The book "Void Star" is an interesting one. It has a William Gibson style plot very similar to Neuromancer but instead of 1980s aesthetic choices, it has 2017 aesthetic choices.
So instead of ninjas you get MMA jiu jitsu guys, US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan, aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear disasters, cartels rather than Yakuza, and so on. It's like 2017 future is extrapolated out instead of 1984 future.
But the plot is extremely Gibson-esque: a woman hired as a consultant on a strange project for a mysterious ultra-wealthy client, rogue AIs, interactions between mega corporations and the criminal underworld.
So if you take cyberpunk to mean just the synthesizers and neon and chrome aesthetic, then it is getting sort of tiresome. But you can update all that stuff to something slightly fresher and still tell the same kind of stories and it works.
> US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan
At the risk of going way out into tangents: Gibson's books had a fascinating mix of tech mega corporations, not just Japanese, but some of the big players were European in origin, and a share of US tech mega corporations.
Gibson absolutely has a kawaii bug about Japanese culture, though that's not his only over-fascination (arguably more of the Neuromancer trilogy is bound to voodoun fascination than Japanese culture fascination), but the important point at the time, and still a useful timeless quality to Gibson's books was how much Gibson got right about the increased weird of a global mega-culture. Much more so than most of his contemporaries, Gibson's cyberpunk much more accurately captured the feeling of the internet before the internet: one minute you might be watching K-Pop on TikTok and then some dude with a Voodoo-based handle sends you some weird files on Discord, before you hop over to Facebook for the latest Eurovision memes.
Gibson used the prominence of Japanese mega corporations not just because a lot 80s tech stock pundits (possibly wrongly; though Sony et al still have a large market presence) thought the Japanese would dominate the future, but as a part of a larger cross-cultural package that the future of "punk" wasn't just white-bread American but a stew waiting to be stirred of global culture. In that Gibson is an interesting comparison to pick when comparing timeless versus time-bound components of cyberpunk, as Gibson's Japanese focus I think was by far one of his most timeless additions to the genre.
sure, that's a fair point. Neuromancer trilogy has European family offices, it has an American media/tech company Sense/Net, Zeiss and Braun are mentioned.
but the books really do feel like Japan is the dominant economic power, in a way that seems very stuck in the 1980s (the Nikkei still has never recovered to its peak in 1991). the way this gets translated is always rainy city streets with neon signs in kanji, and synthesizers. a lot of work that is heavily derivative of Neuromancer just copies these choices blindly rather than trying to convey the same spirit as it tells the story. i liked Void Star because it did the opposite.
another thing underappreciated about Gibson is that much of his world is not particularly futuristic. there's implied to be plenty of buildings left around from the 21st century. the bars, hotels, motels, and restaurants are mostly described as being like normal restaurants today. stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 seems to miss this.
Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far (we'll see when the game comes out), including some parts of the city that look usefully old. It just has its own layers of the fact that Night City is an American city, here being designed by mostly Polish artists giving it a strange (accidental?) European sensibility, combined with the idea that in the source fiction (the RPG), Night City was a planned city that didn't ever exist before (the future year) 1994 (Cyberpunk itself was written in the 80s). So there are at least 70-ish years of layers and tarnish to put on the thing, but the fact that it is entirely distinct from a real place was a fictional conceit from the 80s fiction it inherits.
Which is to say, that I think Gibson is absolutely correct that most "future places" are and will always be built on the tops of the bones of the old places. No one is going to demolish all of San Francisco or DC's haunts and landmarks. But also that's not a criticism that I think directly applies to Cyberpunk 2077 as a specific example because the fiction intentionally wanted and built a young city, with some of the EPCOT feels of the setting an intentional planned commentary of a different sort than most of the space Gibson enjoyed inhabiting in his books. Gibson did his own bits of entirely new construction such as space stations, too, to make various points/contrasts. Corporations building modern "cyber" company cities is a rich tradition of its own in cyberpunk fiction, evoking and reminding readers/players of the past dystopian company towns that did exist in a previous American century and could easily exist again.
The original Blade Runner is a great example of a film that depicts the changing architecture of a city - while we see sweeping shots of mile high sky scrapers throughout the film, on the ground we still see the remains of historic architecture, repurposed and built over - the police station was built within Los Angeles's 1939 Union Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House makes an appearance as Deckard's apartment, and of course the famous Bradbury Building was used as the set for the film's finale. The end result is a city that still feels like it has a history not too dissimilar then the Los Angeles of the real world, extrapolated out to 2019 based on 1980's fears of overpopulation and such.
Something it's sequel wasn't really successful with, where instead the city looks unrecognisable, with architecture that looks alien rather then anything actually realistically plausible. If it wasn't for the frequent Coca Cola and Sony product placement you could be convinced the city was Coruscant from Star Wars or something.
interesting -- i wasn't aware they were sticking that closely to the canon of the source material.
it seems like in the promotional trailers released so far, they're definitely leaving anything non-futuristic-looking in the background, and going hard on 80s action movie tropes. but hopefully there will be more variety in the actual game.
maybe we will get to see some real 1994 decor, even!
Thanks for the recommend, I just grabbed it off Audible.
I feel like you are hitting on "Gibson based" Cyberpunk being now a specific aesthetic, that's now almost more of a genre fiction than sci-fi.
It's a very lazy pallet to turn to for world building, but its a world that everyone likes visit so its probably going to be around for awhile. It's annoying from a logic perspective, but it certainly looks cool.
The Netflix series "Altered Carbon" and did some of this same Cyberpunk borrowing that didn't really make sense as well.
Interesting. I always thought it was kind of interesting that "cyber-punk" originally meant a type of near future sci-fi, and the term was borrowed to use in various types of "retro" sci-fi (steam-punk, etc).
Except as a lot of cyber-punk has remained anchored in the 80's aesthetic that was popular when it was created, its kind of become "retro-actively retro". So now if something is "cyberpunk", your not really sure if its going to be a modern view of the near-future, or an 80's view.
The other day I described my love for Synthwave music as "futuristic music written today, as though in a past that never was, imagining a future that is still yet-to-be."
remember reading it two years ago or so and liked it a lot. The protagonist definitely resembled the Blue Ant trilogy Cayce Pollard character a lot, and I honestly think that the those Gibson books are very underrated, they're probably his most relevant ones, in particular the ideas around anti-marketing.
Well, put it like that, you could probably swap a few terms (feudal lords for corporations, bandit guilds for cartels, etc etc) and tell "the same kind of story" as Fantasy.
I do agree that some (well, most) of the cyberpunk themes are still very much alive though.
You could, but ultimately it would be harder. In cyperpunk nature is almost never a character or force, but in fantasy words it often is. Cyperpunk aesthetic is also largely about how today’s technology might change the world as it develops. It would be very hard to tell that story in fantasy.
> It would be very hard to tell that story in fantasy.
Perhaps Steampunk is closer to this, given that "steam" was part of the first industrial revolution.
However there are some interesting ideas floating around that you could use to tell a pure-Fantasy cyberpunk story; I'm sure someone's tried a novel, but I am only familiar with the tabletop RPG http://cryptorpg.com/, where magic enables cryptography and messaging. From there you can recapitulate pretty much all of the dystopian power/narrative structures that make Cyberpunk what it is.
Magic-as-technology is a surprisingly under-explored concept, with the right magic system I think you could easily tell a Cyberpunk story.
> Magic-as-technology is a surprisingly under-explored concept
This is a very common way to address magic when tradition sci-fi writers try to incorporate fantasy elements into their novels. It’s used in the Shadowrun universe, and in the novel The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O as two popular examples.
It's common outside of sci-fi as well one of the biggest fantasy RPGs Final Fantasy regularly incorporates "Magitech" as they call it into their worlds.
If you haven't read it before, the Foundation series has this as a theme. There is a priesthood of the atomics, who don't know how it works, just how to run the maintenance manual cargo culting.
Walter Jon Williams, author of the cyberpunk classic Hardwired, also wrote two books in a setting that fuses cyberpunk and fantasy: Metropolitan and City on Fire.
The fantasy equivalent is talking about how their own magic systems can influence society. Brandon Sanderson's two Mistborn trilogies are good examples of this. They don't have that hook to our reality that cyberpunk does, but as a fan of both genres it does carry some of the same vibes.
I thought that sounded familiar. I got the hardcover from a dollar store (for a dollar vs $27 cover price, first printing; I guess they made too many copies?). I'll have to give it a read.
I think that many newer novels are cyperpunk inspired, but that doesn’t make them cyperpunk. The visual aesthetic is just as important as the story telling to the genre.
I mean maybe in books, but Deus Ex and the remakes are as fresh as a few years ago now we have Cyberpunk 2077 coming out and Detroit Become Human is fantastic from a story setting. Not to forget The early 2000s telling of Ghost in the Shell and the the most recent ones from 2016ish to now.
Less story inclined but just as cyber punk being the Watchdog games.
Cyber Punk and it's ideals are very much alive, however the medium of expression has changed to ones more fitting of Cyber Punk IMO.
His point is that, with some exceptions (Ghost in the Shell), much of the modern work you cite is a regurgitation of the earliest ideas of the genre which have themselves hardened into tropes.
Gibson found the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer exceedingly retro and 80s because its imagined future repeats anxieties and themes which were most relevant in the 1980s, when the genre first appeared.
The return to these “ancient futures” isn’t really punk, it’s kitsch. But to do the thing those early authors did would be to continually approach the present with the same mindset for interrogating it and see what appears.
In any case, I'll grant you that the 80s cars and CRT theming are retro-futuristic, but those are all surface-level, as Gibson himself points out. However, I think the criticism loses steam if you try to apply it below the surface, even just a little.
Social media, political troll gangs, cheap drones, and military + police robotics played a big part in Watchdogs, and those are all modern or forward-looking. Deus Ex's human augmentation is still forward-looking. AI integration in Detroit Become Human is still forward-looking, even if it isn't terribly imaginative. The interactions of technology, poverty, and crime common to all of these are still forward looking, even if in hindsight they failed to predict some big trends (e.g. social media boosting conspiracy groups and the "traditional hustles" of self-help and alternative medicine).
Regardless, the artists are still using their imaginations. It's the critics who see an 80s car, call it kitsch to get engagement, and miss everything of substance.
But the concerns expressed in those works were the same as the ones expressed forty years ago; that's the point the original article is making. Bethke himself used the phrase “self-referential metafiction” in describing sci-fi authors in the late 70s. I think a lot of the current cyberpunk work is the same, commoditizing an art movement into a fashion dressing to tell the same kind of stories we always get.
Vast corporations doing what they want to the helpless working class started as an 80s fear in opposition to a largely hopeful view of companies from the 50s and 60s. Just because it's come true, or is still a fear, doesn't mean that it's still exciting or exploring a new frontier.
Bruce Sterling was writing eco-fiction thirty years ago, about humans struggling to survive post-climate-change... except that wasn't a phrase that meant what it means to people today. The edge he was riding on in his work has now headed towards the middle.
Vernor Vinge writing about true names in the early 80s was predictive; Become Human commenting about it now isn't.
It doesn't make it bad or not worthy or anything, but it definitely is a move away from the bleeding edge of a predictive SF movement.
"Snow Crash" and "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson are interesting books in this sense. "Snow Crash" works best if you're a cyberpunk fan already, if it can relax into the tropes you already know and make an action movie out of it. "Diamond Age" moves away from that towards a definitely post-cyberpunk place with people who aren't criminals trying to make a buck but maybe good people trying to change the world with the power of technology. It's already shedding the trappings and trying to get somewhere else.
It's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co-opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk.
Don't blame authors, blame society for failing to break out of the neoliberal (or other epithet) trap started in the '80s. If we had fundamentally different struggles and anxieties now, and perhaps a different, more idealistic outlook, then different genres would emerge.
It's gotta be a little weird for these authors to see their "movement" co-opted into big media properties that make millions of dollars for big companies. Somebody else said it in these comments; that's not very punk.
It's not weird at all. Consumerism has co-opted and commodified every single ideology; there's nothing wiser or more edgy or purer about cyberpunk that would have prevented this from happening to it. If anything, it's very apropos.
For Pete’s sake! The concerns and themes expressed in Shakespeare are the same as what we often see in modern media. The human condition doesn’t change much over the centuries! Why do you think it’s so bad that we continue to examine things like power dynamics, privacy, loss of identity and terrorism (all that Gibson touches upon) through new settings or against updated backdrops?
The same thing happened to fantasy. How do you think Tolkien would feel if he saw his life’s work get turned into D&D? At the same time, I love D&D and Lord of the Rings and I wouldn’t be too upset if Tolkien was annoyed about it or if he thought it was stupid and derivative.
This is really about genre fiction as a whole and its never-ending struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of literary fiction readers. It’s all tied up in fashion and classism though, to be frank.
Jacques Derrida coined the neologism to describe narratives of the future. Hauntology is the idea that the present is "haunted" by lost futures, and refers to the return of elements of the past that "haunts" the present as a ghost. So imagined futures, instead of exploring new futures, itself becomes a form which is haunted by the exploration of past ideas of the future. This is the whole idea of retro-futurism that we often see these days.
I'm intensely curious about what comes next in literature/music/movies but have very little insight into what it could be. I think focusing on marginalized experience could recontextualize the stories that came before (colonial narratives taking on a self-aware perspective when seen by different eyes), but then I wonder if that isn't just a re-packaging or a co-op or pandering. Time will hopefully tell.
I'm tempted to think that the larger system has to break down more to find those stories but I don't know what "break down" means -- and who's to say those media aren't there already? I maybe just can't see them or I'm rejecting them i.e. "the noise those kids listen to these days".
As an older millennial and prolific fiction reader (more so when I was younger and had time), there seems to be a 1:1 correlation between lack of consumption of... "intentional" creative media and lack of hope.
Zoomers and younger millennials don't (as an aggregate class) seem as interested in working through challenging material, given the infinite fire hose of more easily consumed alternatives.
I've shown Kurosawa, Leone, and Tarkovsky films to the demographic, and it was literally like they didn't possess the capability to focus for the requisite durations.
I try to avoid being alarmist from limited sample sizes, but it honestly worries me about what "app-ification" is doing to a generation's brains.
Hmm. I think pacing is an issue there, but on the other hand I'm someone who finds most youtube content too slow but enjoys Leone.
Your description of intentional is interesting there. I guess the opposite isn't "unintentional" but "adhoc" or "reality"?
The problem may be just political awareness; the more attention you pay to that kind of thing the more alarmed you get, and that may well be a reasonable response.
I spent a while on word choice, as nothing seemed to fit.
The best I can describe the alternative is (most of this via conversations w/ kids in the 12 and 18 age ranges) essentially as you've said: "adhoc" or "reality" (in the post-Instagram, staged-but-effecting-effortless sense).
Perhaps a better dialectic basis is "desire" vs lack of same.
It seems innocuous to say you can have more and less edited media creation styles. But the distinction I'm groping for is more in intent of the creator.
What do they want? What is your average YouTuber trying to get across via their creative choices?
It feels like democratization of publishing has resulted in Facebook for the arts: consumption driven primarily by catering to baser human neurological ticks, rather than via an author's studied intention. And the latter being drowned out by an infinite mass of the former.
And worst of all, audience / consumers being re-baselined with the expectation that creators aren't actually exercising intent in their choices, and so lose the ability to recognize it when it does exist.
> As an older millennial and prolific fiction reader (more so when I was younger and had time), there seems to be a 1:1 correlation between lack of consumption of... "intentional" creative media and lack of hope.
I'm likely of the same age group as you and have encountered similar observations in just about all other age groups, there simply is a lack of desire for hard-nosed optimism in exchange of numbing escapism (be it in the form social media of contrived/trite traditional media and video games) as its what is sought out most.
I'm not going to try and portray that my early readings of philosophy or even my deep fascination with Aldous Huxley and Neal Stephenson books are solely what compelled me to view the World in an optimistic manner, and then later act up on for most of my young to adult life be it in environmentalism or activism. That came from a lot of often perception shattering and heart-breaking experience of Humanity's myopic toll on this Planet.
But what those books did do is give me a coping mechanism found in a great deal of story telling. It allowed me to endure and try to come to terms with the very uncomfortable truths about the Human Condition that were being discussed since the advent of Western Society in Greece and similarly found in Huxely's novels as well as many other cyberpunk genres which is best summed as the following: In the World of the insane, the rational man doesn't become King, he gets lynched!
And we see that today with the situation with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, many activists in Hong Kong, citizen journalists and physicians in China during the outbreak of COVID etc...
I think the experiences taken away from those books and novels are that an individual's success (or survival) may not be possible, but the Human Spirit to defy that and try against all odds an inspire others to follow is a worthy and noble path, but it's an entirely ignored aspect for so many.
Which leads to wide-spread pessimism, and even misanthropy, which if I'm honest makes me as worried of the impacts of climate change and warfare sometimes because it makes me re-evaluate if its even worth the MASSIVE undertaking if that is what remains of the Human Spirit for so many.
In short: it's not an age thing, its a Person thing; one that has been exploited by major media (be it traditional or social) as an institution to foment a culture addicted to outrage and cancel culture to onboard them on to their platforms/goods/services which if looked objectively and detached from emotion kind of serve as a pressure release to an otherwise very unjust World.
I can't help but recall the role of Roman circuses, the death of Archimedes or even the burning of the Library of Alexandra in saying all of that and how ingrained that's been in Humans.
It's kind of hard to come up with new futurological themes and anxieties when the foundational works were so prescient :)
What would be the new ones? Universal surveillance? Pretty sure that was covered. Ubiquitous AI becoming malevolent or just generally shifty? Done to death.
Did Altered Carbon have anything new with technological advancements leading to immortality? I'm sure that was done at some point... and the book came out almost 20 years ago.
The latest season of Westworld was fun, but most of the cyberpunk elements are recycled, with a veneer of solarpunk. Fancy techno-drugs have certainly been done before.
Did Altered Carbon have anything new with technological advancements leading to immortality?
When I read the books I was struck by Quellcrist Falconer's approach to guerilla warfare. She thought that immortality allowed guerillas to use time as cover, the way guerillas of past ages had concealed themselves in urban crowds or the remote countryside. It was the first time I had encountered that idea. (Someone who's read even more SF than me may cite earlier antecedents.)
The TV adaptation replaced this interesting character and her ideas with the well-worn Noble Reactionary telling us that Technology Is Bad.
I want an epistolary murder mystery that takes the form of a thread on a popular website that includes the killer dropping hints and evidence of his crime. When it comes out half the fun will be figuring out which anonymous posts belong to the same person and letting the readers solve the mystery of figuring out which one of the trolls was also the killer.
Kind of but without spoiling anything that was mostly conjecture by the general populace. A lot of the scenes where Motoko is on the VR-esque message boards are other people speculating on the Laughing Man's motives.
Edit: Though on quick second thought I think there is at least one instance where he does contact her in that space.
Right but I guess my point is that re-exploring and re-contextualizing those ideas for a modern audience has a place in carrying the torch. Cyberpunk 2077 gave me strong Akira vibes from the character aesthetics and the scenery is what I imagine the sprawl would look like. This can be fine as long as the story can carry it's own points and isn't just regurgitation as you put it. This however, remains to be seen.
So far I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Detroit Become human do the best job of re-contextualizing and extending cyberpunk ideas for a modern audience along with Ghost in the Shell SAC and 2nd Gig as a little earlier on works.
I think if you differ too far from the original ideas you're not in Cyberpunk anymore and now you've entered into a new genre. Perhaps that is appropriate, just not if you're trying to make a Cyberpunk work imo because necessarily they must share some core ideas from the original works to remain in the genre. That said this makes it a very fine line to walk between a work that makes points of its own drawing from the original works and derivative crap.
Oh interesting, I've only looked at some scenary and the announcement trailer because I didn't want to spoil anything for myself. I mean if that's the case then their goal isn't really to make a modern adaptation of the Cyberpunk themes, it's to stay faithful to the themes presented in that RPG and criticizing it for not modernizing the genre is a little silly.
Yes, the Cyberpunk RPG is one of the classics of the genre. Originally set in the then-future of 2013, by titling the videogame Cyberpunk 2077 they are playing with the fact that the RPG's editions continued to push the timeline in their titles (Cyberpunk 2020 was released in 1990, for instance), and makes something of a case for 64 years of "alternate future history" now from the original Cyberpunk 2013 setting.
Also Cyberpunk Red, a new 4th Edition was supposed to come out this year, but obviously got delayed by COVID just as the videogame did. It's edition name of "Red" a direct homage to CD Projekt Red and includes some collaborative efforts with the videogame on the combined and updated timeline. (Cyberpunk Red will be set in 2045, set up some plots that directly effect the videogame's 2077, and also retcon some of the pieces of 3rd Edition's timeline that they didn't think should carry forward and are now alternate future history to alternate future history.)
It’s not fair to critique a film or video game based on its trailer. The phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” comes to mind.
Let’s suspend judgment of Cyberpunk 2077 until it’s released in a couple months. They surprised everyone with how awesome Witcher 3 was, so let’s give CD Projekt the benefit of the doubt.
Curious how Cyberpunk 2077 will deal with first person POV problems like taking cover behind objects or going up a steep incline. Good open worlds have so much going on that it's usually much more efficient to view them through a big picture 3rd person POV. A dedicated 'real life' point of view like the one that Cyberpunk 2077 has adopted reveals only a fraction of the context that can be gained from the same scene viewed from a 3rd person POV.
that's a weird point of view. would steampunk in a non Victorian retro-future even work? are we gonna rename futurism if it doesn't keep up with times?
then why is this fixation with cyberpunk being rooted in the now?
It's understandable in that a genre's pioneer might scoff at descendent works. But that sort of purism also feels gatekeeping and snobby. I certainly can't imagine Sterling or Stephenson being so purist about the genre.
> Gibson found the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer exceedingly retro and 80s because its imagined future repeats anxieties and themes which were most relevant in the 1980s, when the genre first appeared.
Not to mention, many cyberpunk ideas just became everyday life, from social networking and "always-connected" being the new normal, market dominance by technological megacorps, and cybercriminals scoring big payouts right down to minor terminology like hashtags and life hacks.
The other day an ad for "Mom Hacks" played over the Walmart store intercom. It doesn't seem so long ago that my own mother warned me that normal people only understood the term "hack" to refer to cybercrime. Somewhere between then and now, ideas from our little corner of the world colonized the rest of it, and I don't think I realized how thoroughly it had happened until "Mom Hacks" made me reflect on it.
Right exactly, we currently live in a world just shy of having Zaibatsus with their own paramilitary arms minus some of the flashier tech but still including many elements of the dystopias works from the 80's and 90's and even early 2000's were trying to warn us about.
Certain stories about Apple coopting Bay Area police forces to track down their lost prototypes, would indicate that some zaibatsu already have, in practice, their paramilitary. And of course oil companies have had military-grade security basically forever.
It's interesting you bring up Cyberpunk 2077, probably the most hotly anticipated work in the genre, and this guy has nothing positive to say about it at all.
Cyberpunk 2077 is designed for 12 year olds, they are the #1 customer of these single player console games. They will not have read any Gibson by that point (maybe Hunger Games). If you think about what has been successful with that audience, looking at Grand Theft Auto for example, it has to feel like parents wouldn't like it. And it has little to do with genre, because there is no genre to GTA. CD Projekt Red was incredibly clever with a particular piece of art it marketed which specifically invoked something in the zeitgeist that makes parents angry and uncomfortable in 2019-2020.
This is what GTA did, what South Park did, Modern Warfare, and long before that, Ren and Stimpy did, what Spongebob did, etc. - do something that pisses off parents. When making a product for 12 year old boys, which is what these books and games are, pissing off parents such an integral part of the product's success. Gibson pissed off parents then, he just doesn't really piss them off now. Anything commie or anti-authoritarian in that period was anti-parent. It just goes to show that the article is way off the mark when it comes to understanding what is actually novel in contemporary work, and how tough it is that kids, especially boys, don't read anymore.
> The average age of a U.S. gamer is 35, the average number of years a U.S. gamer has been playing games is 13, and only 29% of the gamer population is under 18 years old.
Given you’re listing some of the most popular games, I think it’s fair to assume those games are targeting the average age?
I respectfully disagree. If you look at the history of CD Projekt red they tend to do a great job of translating a source story and world into a compelling video game setting and story. Witcher 3 was critically acclaimed for a reason.
As I was made aware of today Cyberpunk 2077 is being adapted from source material that is a tabletop RPG that's been around for like 30 years. With that thought in mind I expect the story to be much less vacant and more adult focused with compelling narrative.
I think your suggestion is off the mark for this work knowing who is producing it. That said only time will tell.
I'll also add in terms of the concerns of cliches, I mean the ethics and ideas in Cyberpunk have 40 years of discussion and mainstreaming now which means many people will wear the ideas of cyberpunk as an aesthetic and really not intern or create works that embody the ideology. The thing is this happens with every set of ideas and I refer back to this post as a good exploration of why
"https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths"
Unfortunately this means that if you do have a more vested interest in works that respect and extend classical cyber punk thoughts you have to work a little harder to separate wheat from chaff.
A recent example of this is Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 that revives characters and art from earlier more idealistic works that are much more in line with the ethos and work hard to make points about sociopolitical events and where they could lead us, but this iteration really falls short, in my opinion, of making any of it's own strong points. Instead they rely on the flashy tech, scenary and tropes we've come to be familiar with in Cyberpunk. Not to say they didn't try though but they couldn't carry it like previous writers in the series.
I'm confused - is this complaining about the genre as a whole being less popular? Or just books?
I think with one of the most hyped and games of the year being a cyberpunk game (with "Cyberpunk" literally in the name) - its definitely premature to call the genre as a whole "dead"
If this article is just lamenting the absence of Cyberpunk books - well surges in popularity in one media can always carry over to others...
The article isn't about either of those things. It's about the original ideas of cyberpunk (which were rooted in the 80s) being turned into cliches and repeated ad infinitum since and whether a new 2020-era genre is needed.
The idea that a new genre could be created because critics concluded that one was "needed" is the daftest and most out-of-touch thing I've ever heard...
Well, generally it’s more like critics pointing out that the niche cyberpunk used to fill is now empty and that something will inevitably come to fill it. Critics definitely don’t have the power to actually create a genre like that, those come from grassroot sources, but a good critic would be able to realize that there’s a literary void that is waiting to be filled.
The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most out-of-touch thing I've ever read.
Oh wait, that has happened multiple times.
Granted, a genre is bigger than a tool. But this free-floating hatred for commentators of all stripes literally blinds people to reality.
And it isn't some Critic-On-High making pronouncements and waiting for followers to act. It is observational.
> The idea that a random person on a message board could inspire someone to write software because someone said they needed a tool is the daftest, most out-of-touch thing I've ever read.
A tool already describes a solution to a problem in mind, it's clear cut. If the analogous problem here is "I want new genre fiction", then a) that doesn't describe what's desired, and b) that already exists (qua all the "punk" suffixed derivatives among other things), it's just not as popular, and therefore we can surmise the wrong question is being asked.
Stephenson once had a talk where he suggested that sci-fi writers should effectively return to optimistic stories, but he hasn't done that himself. He could literally solve the problem he described. We want what we want, and write what we want to write.
I've been re-reading "The Hobbit" recently, and this passage struck me as relevant to your comment. From Chapter 3, "A Short Rest":
"Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."
During the stay in Rivendell, nothing much interesting happens - so Tolkien doesn't bother with telling us about it. The exciting, interesting stuff is when our heroes are in peril or experiencing great trials and tribulations.
The headline asks the question and doesn't provide a clear answer. I guess it depends on how you look at it.
The genre is definitely not as fresh and new as it was in the 1980s, but that's unavoidable when a genre is over 30 years old. One of the people in the article calls it paint-by-the-numbers Gibson. But someone also mentions that fantasy was huge back then, and that it was all trying to copy Tolkien. Paint-by-the-numbers Tolkien, I guess.
I guess every genre starts with a few innovative writers breaking new ground, and then a few decades of copycats, until finally someone gets tired of all that and reinvents the genre again.
The big question is whether that's possible with cyberpunk; it's already a pretty specific genre. It's really a reinvention of SciFi. Maybe transhumanism can be seen as a reinvention? Solarpunk maybe? Neither seem to have anywhere near the same impact, though. Maybe they're just riding on the coattails of cyberpunk. Those are clearly still going strong.
Cyberpunk can easily be reinvented if writers take their heads out of the 80s. At its core it isn't about people with neon hair shooting lasers out of their eyes to paint fluorescent graffity with Japanese letters, but about trying to imagine all the ways that current technology can affect the human society in the near future and answering the question of 'what can even go wrong?' with 'everything'.
If there is anything we have in abundance today is tech that can be horribly abused by those in power.
I think we're getting a bit too liberal with labels.
"Trying to imagine all the ways that current technology can affect the human society in the near future and answering the question of 'what can even go wrong?' " is basically just "doing SciFi the way SciFi should be done". There is nothing eminently cyberpunk in the technique. Obviously "SciFi done right" will forever self-reinvent, that's how cyberpunk came to be in the first place; but it has little to do with the health of cyberpunk as a genre.
We usually talk of cyberpunk specifically to restrict the argument to a subset of scifi topics and literary aesthetics common to the self-declared cyberpunk artists: the influence of networks, body augmentation, and corporate feudalism (or rejection thereof). A scifi text that does not touch on any of those items, is unlikely to be seen or defined as cyberpunk.
So imho a "cyberpunk reinvention" would need to find something fresh to say on those topics. If I were to write a book on reusable rockets, for example, I would be "doing scifi right" (spaceX etc) but not really "doing cyberpunk".
You forgot the most important part: "answering the question of 'what can even go wrong?' with 'everything'."
This isn't about making stories on reusable rockets, it is about how those reusable rockets would affect the common man's life negatively. You know, "high tech, low life". Of course if that wouldn't make sense (cannot think how reusable rockets could affect everyday life, at least in a direct way), then it isn't much of a fit for Cyberpunk.
Framing Cyberpunk as only about networks, body augmentation and corporate feudalism is IMO too narrow and restricting - these can be the symptoms of high tech but they aren't the only thing that high tech can do or affect negatively.
I mean, what is next? Restricting Cyberpunk works to only be set at night while raining? :-P
That’s a pessimistic view of cyberpunk. “Maneki Neko” by Sterling is a short story about positive impacts of tech, should it not be considered cyberpunk? It certainly was included in the genre when it appeared.
I think you’re actually restricting the category more than I did.
The parts of Cyberpunk that are valuable are the aesthetic and the way in which it provides tropes, and expectations that let you tell different stores. If someone picks up a cyberpunk book they expect the protag to be an antihero or even a villain. They expect noir themes.
In Neuromancer the protag murders a bunch of people in an office building because he and his friends want to steal something in the basement of the building. If you set that story in the modern day readers would likely have far more empathy toward the victims of the attack. If you put that story into the startrek universe and readers likely wouldn't finish the book. The aesthetics of Cyberpunk is a sleight of hand that let's get away with themes that you couldn't tell in other genres.
Yes there are some other tropes that are into play, but those aren't always important - e.g. there are Cyberpunk works where you do not play the antihero or villain. E.g. in movies Alex Murphy in Robocop isn't exactly an antihero and certainly not a villain. Similar in games with JC Denton in Deus Ex (though of course in such games this particular aspect isn't clear since it is up to the player - but you are essentially playing as a glorified cop).
That some popular works in the genre share some of these tropes doesn't mean that the genre is all about those tropes.
It is an interesting take, but once you look beyond the obvious, the critique is reminiscent of "Nothing new under the sun" trope ( they phrase it as a minor insult -- Akira fan fic ). Not exactly compelling argument in my mind.
Personally, I think interest in Cyberpunk may have declined ( and oddly increased in mainstream DND ), because, frankly, we seem to be living in early Cyberpunk universe ( powerful corporations, nascent augment technology.. ).
edit: Then again, Cyber 2077 may re-ignite mainstream interest in the genre.
I think we've been in "early cyberpunk" for about 15 years already (if not 20). The renewed interest, imho, is due to a combination of factors, but mostly two: the generation that grew up reading it as kids is now old enough to be in positions of power over artistic output, so they will use those influences in their own work; and some of the societal shifts cyberpunk speculated about, are now recognizable by pretty much everyone.
Wasn't William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) roughly quoted saying: "I don't write 'cyberpunk' dystopias anymore...because we are living them. They are our reality today. So I just write contemporary fiction." ....somebody help me out on this...I might be off the mark.
It's not exactly that, but about how Gibson has steadily gotten more and more near-future:
"The ten novels that Gibson has written since have slid steadily closer to the present. In the nineties, he wrote a trilogy set in the two-thousands. The novels he published in 2003, 2007, and 2010 were set in the year before their publication. (Only the inevitable delays of the publishing process prevented them from taking place in the years when they were written.) Many works of literary fiction claim to be set in the present day. In fact, they take place in the recent past, conjuring a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date. Gibson’s strategy of extreme presentness reflects his belief that the current moment is itself science-fictional. “The future is already here,” he has said. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.”
The further Gibson developed his present-tense sci-fi, the more mysterious and resonant his novels became. They seemed to reveal a world within the world: the real present. The approach was risky; it put him at the mercy of events. In 2001, Gibson rushed to incorporate the September 11th attacks into his half-completed eighth novel, “Pattern Recognition,” a story about globalization, filmmaking, Internet forums, brand strategy, and informational deluge. Terrorism turned out to fit neatly within this framework; “Pattern Recognition” is often described as the first post-9/11 novel. The risks could pay off."
Also the "Gibson's Law" quote of "The future is already here. It is just unevenly distributed." is a thing I often quote, as it provides multiple useful perspectives.
I suspect you are thinking of a different writer. I've never read a Gibson interview where he said anything like that, though I have not read every Gibson interview.
Not really. He doesn't describe our world as a cyberpunk dystopia in that interview. Whatever world we have today I don't believe he has ever referred to as cyberpunk-esque.
1. I wouldn't call The Matrix cyberpunk. That's the first time I heard that; and
2. I don't see cyberpunk as having died in the 1980s, so much as it was simply the zeitgeist of that era and there have been lots of those in sci-fi (and more generally).
For example, if you look at sci-fi from the 1960s you have lots of material about mental powers (eg telepathy in Stranger and a Strange Land). Star Trek was a utopia that mirrored a rosy view of America. All of this in an era of personal freedom and society wrestling with the lingering injustices of slavery a century earlier I think is no accident.
What happened in the 1980s was the rise of Japan and the loss of manufacturing jobs in America. This stoked fears that corporations would replace governments and we'd face a dystopian but technological future. I still see cyberpunk as interlinked with anti-Japanese xenophobia.
So the issue with cyberpunk is that this xenophobia faded, the genre didn't really evolve (and probably peaked with Blade Runner) and apart from the Internet virtually nothing predicted in cyberpunk came to pass. We still have governments. We don't live in a dystopian future (mostly). There are enhanced humans with implants.
But I wouldn't describe it as dying. We simply moved on.
Also, cyberpunk broke into the mainstream (Blade Runner, Neuromancer) at a time of fascination with Japan. I say fascination because there was a spectrum - from philic to phobic.
That attention was, of course, a result of their (at the time) massively increased economic strength, relative to that of the USA.
That same spectrum of attention exists in the body of cyberpunk, in toto. There is not an anti-Japanese xenophobia that exists in the corpus either pervasively, or inherently.
"Everything about UNIX sounds silly. We're talking about an OS with commands like chown, awk, and grep here and where 'zombie children floating in the pipe' is a legitimate description of an error state."
It's been replaced by whatever genre you would describe Black Mirror as. A reflection of the modern dystopia we live in within the context of the current year.
I agree that Black Mirror is one of the few original attempts at doing proper scifi about the near future, that we’ve had in quite some time. I wish it were not so utterly depressing, my mental health can barely stomach a single episode every month or so. If that were a genre, I would call it “cybercynical”.
No need to panic guys, I'm still alive. And this Bruce guy hasn't even spoken to me -- so take his opinion with the appropriate amount of sodium chloride.
Considering a teenager recently commandeered the Twitter accounts of a number of world leaders, and then used this awesome power to run a two-bit scam with electronic money, makes me think cyberpunk is indeed dead because it is now reality.
"A…depressingly mountainous amount of the self-identified cyberpunk fiction I see now is stuck firmly in the 1980s. It's not new, fresh, or original. It's paint-by-numbers Imitation Gibson. It's Blade Runner fan fic, or Akira fan fic, or worse, wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic" I read a large amount of new cyberpunk and this is depressingly accurate
Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl" is an interesting take on this.
The most concise take I've seen for the core defining aesthetic of cyberpunk is: "high tech, low life."
With that in mind, I don't think it _really_ matters what the tech is, so long as the story is about those on the fringes of society and their interactions with it; how _alien_ the world is to them, and how alien they are to the world.
Watts's work is great also as an existentialist hard sci-fi cosmic horror. It's got all of the Plutonian depths, malevolent antediluvian creatures, unfathomable aliens, degenerated humanity, and posthuman body horror of Lovecraft, just not the omnipotent space gods. Plus, he even continues cyberpunk tropes to their natural dystopian conclusions- in Rifters, "N'Am" is a continent governed by the power company that sends PTSD-afflicted veterans and abuse survivors to maintain deep sea geothermal generators, gigacorp execs are literally called "corpses", and the internet is completely swallowed up by A.I. spam bots.
How would you rate the Rifters trilogy vs the Firefall trilogy? (I thoroughly enjoyed Blindsight, hobbled my way through Echopraxia, and it's unlikely I'll read Firefall)
I meant more with regards to the Internet and the "post-truth" era we are supposedly in, at least in a media context. From my perspective every media source has become intensely partisan / there is no single mainstream media narrative anymore, which is a new phenomenon.
+1 for Tom Clancy though. I grew up reading all the Rainbow Six books.
I don't agree. Yellow journalism was a similar phenomenon, but the pre-social media landscape was far different from the one today. Pre-social media, you still needed significant resources to push your narrative. Today, you mostly just need to go viral. Not too many resources required. Very different situation.
Public access and small local radio were cheap or free to access, and common sources of fringe ideas. It wasn't until the spectrum ownership was consolidated that this access disipated; but by then, dial up BBSs were common and growing popular.
Also, handing out and distributing hand-pressed folios was common; and a source of much of the zeitgeist for several political revolutions.
The pandemic will feature prominently in fiction for many years. Every genre from scifi, dramas, horror, comedies, etc will be touched by it since the event has touched every person on earth. Themes around loneliness and isolation will be more common than before. The aesthetic will be sweatpants.
The other big concept will be concentration camps, specifically the ones currently operated by the United States. China also has these, at a larger scale and with much, much worse treatment, but the megacorps that control western media are too cowardly to broach the subject until after they are banned from the country. Criticizing the US is less risky. Perhaps the next Nobel in literature will be written by a teenager currently laying on a concrete floor trying to console a toddler who was sprayed with a chemical prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
Someone else mentioned Mr Robot and I think it fits the bill. Without giving too much away there are questions like who is really in control, the nature of reality, the rise of China, the interplay between control/privacy/hacking, and of course a heavy dose of mental health issues.
I think one big thing they missed was the decay of traditional news media and the rise of social media but maybe I'm forgetting something.
Biopunk's been done but pandemics and battles for cures and control over cures and 'was this all a conspiracy' seem very relevant to this year specifically
At it's best, sci-fi is a great canvas for social commentary. You can use present day concerns and take them out to their ultimate conclusions to highlight the risks and rewards of taking our society down a certain path. That also means sci-fi is very much a product of the time it was created. If cyberpunk is getting less relevant, it's only because our society's concerns have moved on from corporate skepticism to corporate embrace and from techno-fear to techno-love. The cyber tech itself has gone from new to mundane. The next anxieties will produce the next sci-fi.
I'm gonna be honest, I only like cyberpunk for the aesthetics, not any of the themes. In 2020 most of the messaging behind the cyberpunk genre seems trite and obvious in hindsight (probably because of how accurate a lot of their social predictions were). I think most people agree that are into cyberpunk today are into it more for the neon signs than the social commentary.
> I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the baseline of now, and begins a whole new series of extrapolations that creates a new consensual vision of a different future.
I think VirtuaVerse does it pretty well. It has that classic cyberpunk style, but it explores very contemporary ideas. I.e. it's not stuck in the '80s.
After the (disappointing) release of Duke Nukem Forever, the title of the single most awaited game in history was overtaken by Half-Life 3 (or, maybe, Half-Life 2: Episode Three).
I don't think a lot of people are still holding their breath for HL3, especially without any official acknowledgment of its development and the release of Half-Life:Alyx. HL2 was also so long ago (16 years) that most young adults don't even have a connection to it, as they didn't grow up with it.
TFA specifically mentions how much cyberpunk is retreads of shadowrun and 2077. The trailers make me think the game is going to be very true to the source material, so it's not pertinent to the question asked in TFA.
Any reason to assume it won't be just rewarmed clichés of the genre? (which could still make a fun game! - but probably not satisfy the discussion in the article)
Then you should maybe step outside your filter bubble? The amount of merch and cosplays out there for Cyberpunk 2077 is unprecedented for an unreleased game as far as I can tell.
So instead of ninjas you get MMA jiu jitsu guys, US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan, aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear disasters, cartels rather than Yakuza, and so on. It's like 2017 future is extrapolated out instead of 1984 future.
But the plot is extremely Gibson-esque: a woman hired as a consultant on a strange project for a mysterious ultra-wealthy client, rogue AIs, interactions between mega corporations and the criminal underworld.
So if you take cyberpunk to mean just the synthesizers and neon and chrome aesthetic, then it is getting sort of tiresome. But you can update all that stuff to something slightly fresher and still tell the same kind of stories and it works.