its retention is higher than that of ¹⁴N. This can be seen by analyzing the waste of organisms. Cattle urine has shown that there is a depletion of ¹⁵N relative to the diet. As organisms eat each other, the ¹⁵N isotopes are transferred to the predators. Thus, organisms higher in the trophic pyramid have accumulated higher levels of ¹⁵N ( and higher δ¹⁵N values) relative to their prey and others before them in the food web. Numerous studies on marine ecosystems have shown that on average there is a 3.2‰ enrichment of ¹⁵N vs. diet between different trophic level species in ecosystems. In the Baltic sea, Hansson et al. (1997) found that when analyzing a variety of creatures (such as particulate organic matter (phytoplankton), zooplankton, mysids, sprat, smelt and herring,) there was an apparent fractionation of 2.4‰ between consumers and their apparent prey.

In addition to trophic positioning of organisms, δ¹⁵N values have become commonly used in distinguishing between land derived and natural sources of nutrients. As water travels from septic tanks to aquifers, the nitrogen rich water is delivered into coastal areas. Waste-water nitrate has higher concentrations of ¹⁵N than the nitrate that is found in natural soils in near shore zones. For bacteria, it is more convenient for them to uptake ¹⁴N as opposed to ¹⁵N because it is a lighter element and easier to metabolize. Thus, due to bacteria's preference when performing biogeochemical processes such as denitrification and volatilization of ammonia, ¹⁴N is removed from the water at a faster rate than ¹⁵N, resulting in more ¹⁵N entering the aquifer. ¹⁵N is roughly 10-20‰ as opposed to the natural ¹⁵N values of 2-8‰. The inorganic nitrogen that is emitted from septic tanks and other human-derived sewage is usually in the form of ${\displaystyle {\text{NH}}_4^{+}}$. Once the nitrogen enters the estuaries via groundwater, it is thought that because there is more ¹⁵N entering, that there will also be more ¹⁵N in the inorganic nitrogen pool delivered and that it is picked up more by producers taking up N. Even though ¹⁴N is easier to take up, because there is much more ¹⁵N, there will still be higher amounts assimilated than normal. These levels of δ¹⁵N can be examined in creatures that live in the area and are non migratory (such as macrophytes, clams and even some fish). This method of identifying high levels of nitrogen input is becoming a more and more popular method in attempting to monitor nutrient input into estuaries and coastal ecosystems. Environmental managers have become more and more concerned about measuring anthropogenic nutrient inputs into estuaries because excess in nutrients can lead to eutrophication and hypoxic events, eliminating organisms from an area entirely.

Oxygen-18

Analysis of the ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O in the shells of the Colorado Delta clam was used to assess the historical extent of the estuary in the Colorado River Delta prior to construction of upstream dams.

Forensic science

A recent development in forensic science is the isotopic analysis of hair strands. Hair has a recognisable growth rate of 9-11mm per month or 15 cm per year. Human hair growth is primarily a function of diet, especially drinking water intake. The stable isotopic ratios of drinking water are a function of location, and the geology that the water percolates through. ⁸⁷Sr, ⁸⁸Sr and oxygen isotope variations are different all over the world. These differences in isotopic ratio are then biologically 'set' in our hair as it grows and it has therefore become possible to identify recent geographic histories by the analysis of hair strands. For example, it could be possible to identify whether a terrorist suspect had recently been to a particular location from hair analysis. This hair analysis is a non-invasive method which is becoming very popular in cases that DNA or other traditional means are bringing no answers.

Isotope analysis can be used by forensic investigators to determine whether two or more samples of explosives are of a common origin. Most high explosives contain carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms and thus comparing their relative abundances of isotopes can reveal the existence of a common origin. Researchers have also shown that analysis of the ¹²C/¹³C ratios can locate the country of origin for a given explosive.

Stable isotopic analysis has also been used in the identification of drug trafficking routes. Isotopic abundances are different in morphine grown from poppies in south-east Asia versus poppies grown in south-west Asia. The same is applied to cocaine that is derived from Bolivia and that from Colombia.

Traceability

See also: Traceability

Stable isotopic analysis has also been used for tracing the geographical origin of food, timber, and in tracing the sources and fates of nitrates in the environment.

Geology

Main article: Isotope geochemistry

Hydrology

In isotope hydrology, stable isotopes of water (²H and ¹⁸O) are used to estimate the source, age, and flow paths of water flowing through ecosystems. The main effects that change the stable isotope composition of water are evaporation and condensation. Variability in water isotopes is used to study sources of water to streams and rivers, evaporation rates, groundwater recharge, and other hydrological processes.

Paleoclimatology

The ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O in ice and deep sea cores is temperature dependent, and can be used as a proxy measure for reconstructing climate change. During colder periods of the Earth's history (glacials) such as during the ice ages, ¹⁶O is preferentially evaporated from the colder oceans, leaving the slightly heavier and more sluggish ¹⁸O behind. Organisms such as foraminifera which combine oxygen dissolved in the surrounding water with carbon and calcium to build their shells therefore incorporate the temperature-dependent ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O ratio. When these organisms die, they settle out on the sea bed, preserving a long and invaluable record of global climate change through much of the Quaternary. Similarly, ice cores on land are enriched in the heavier ¹⁸O relative to ¹⁶O during warmer climatic phases (interglacials) as more energy is available for the evaporation of the heavier ¹⁸O isotope. The oxygen isotope record preserved in the ice cores is therefore a "mirror" of the record contained in ocean sediments.

Oxygen isotopes preserve a record of the effects of the Milankovitch cycles on climate change during the Quaternary, revealing an approximately 100,000-year cyclicity in the Earth's climate.

Cyberpunk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk 

Artificial landscapes and “city lights at night” were some of the first metaphors used by the genre for cyberspace (in Neuromancer, by William Gibson). From top to bottom: Shibuya, Tokyo (Japan), Times Square, New York (United States), Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico) and São Paulo (Brazil).

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.

Comics exploring cyberpunk themes began appearing as early as Judge Dredd, first published in 1977. Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer helped solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. Other influential cyberpunk writers included Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation (also directed by Otomo) later popularizing the subgenre.

Early films in the genre include Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, one of several of Philip K. Dick's works that have been adapted into films (in this case, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). The "first cyberpunk television series" was the TV series Max Headroom from 1987, playing in a futuristic dystopia ruled by an oligarchy of television networks, and where computer hacking played a central role in many story lines. The films Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and New Rose Hotel (1998),both based upon short stories by William Gibson, flopped commercially and critically, while The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) and Judge Dredd (1995) were some of the most successful cyberpunk films.

Newer cyberpunk media includes Blade Runner 2049 (2017), a sequel to the original 1982 film; Dredd (2012), which was not a sequel to the original movie; Upgrade (2018); Alita: Battle Angel (2019), based on the 1990s Japanese manga Battle Angel Alita; the 2018 Netflix TV series Altered Carbon, based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name; the 2020 remake of 1997 role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII; and the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), based on R. Talsorian Games's 1988 tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk.

Background

Lawrence Person has attempted to define the content and ethos of the cyberpunk literary movement stating:

Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body.

— Lawrence Person

Cyberpunk plots often center on conflict among artificial intelligences, hackers, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than in the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to feature extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its original inventors ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. There are sources who view that cyberpunk has shifted from a literary movement to a mode of science fiction due to the limited number of writers and its transition to a more generalized cultural formation.

History and origins

The origins of cyberpunk are rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, where New Worlds, under the editorship of Michael Moorcock, began inviting and encouraging stories that examined new writing styles, techniques, and archetypes. Reacting to conventional storytelling, New Wave authors attempted to present a world where society coped with a constant upheaval of new technology and culture, generally with dystopian outcomes. Writers like Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer, Samuel R. Delany, and Harlan Ellison often examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution with an avant-garde style influenced by the Beat Generation (especially William S. Burroughs' science fiction writing), Dadaism, and their own ideas. Ballard attacked the idea that stories should follow the "archetypes" popular since the time of Ancient Greece, and the assumption that these would somehow be the same ones that would call to modern readers, as Joseph Campbell argued in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Instead, Ballard wanted to write a new myth for the modern reader, a style with "more psycho-literary ideas, more meta-biological and meta-chemical concepts, private time systems, synthetic psychologies and space-times, more of the sombre half-worlds one glimpses in the paintings of schizophrenics."

This had a profound influence on a new generation of writers, some of whom would come to call their movement "cyberpunk". One, Bruce Sterling, later said:

In the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation—cyberpunks and humanists and so forth—[Ballard] was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see the peak of achievement that he had reached.

Ballard, Zelazny, and the rest of New Wave was seen by the subsequent generation as delivering more "realism" to science fiction, and they attempted to build on this.

Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova is also considered one of the major forerunners of the cyberpunk movement. It prefigures, for instance, cyberpunk's staple trope of human interfacing with computers via implants. Writer William Gibson claimed to be greatly influenced by Delany, and his novel Neuromancer includes allusions to Nova.

Cyberpunk-specific themes such as global technocracy and the problem of artificial intelligence are already present in such classic works of fantasy as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune.

Similarly influential, and generally cited as proto-cyberpunk, is the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, first published in 1968. Presenting precisely the general feeling of dystopian post-economic-apocalyptic future as Gibson and Sterling later deliver, it examines ethical and moral problems with cybernetic, artificial intelligence in a way more "realist" than the Isaac Asimov Robot series that laid its philosophical foundation. Dick's protege and friend K. W. Jeter wrote a novel called Dr. Adder in 1972 that, Dick lamented, might have been more influential in the field had it been able to find a publisher at that time. It was not published until 1984, after which Jeter made it the first book in a trilogy, followed by The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms (1987). Jeter wrote other standalone cyberpunk novels before going on to write three authorized sequels to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, named Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996), and Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was made into the seminal movie Blade Runner, released in 1982. This was one year after William Gibson's story, "Johnny Mnemonic" helped move proto-cyberpunk concepts into the mainstream. That story, which also became a film years later in 1995, involves another dystopian future, where human couriers deliver computer data, stored cybernetically in their own minds.

The term cyberpunk first appeared as the title of a short story written by Bruce Bethke, written in 1980 and published in Amazing Stories in 1983. It was picked up by Gardner Dozois, editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and popularized in his editorials.

Bethke says he made two lists of words, one for technology, one for troublemakers, and experimented with combining them variously into compound words, consciously attempting to coin a term that encompassed both punk attitudes and high technology. He described the idea thus:

The kids who trashed my computer; their kids were going to be Holy Terrors, combining the ethical vacuity of teenagers with a technical fluency we adults could only guess at. Further, the parents and other adult authority figures of the early 21st Century were going to be terribly ill-equipped to deal with the first generation of teenagers who grew up truly "speaking computer."

Afterward, Dozois began using this term in his own writing, most notably in a Washington Post article where he said "About the closest thing here to a self-willed esthetic 'school' would be the purveyors of bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been referred to as 'cyberpunks'—Sterling, Gibson, Shiner, Cadigan, Bear."

About that time in 1984, William Gibson's novel Neuromancer was published, delivering a glimpse of a future encompassed by what became an archetype of cyberpunk "virtual reality", with the human mind being fed light-based worldscapes through a computer interface. Some, perhaps ironically including Bethke himself, argued at the time that the writers whose style Gibson's books epitomized should be called "Neuromantics", a pun on the name of the novel plus "New Romantics", a term used for a New Wave pop music movement that had just occurred in Britain, but this term did not catch on. Bethke later paraphrased Michael Swanwick's argument for the term: "the movement writers should properly be termed neuromantics, since so much of what they were doing was clearly imitating Neuromancer".

Sterling was another writer who played a central role, often consciously, in the cyberpunk genre, variously seen as either keeping it on track, or distorting its natural path into a stagnant formula. In 1986 he edited a volume of cyberpunk stories called Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, an attempt to establish what cyberpunk was, from Sterling's perspective.

In the subsequent decade, the motifs of Gibson's Neuromancer became formulaic, climaxing in the satirical extremes of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in 1992.

Bookending the cyberpunk era, Bethke himself published a novel in 1995 called Headcrash, like Snow Crash a satirical attack on the genre's excesses. Fittingly, it won an honor named after cyberpunk's spiritual founder, the Philip K. Dick Award.

It satirized the genre in this way:

...full of young guys with no social lives, no sex lives and no hope of ever moving out of their mothers' basements ... They're total wankers and losers who indulge in Messianic fantasies about someday getting even with the world through almost-magical computer skills, but whose actual use of the Net amounts to dialing up the scatophilia forum and downloading a few disgusting pictures. You know, cyberpunks.

The impact of cyberpunk, though, has been long-lasting. Elements of both the setting and storytelling have become normal in science fiction in general, and a slew of sub-genres now have -punk tacked onto their names, most obviously steampunk, but also a host of other cyberpunk derivatives.

Style and ethos

Primary figures in the cyberpunk movement include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Bruce Bethke, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley. Philip K. Dick (author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, from which the film Blade Runner was adapted) is also seen by some as prefiguring the movement.

Blade Runner can be seen as a quintessential example of the cyberpunk style and theme. Video games, board games, and tabletop role-playing games, such as Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, often feature storylines that are heavily influenced by cyberpunk writing and movies. Beginning in the early 1990s, some trends in fashion and music were also labeled as cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is also featured prominently in anime and manga (Japanese cyberpunk), with Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop being among the most notable.

Setting

Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan (the latter three images depict the Shibuya Crossing). About Japan's influence in the 1980s on the genre, William Gibson said, "modern Japan simply was cyberpunk."

Cyberpunk writers tend to use elements from crime fiction—particularly hardboiled detective fiction and film noir—and postmodernist prose to describe an often nihilistic underground side of an electronic society. The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Gibson defined cyberpunk's antipathy towards utopian science fiction in his 1981 short story "The Gernsback Continuum," which pokes fun at and, to a certain extent, condemns utopian science fiction.

In some cyberpunk writing, much of the action takes place online, in cyberspace, blurring the line between actual and virtual reality. A typical trope in such work is a direct connection between the human brain and computer systems. Cyberpunk settings are dystopias with corruption, computers and internet connectivity. Giant, multinational corporations have for the most part replaced governments as centers of political, economic, and even military power.

The economic and technological state of Japan is a regular theme in the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s. Of Japan's influence on the genre, William Gibson said, "Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk." Cyberpunk is often set in urbanized, artificial landscapes, and "city lights, receding" was used by Gibson as one of the genre's first metaphors for cyberspace and virtual reality. The cityscapes of Hong Kong has had major influences in the urban backgrounds, ambiance and settings in many cyberpunk works such as Blade Runner and Shadowrun. Ridley Scott envisioned the landscape of cyberpunk Los Angeles in Blade Runner to be "Hong Kong on a very bad day". The streetscapes of the Ghost in the Shell film were based on Hong Kong. Its director Mamoru Oshii felt that Hong Kong's strange and chaotic streets where "old and new exist in confusing relationships", fit the theme of the film well. Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City is particularly notable for its disorganized hyper-urbanization and breakdown in traditional urban planning to be an inspiration to cyberpunk landscapes. Portrayals of East Asia and Asians in Western cyberpunk have been criticized as Orientalist and promoting racist tropes playing on American and European fears of East Asian dominance; this has been referred to as "techno-Orientalism".

Protagonists

One of the cyberpunk genre's prototype characters is Case, from Gibson's Neuromancer. Case is a "console cowboy," a brilliant drug addicted hacker who has betrayed his organized criminal partners. Robbed of his talent through a crippling injury inflicted by the vengeful partners, Case unexpectedly receives a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be healed by expert medical care but only if he participates in another criminal enterprise with a new crew.

Like Case, many cyberpunk protagonists are manipulated or forced into situations where they have little or no control. They often begin their story with little to no power, starting in roles of subordinates or burnouts. The story usually involves them breaking out of these lowly roles early on. They typically have bittersweet or negative endings, rarely make great gains by the end of the story.

Protagonists often fit into the role of outcasts, criminals, misfits and malcontents, expressing the "punk" component of cyberpunk. Due to the morally ambiguous nature of the worlds they inhabit, cyberpunk protagonists are usually antiheroes. They often engage with their society's drug subcultures or some other vice. Though they may morally or ethically oppose some of the more bleak aspects of their worlds, they are often too pragmatic or defeated to change them.

Society and government

Cyberpunk can be intended to disquiet readers and call them to action. It often expresses a sense of rebellion, suggesting that one could describe it as a type of cultural revolution in science fiction. In the words of author and critic David Brin:

...a closer look [at cyberpunk authors] reveals that they nearly always portray future societies in which governments have become wimpy and pathetic ...Popular science fiction tales by Gibson, Williams, Cadigan and others do depict Orwellian accumulations of power in the next century, but nearly always clutched in the secretive hands of a wealthy or corporate elite.

Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet. The earliest descriptions of a global communications network came long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, though not before traditional science-fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke and some social commentators such as James Burke began predicting that such networks would eventually form.

Some observers cite that cyberpunk tends to marginalize sectors of society such as women and Africans. It is claimed that, for instance, cyberpunk depicts fantasies that ultimately empower masculinity using fragmentary and decentered aesthetic that culminate in a masculine genre populated by male outlaws. Critics also note the absence of any reference to Africa or an African-American character in the quintessential cyberpunk film Blade Runner while other films reinforce stereotypes.

Media

Literature

See also: List of cyberpunk works § Print media, and Cyborgs in fiction

Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1983 for his short story "Cyberpunk," which was published in an issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories. The term was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan and others. Of these, Sterling became the movement's chief ideologue, thanks to his fanzine Cheap Truth. John Shirley wrote articles on Sterling and Rucker's significance. John Brunner's 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider is considered by many to be the first cyberpunk novel with many of the tropes commonly associated with the genre, some five years before the term was popularized by Dozois.

William Gibson with his novel Neuromancer (1984) is arguably the most famous writer connected with the term cyberpunk. He emphasized style, a fascination with surfaces, and atmosphere over traditional science-fiction tropes. Regarded as ground-breaking and sometimes as "the archetypal cyberpunk work," Neuromancer was awarded the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards. Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) followed after Gibson's popular debut novel. According to the Jargon File, "Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naïve and tremendously stimulating."

Early on, cyberpunk was hailed as a radical departure from science-fiction standards and a new manifestation of vitality. Shortly thereafter, however, some critics arose to challenge its status as a revolutionary movement. These critics said that the science fiction New Wave of the 1960s was much more innovative as far as narrative techniques and styles were concerned. Furthermore, while Neuromancer's narrator may have had an unusual "voice" for science fiction, much older examples can be found: Gibson's narrative voice, for example, resembles that of an updated Raymond Chandler, as in his novel The Big Sleep (1939). Others noted that almost all traits claimed to be uniquely cyberpunk could in fact be found in older writers' works—often citing J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Stanisław Lem, Samuel R. Delany, and even William S. Burroughs. For example, Philip K. Dick's works contain recurring themes of social decay, artificial intelligence, paranoia, and blurred lines between objective and subjective realities. The influential cyberpunk movie Blade Runner (1982) is based on his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Humans linked to machines are found in Pohl and Kornbluth's Wolfbane (1959) and Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1968).

In 1994, scholar Brian Stonehill suggested that Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow "not only curses but precurses what we now glibly dub cyberspace." Other important predecessors include Alfred Bester's two most celebrated novels, The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, as well as Vernor Vinge's novella True Names.

Reception and impact

Science-fiction writer David Brin describes cyberpunk as "the finest free promotion campaign ever waged on behalf of science fiction." It may not have attracted the "real punks," but it did ensnare many new readers, and it provided the sort of movement that postmodern literary critics found alluring. Cyberpunk made science fiction more attractive to academics, argues Brin; in addition, it made science fiction more profitable to Hollywood and to the visual arts generally. Although the "self-important rhetoric and whines of persecution" on the part of cyberpunk fans were irritating at worst and humorous at best, Brin declares that the "rebels did shake things up. We owe them a debt."

Fredric Jameson considers cyberpunk the "supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself".

Cyberpunk further inspired many professional writers who were not among the "original" cyberpunks to incorporate cyberpunk ideas into their own works,^{[citation needed]} such as George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails. Wired magazine, created by Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, mixes new technology, art, literature, and current topics in order to interest today's cyberpunk fans, which Paula Yoo claims "proves that hardcore hackers, multimedia junkies, cyberpunks and cellular freaks are poised to take over the world."

Film and television

See also: List of cyberpunk works § Films, List of cyberpunk works § Television and Web Series, and Japanese cyberpunk

The film Blade Runner (1982)—adapted from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—is set in 2019 in a dystopian future in which manufactured beings called replicants are slaves used on space colonies and are legal prey on Earth to various bounty hunters who "retire" (kill) them. Although Blade Runner was largely unsuccessful in its first theatrical release, it found a viewership in the home video market and became a cult film. Since the movie omits the religious and mythical elements of Dick's original novel (e.g. empathy boxes and Wilbur Mercer), it falls more strictly within the cyberpunk genre than the novel does. William Gibson would later reveal that upon first viewing the film, he was surprised at how the look of this film matched his vision for Neuromancer, a book he was then working on. The film's tone has since been the staple of many cyberpunk movies, such as The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003), which uses a wide variety of cyberpunk elements.

The number of films in the genre or at least using a few genre elements has grown steadily since Blade Runner. Several of Philip K. Dick's works have been adapted to the silver screen. The films Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel, both based upon short stories by William Gibson, flopped commercially and critically. These box offices misses significantly slowed the development of cyberpunk as a literary or cultural form although a sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner was released in October 2017 with Harrison Ford reprising his role from the original film. A rigorous implementation of all core cyberpunk hallmarks is the TV series Max Headroom from 1987, playing in a futuristic dystopia ruled by an oligarchy of television networks, and where computer hacking played a central role in many story lines. Max Headroom has been called "the first cyberpunk television series", with "deep roots in the Western philosophical tradition".

In addition, "tech-noir" film as a hybrid genre, means a work of combining neo-noir and science fiction or cyberpunk. It includes many cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner, Burst City, Robocop, 12 Monkeys, The Lawnmower Man, Hackers, Hardware, and Strange Days, Total Recall.

Anime and manga

Main article: Japanese cyberpunk

See also: List of cyberpunk works § Animation, and List of cyberpunk works § Graphic novels and comics

The Japanese cyberpunk subgenre began in 1982 with the debut of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga series Akira, with its 1988 anime film adaptation, which Otomo directed, later popularizing the subgenre. Akira inspired a wave of Japanese cyberpunk works, including manga and anime series such as Ghost in the Shell, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, and Serial Experiments Lain. Other early Japanese cyberpunk works include the 1982 film Burst City, the 1985 original video animation Megazone 23, and the 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man.

In contrast to Western cyberpunk which has roots in New Wave science fiction literature, Japanese cyberpunk has roots in underground music culture, specifically the Japanese punk subculture that arose from the Japanese punk music scene in the 1970s. The filmmaker Sogo Ishii introduced this subculture to Japanese cinema with the punk film Panic High School (1978) and the punk biker film Crazy Thunder Road (1980), both portraying the rebellion and anarchy associated with punk, and the latter featuring a punk biker gang aesthetic. Ishii's punk films paved the way for Otomo's seminal cyberpunk work Akira.

Cyberpunk themes are widely visible in anime and manga. In Japan, where cosplay is popular and not only teenagers display such fashion styles, cyberpunk has been accepted and its influence is widespread. William Gibson's Neuromancer, whose influence dominated the early cyberpunk movement, was also set in Chiba, one of Japan's largest industrial areas, although at the time of writing the novel Gibson did not know the location of Chiba and had no idea how perfectly it fit his vision in some ways. The exposure to cyberpunk ideas and fiction in the 1980s has allowed it to seep into the Japanese culture.

Cyberpunk anime and manga draw upon a futuristic vision which has elements in common with Western science fiction and therefore have received wide international acceptance outside Japan. "The conceptualization involved in cyberpunk is more of forging ahead, looking at the new global culture. It is a culture that does not exist right now, so the Japanese concept of a cyberpunk future, seems just as valid as a Western one, especially as Western cyberpunk often incorporates many Japanese elements." William Gibson is now a frequent visitor to Japan, and he came to see that many of his visions of Japan have become a reality:

Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns—all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information—said, "You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town." And it was. It so evidently was.

Cyberpunk themes have appeared in many anime and manga, including the ground-breaking Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Ergo Proxy, Megazone 23, Goku Midnight Eye, Cyber City Oedo 808, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Bubblegum Crisis, A.D. Police: Dead End City, Angel Cop, Blame!, Armitage III, Texhnolyze, Psycho-Pass and No Guns Life.

Influence

Akira (1982 manga) and its 1988 anime film adaptation have influenced numerous works in animation, comics, film, music, television and video games. Akira has been cited as a major influence on Hollywood films such as The Matrix, Chronicle, Looper, Midnight Special, and Inception, as well as cyberpunk-influenced video games such as Hideo Kojima's Snatcher and Metal Gear Solid, Valve's Half-Life series and Dontnod Entertainment's Remember Me. Akira has also influenced the work of musicians such as Kanye West, who paid homage to Akira in the "Stronger" music video, and Lupe Fiasco, whose album Tetsuo & Youth is named after Tetsuo Shima. The popular bike from the film, Kaneda's Motorbike, appears in Steven Spielberg's film Ready Player One, and CD Projekt's video game Cyberpunk 2077.

An interpretation of digital rain, similar to the images used in Ghost in the Shell and later in The Matrix.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) influenced a number of prominent filmmakers, most notably the Wachowskis in The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. The Matrix series took several concepts from the film, including the Matrix digital rain, which was inspired by the opening credits of Ghost in the Shell and a sushi magazine the wife of the senior designer of the animation, Simon Witheley, used to have it the kitchen at the time, and the way characters access the Matrix through holes in the back of their necks. Other parallels have been drawn to James Cameron's Avatar, Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates. James Cameron cited Ghost in the Shell as a source of inspiration, citing it as an influence on Avatar.

The original video animation Megazone 23 (1985) has a number of similarities to The Matrix. Battle Angel Alita (1990) has had a notable influence on filmmaker James Cameron, who was planning to adapt it into a film since 2000. It was an influence on his TV series Dark Angel, and he is the producer of the 2019 film adaptation Alita: Battle Angel.

Comics

In 1975, artist Moebius collaborated with writer Dan O'Bannon on a story called The Long Tomorrow, published in the French magazine Métal Hurlant. One of the first works featuring elements now seen as exemplifying cyberpunk, it combined influences from film noir and hardboiled crime fiction with a distant sci-fi environment. Author William Gibson stated that Moebius' artwork for the series, along with other visuals from Métal Hurlant, strongly influenced his 1984 novel Neuromancer. The series had a far-reaching impact in the cyberpunk genre, being cited as an influence on Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Blade Runner. Moebius later expanded upon The Long Tomorrow's aesthetic with The Incal, a graphic novel collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky published from 1980 to 1988. The story centers around the exploits of a detective named John Difool in various science fiction settings, and while not confined to the tropes of cyberpunk, it features many elements of the genre.

Concurrently with many other foundational cyberpunk works, DC Comics published Frank Miller's six-issue miniseries Rōnin from 1983 to 1984. The series, incorporating aspects of Samurai culture, martial arts films and manga, is set in a dystopian near-future New York. It explores the link between an ancient Japanese warrior and the apocalyptic, crumbling cityscape he finds himself in. The comic also bears several similarities to Akira, with highly powerful telepaths playing central roles, as well as sharing many key visuals.

Rōnin would go on to influence many later works, including Samurai Jack and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as video games such as Cyberpunk 2077. Two years later, Miller himself would incorporate several toned-down elements of Rōnin into his acclaimed 1986 miniseries The Dark Knight Returns, in which a retired Bruce Wayne once again takes up the mantle of Batman in a Gotham that is increasingly becoming more dystopian.

Paul Pope's Batman: Year 100, published in 2006, also exhibits several traits typical of cyberpunk fiction, such as a rebel protagonist opposing a future authoritarian state, and a distinct retrofuturist aesthetic that makes callbacks to both The Dark Knight Returns and Batman's original appearances in the 1940s.

Games

See also: List of cyberpunk works § Video games, and List of cyberpunk works § Role-playing games

There are many cyberpunk video games. Popular series include Final Fantasy VII and its spin-offs and remake, the Megami Tensei series, Kojima's Snatcher and Metal Gear series, Deus Ex series, Syndicate series, and System Shock and its sequel. Other games, like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and the Matrix series, are based upon genre movies, or role-playing games (for instance the various Shadowrun games).

Several RPGs called Cyberpunk exist: Cyberpunk, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk v3.0 and Cyberpunk Red written by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games, and GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games as a module of the GURPS family of RPGs. Cyberpunk 2020 was designed with the settings of William Gibson's writings in mind, and to some extent with his approval, unlike the approach taken by FASA in producing the transgenre Shadowrun game and its various sequels, which mixes cyberpunk with fantasy elements such as magic and fantasy races such as orcs and elves. Both are set in the near future, in a world where cybernetics are prominent. In addition, Iron Crown Enterprises released an RPG named Cyberspace, which was out of print for several years until recently being re-released in online PDF form. CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077, a cyberpunk open world first-person shooter/role-playing video game (RPG) based on the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020, on December 10, 2020. In 1990, in a convergence of cyberpunk art and reality, the United States Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games's headquarters and confiscated all their computers. Officials denied that the target had been the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook, but Jackson would later write that he and his colleagues "were never able to secure the return of the complete manuscript; [...] The Secret Service at first flatly refused to return anything – then agreed to let us copy files, but when we got to their office, restricted us to one set of out-of-date files – then agreed to make copies for us, but said "tomorrow" every day from March 4 to March 26. On March 26 we received a set of disks which purported to be our files, but the material was late, incomplete and well-nigh useless." Steve Jackson Games won a lawsuit against the Secret Service, aided by the new Electronic Frontier Foundation. This event has achieved a sort of notoriety, which has extended to the book itself as well. All published editions of GURPS Cyberpunk have a tagline on the front cover, which reads "The book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service!" Inside, the book provides a summary of the raid and its aftermath.

Cyberpunk has also inspired several tabletop, miniature and board games such as Necromunda by Games Workshop. Netrunner is a collectible card game introduced in 1996, based on the Cyberpunk 2020 role-playing game. Tokyo NOVA, debuting in 1993, is a cyberpunk role-playing game that uses playing cards instead of dice.

Cyberpunk 2077 set a new record for the largest number of simultaneous players in a single player game, with a record 1,003,262 playing just after the December 10th launch, according to Steam Database. That tops the previous Steam record of 472,962 players set by Fallout 4 back in 2015.

Music

See also: List of cyberpunk works § Music

"Much of the industrial/dance heavy 'Cyberpunk'—recorded in Billy Idol's Macintosh-run studio—revolves around Idol's theme of the common man rising up to fight against a faceless, soulless, corporate world."

—Julie Romandetta

Invariably the origin of cyberpunk music lies in the synthesizer-heavy scores of cyberpunk films such as Escape from New York (1981) and Blade Runner (1982). Some musicians and acts have been classified as cyberpunk due to their aesthetic style and musical content. Often dealing with dystopian visions of the future or biomechanical themes, some fit more squarely in the category than others. Bands whose music has been classified as cyberpunk include Psydoll, Front Line Assembly, Clock DVA, Angelspit and Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

Some musicians not normally associated with cyberpunk have at times been inspired to create concept albums exploring such themes. Albums such as the British musician and songwriter Gary Numan's Replicas, The Pleasure Principle and Telekon were heavily inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick. Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine and Computer World albums both explored the theme of humanity becoming dependent on technology. Nine Inch Nails' concept album Year Zero also fits into this category. Fear Factory concept albums are heavily based upon future dystopia, cybernetics, clash between man and machines, virtual worlds. Billy Idol's Cyberpunk drew heavily from cyberpunk literature and the cyberdelic counter culture in its creation. 1. Outside, a cyberpunk narrative fueled concept album by David Bowie, was warmly met by critics upon its release in 1995. Many musicians have also taken inspiration from specific cyberpunk works or authors, including Sonic Youth, whose albums Sister and Daydream Nation take influence from the works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson respectively. Madonna's 2001 Drowned World Tour opened with a cyberpunk section, where costumes, asethetics and stage props were used to accentuate the dystopian nature of the theatrical concert. Lady Gaga used a cyberpunk-persona and visual style for her sixth studio album Chromatica (2020).

Vaporwave and synthwave are also influenced by cyberpunk. The former has been inspired by one of the messages of cyberpunk and is interpreted as a dystopian critique of capitalism in the vein of cyberpunk and the latter is more surface-level, inspired only by the aesthetic of cyberpunk as a nostalgic retrofuturistic revival of aspects of cyberpunk's origins.

Social impact

Art and architecture

Berlin's Sony Center, opened in 2000, has been described as having a cyberpunk aesthetic

Writers David Suzuki and Holly Dressel describe the cafes, brand-name stores and video arcades of the Sony Center in the Potsdamer Platz public square of Berlin, Germany, as "a vision of a cyberpunk, corporate urban future".

Society and counterculture

Several subcultures have been inspired by cyberpunk fiction. These include the cyberdelic counter culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cyberdelic, whose adherents referred to themselves as "cyberpunks", attempted to blend the psychedelic art and drug movement with the technology of cyberculture. Early adherents included Timothy Leary, Mark Frauenfelder and R. U. Sirius. The movement largely faded following the dot-com bubble implosion of 2000.

Cybergoth is a fashion and dance subculture which draws its inspiration from cyberpunk fiction, as well as rave and Gothic subcultures. In addition, a distinct cyberpunk fashion of its own has emerged in recent years which rejects the raver and goth influences of cybergoth, and draws inspiration from urban street fashion, "post apocalypse", functional clothing, high tech sports wear, tactical uniform and multifunction. This fashion goes by names like "tech wear", "goth ninja" or "tech ninja".

The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong (demolished in 1994) is often referenced as the model cyberpunk/dystopian slum as, given its poor living conditions at the time coupled with the city's political, physical, and economic isolation has caused many in academia to be fascinated by the ingenuity of its spawning.

Related genres

See also: Cyberpunk derivatives

As a wider variety of writers began to work with cyberpunk concepts, new subgenres of science fiction emerged, some of which could be considered as playing off the cyberpunk label, others which could be considered as legitimate explorations into newer territory. These focused on technology and its social effects in different ways. One prominent subgenre is "steampunk," which is set in an alternate history Victorian era that combines anachronistic technology with cyberpunk's bleak film noir world view. The term was originally coined around 1987 as a joke to describe some of the novels of Tim Powers, James P. Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter, but by the time Gibson and Sterling entered the subgenre with their collaborative novel The Difference Engine the term was being used earnestly as well.

Another subgenre is "biopunk" (cyberpunk themes dominated by biotechnology) from the early 1990s, a derivative style building on biotechnology rather than informational technology. In these stories, people are changed in some way not by mechanical means, but by genetic manipulation.

Cyberpunk works have been described as well situated within postmodern literature.

Registered trademark status

See also: Trademark distinctiveness § Generic term

In the United States, the term "Cyberpunk" is a registered trademark by R. Talsorian Games Inc. for its tabletop role-playing game.

Within the European Union, the "Cyberpunk" trademark is owned by two parties: CD Projekt SA for "games and online gaming services" (particularly for the video game adaptation of the former) and by Sony Music for use outside games.