Messenger Skateboards and Messenger Bikes in Postcyberpunk

This chapter focuses on several important postcyberpunk works from the 1990s by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. All these works celebrate transportation technologies such as skateboards and bicycles, technologies that challenge the car and its dominance over the road. Furthermore, an interest in transport machines helps these texts demonstrate some of the key features that scholars have identified as setting postcyberpunk apart from the classic cyberpunk of the 1980s, as well as some of the features they see as building continuity between the two.