Bethke, Bruce Raymond 1955–

PERSONAL: Born 1955, in Milwaukee, WI.

ADDRESSES: Home—P.O. Box 28094, Oakdale, MN 55128. Agent—Ashley Grayson Literary Agency, 1342 18th St., San Pedro, CA 90732. E-mail—brbethke@ddb.com.

CAREER: Software developer in Minnesota; worked at miscellaneous other jobs, including rock musician, teacher, and sausage maker.

AWARDS, HONORS: Philip K. Dick Award, best American novel, 1995, for Headcrash.

WRITINGS:

Cyberpunk (novel), 1989.

Maverick (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Headcrash (novel), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1995.

(With Vox Day) Rebel Moon (novel), Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1996.

Wild, Wild West (novel), Warner Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Author of an unpublished novel, Headcrash 2.0, 1997; also author of more than 200 computer software instruction manuals. Work represented in anthologies, including Swashbuckling Editor Stories, Wildside Press; and Lamps on the Brow, Cahill Publications. Contributor of novellas and short stories to magazines, including Amazing, Aboriginal, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery, Easyriders, and Amazing Stories.

SIDELIGHTS: Science-fiction writer Bruce Raymond Bethke attracted significant notice with the publication of his first short story, "Cyberpunk," in 1983. The story circulated in manuscript before it was published in Amazing Stories in 1983 and is credited as the work that led editor Gardner Dozois to use the term "cyberpunk" to designate a new science-fiction sub-genre. Cyberpunk fiction had its roots as far back as the 1940s and 1950s, in the work of Samuel B. Delany, Bruce Sterling, and others, but became chiefly associated with the fiction of William Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is considered the definitive cyberpunk novel.

Bethke did not invent the sub-genre, but he did coin its name, which is an amalgam from the words "cybernetics," the science of replacing human body parts with computerized ones, and "punk," which refers to the aggressive and defiant music and sensibility of the 1980s counterculture. Bethke has explained that his invention of the term was prompted mostly by practicalities. "I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology," he commented in a contribution to the Users.zetnet Web site. "[But] my reasons … were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember." "Cyberpunk" was considered an apt term to describe fiction that explored themes of social and personal alienation in a dehumanized, high-tech future world.

Bethke brings significant technological experience to his fiction. He describes himself as "an ex-surfer, ex-rock musician, ex-teacher, and ex-sausage maker" who worked in software development for a large multinational company. He has written more than 200 instruction manuals, articles, and books about computer software. His stories have been published in major science fiction magazines.

In one of Bethke's first novels, Maverick, basic cyberpunk themes are again prominent. In the novel, robots have built cities on uninhabited planets, looking for human beings to serve. Frustrated without any human masters, the machines accept a wolf-like race, the Kin, as human equivalents. A more complex type of robot, a "learning machine," has already imprinted on the Kin and caused them to accept it as a sort of Messiah symbol before abandoning them; many of the Kin are obsessed now by the possibility of the learning machine's "Return," an event that they believe will be religiously redemptive. The novel's human characters, who include the scientist who developed the learning machine and her family, are threatened by the slave-taking Dr. Aranimas; and the book's title character, a Kin no longer, becomes involved with the Kin who believe in a Return and those who do not.

Edith Tyson, in Voice of Youth Advocates, found that much of the novel's effect is achieved through Bethke's shifts in viewpoint from humans to robots to Kin. "Bethke does a fair job with the humans and a better one with the robots, [but] he is masterful in the portrayal of the Kin;… they are super-wolves all the way, yet we identify with them." Tyson added, however, that the book is very much a middle volume in an Isaac Asimov series (Asimov allowed writers to add their own new books in a series with characters he created about a robot universe) and pointed out that readers unfamiliar with the series might find it difficult to keep the characters straight. Kliatt reviewer Amos C. Patterson, however, did not find this a drawback, observing that Maverick "is an easy read and the excitement level is high."

Bethke also wrote the novel Headcrash, in which his cyberpunk hero exploits the Internet to avenge himself after being fired from his computer programming job. Bethke's additional works include the 1996 book Rebel Moon, based on a computer game of the same title in which lunar colonists unite behind Dalton Starkiller in a seemingly doomed rebellion. Despite the outlandish characters and situations Bethke creates, according to information about Bethke published on a Warner Books Web site, he lives "a life of quiet bourgeois complacency in suburban Minnesota."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, 1975–1991, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Kliatt, September, 1991, Amos C. Patterson, review of Maverick, p. 20.

Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 1990, Edith Tyson, review of Maverick, pp. 293-94.

ONLINE

Bruce Bethke, Freelance Writer, http://www.spedro.com (December 3, 2005).

Users.zetnet Web site, http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/iplus/stories/cpunk.htm/ (March 13, 1999).

Warner Books Web site, wysiwyg://55http:///www.pathfinder.com/twep/aspects/authors/bruce_bethke (March 13, 1999).