Charles Stross's early works came in at tail end of cyberpunk, lets call it the silver age, and to me they read like they're trying to find a way forward for the genre, and he ultimately decided that wasn't the way to go. So he branched out from there, including to near-future sci-fi. This was ultimately a dead end because he kept finding that, no matter how strange the plot, by the time a manuscript was really starting to take its final form he was already proven right by current events. And publishing schedules being what they are, his book wouldn't hit shelves until a year or more later at which point they'd read like derivative commentary on year++ old events. Essentially, his predictions were pretty good, but his expected timeline was far too generous: the future was coming too fast. All of his work is worth reading though, and I think his Laundry Files & Merchant series would appeal to different, somewhat overlapping sets of HN readers. For one of the most interesting mind fck time travel stories, check out his short work Palimpsest.
> Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died).
More about that close future scifi dead end :
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-craz...
Including a... pandemic novel !
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality...
... I swear that I used the word "trump" above unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! the artists themselves speak up about how much they despise the people using their music. The fact that the message is being misused couldn't be clearer. But the people using it are there for the aesthetic: the general sound and feeling of being rebels, ahead of the curve, etc.
And honestly I think that's a good thing. Creative reuse results in good and bad; jazz and Christian rock. Creators can't control their art once it's in the public, and the world would be a smaller place if they could.
Sorry I didn't reply to the part about Charles Stross, it looks like an interesting commentary but I'm not familiar enough with Stross in particular.
I'd argue that another game released in 2020 understood the "punk" part of cyberpunk much better than CP2077 -- Umurangi Generation. Instead of giving you a gun, the game gives you a camera, and tells you to go out and document how everyday people are reacting to the end of the world. The game was primarily inspired by the early 2020 brushfires in Australia, while its add-on DLC pack Macro was heavily influenced by the protests following the death of George Floyd, and both heavily criticize how the state misleads, reassures, and generally fails to respond to dire situations.
Errant Signal did an excellent deep-dive (and spoiler-filled) video essay on the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctkeq8IpdQA
Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore. Now it's just a trope. So I disagree with what some are saying that cyberpunk is currently used to convey a message; it's not, in general. It's used to convey a trope that's lost most of its barb.
All in my opinion, of course. And Gibson's.
I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms.
The merit and pertinence of the message as radical criticism is going to have everything to do with ground level execution of details, depth of world building, clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different depending on any particular media.
I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something unique about the genre as distinct from other genres.
It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to find a time where that would be a genuinely radical message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. There was also the East India Trading Company and its affect on India.
I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd like to), but I always got the sense that humanization and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk and the dystopian world created by corporations was one of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, though.
It ebbs and it flows - there are times in history you can fondly remember for their plenty and times you can remember for their scarcity.
The only really new trend, IMO, is that in the modern world (I think for the first time ever) working continuously for the same company is a financial trap. The strangest innovation of the current day is that churn is accepted and retaining skilled employees is de-emphasized compared to... hiring new replacement employees with less skill. This incredibly bonkers habit has gained wide enough acceptance that it's sort of the default business state.
A quote from one of the RPGnet moderators, something to the effect of...
"Transhumanism is about how technology will fundamentally reshape how we live, and how we perceive what it means to be human. Cyberpunk is how it won't."
"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.
It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.
More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, unless presented in an innovative way, feel derivative and boring to me.
I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a message that has become a trope.
...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes.
The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.
Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it.
It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.
Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains.
People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a thought terminating cliche.
Those tiki torch people arent exactly running the country now are they?
It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis.
Yes, well, like punk-punk. See Jello Biaffra and The Melvins, "Those dumb punk kids will buy anything":
Hey, we're back Show us how much you care
The merch booth's right over there
And if our scam works What a bandwagon it will be
https://genius.com/Jello-biafra-those-dumb-punk-kids-will-bu...
And music:
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.
The problem with playing the capitalist game is that it demands all of you, and never guarantees anything back.
I will whole hardily agree that corporations manage to water down a lot of interesting things to drive mass market appeal but building something interesting within a corporation doesn't negate its message. We live in a world where 90%[1] of genuine political discussion happens hosted by either Google, Facebook or Reddit - those are our forums for discussion in the modern world.
I'd also just briefly disagree with litmus testing and gatekeeping as generally useful concepts - in almost all the cases they're applied they're used to try and reduce a complex spectrum discussion into a binary choice (aka capital punishment, weed legalization, abortion legality) and they add nothing of value - merely providing an easier tool to help clump a wide discussion into the theming of Us vs. Them.
1. I have no facts for this but I think it's a reasonable ballpark.
CDPR is about as authentic as you'll find in high-budget video game development; and as I enjoy high-fidelity entertainment, as well as Pondsmith's take on Cyberpunk, I quite enjoyed CP2077.
The alleged egregious overtime was acknowledged as a voluntary undertaking by several team members, and it seems as though the journalists didn't bother to investigate into the allegations they received from a couple of complainers and opted to report them at face value. The subsequent response from the company affirmed my understanding, where they publicly apologized for bugs, reported to shareholders about their efforts to correct internal development processes, and so forth.
As though working an extra 8h a week during the final months before a hard deadline is either unheard of or intolerable. There was no exodus of talent from CDPR.
and indeed many original punk bands found commercial success
does that somehow invalidate punks? at best it shows that - like all (?) things before it - punk was also consumed by consumerism.
Yes. When a movement whose entire thesis is "fuck the establishment" gets co-opted by the establishment, it becomes invalid as a movement, a hollow and pathetic shell of itself. Punk is anti-society, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-authority, anti-conformity, anti everything, even anti-music to a degree. Its relevance died as soon as the last punk lived past 30 and it became old people music. Just another style to buy at Hot Topic.
You, by living in society, are not punk. The novels you label as punk are not punk because they are made for profit, advertised to appease and sedate a sense of counterculture, and bought with money made from corporate work.
Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify.
Plenty of other punk types. Train hopping crusty punk types come to mind. Moxie Marlinspike has a few great stories about hanging with that crowd.
The story is about megacorporations greedily controlling the supply of food via patents on GMO crops in a post-peak-oil society. There's no artificial general intelligence lurking in the electrons to save or doom us, just the consequences of our own choices.
Most of his stories in "Pump Six and Other Stories" are very good. Depressing, but good.
My friend is Thai and said he (Bagciaglupi) couldn't speak the language to save his life, but otherwise liked the book.
I suppose Gibson is guilty of this as well, only with the Japanese instead of Thai. It doesn't bother me.
I've no idea if Gibson has read Bacigalupi or what he thinks of his work, but I am definitely a fan!
Hell, cyberpsychosis, a pretty plot-minor series of encounters, delves into one of the more interesting considerations in the game. That a fair number of people are unable to handle the implant tech at all and lose their ability to function in a balanced way - each encounter has a harrowing series of notes about the person degrading into insanity and each is just sort of... ignored by most of the people around it and accepted as a cost of technological advancement.
I know the devs get a lot of hate, but I think that there is a whole lot of heart and soul poured into that game.
still lotta T-poses though
I'm reminded of that line in The Matrix when Neo breaks The Oracle's vase, "What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"
It's as lazy as it gets, and definitely not punk.
Reading is not very punk, though arguing what punk is is definitely punk.
Having recently been to several punk rock shows (read: damp basement noise fests), I'd say: having a blue collar job, being against "the system", doing copious amounts of cocaine and speed on their time off, and having their entire body blasted with tattoos such as a hand flipping you off, a trash can overflowing with garbage, and many insults. I thought this particular kind of people didn't exist anymore, but no, they're still alive and moshing in the basements of most cities.
He has a point IMHO;
Big fan of Invurt:: groks cyberpunk; made no attempt to copy the aesthetic;
First, Blade Runner came BEFORE Neuromancer was released, so it cannot have been a derivative, and there weren't any good representations of the aesthetic on screen either; its visuals broke new ground in many senses. Gibson rightly feared that:
> "BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, done for. Everyone would assume I’d copped my visual texture from this astonishingly fine-looking film."
[source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.willia...]
Are there any other visual works of cyberpunk that came after Neuromancer and that Gibson praised? There must have been, but how common were they?
Second, I don't think Gibson's main objection was the aesthetic, but rather, that derivative works didn't do anything with it. They just copied, losing the punk spirit and rebelliousness.
For example here[1] is an interview in which Gibson waxes lyrical about pop culture, imagery, prose style and selective use of detail, and also says he didn't "have the patience" to flesh out details like the backstory of what was supposed to actually have happened to the US because they'd only detract from the reading enjoyment. He's saying that he was influenced by how cheesy Cold War era blockbusters could imply a lot happened with a few well chosen casual words, not claiming to make a case for a different politics or to channel Brave New World
And let's be brutally honest, the politics of Neuromancer isn't really more sophisticated than "counterculture is cool" and a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF. The writing is fantastic, but it's all about imagery and ideas. Even his polemical writing on Singapore and the Golden Age seem more concerned that paternalistic ideas of ideal societies are dull than anything else.
Even the most cynically commercial use of cyberpunk cliches embraces the idea that counterculture - or at least 1980s cyberpunk idea of counterculture - is cool
> "[...] a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF"
That was no small feat. It seems pretty major to me. It took me some work to mature from my young SF fan self to notice the rightwing undertones in much of it. Call it naivete, if you want.
What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
> What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye-popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to deviate so much as an inch from them.
But eye-popping style was all it ever was. Neuromancer didn't fight against John Campbell's opinions on slavery, or capitalism, or Cold War politics, it just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias.
> "[Gibson] just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias."
You are not wrong, but I'd argue that it had a meaningful message beyond plain aesthetics when placed in the right context, i.e. when Neuromancer and cyberpunk were born. Now it's just the aesthetic, and the "message" of hi-tech lowlives and evil megacorporations is a lazy one, just rehashing mindlessly what was before. I'm not saying nothing interesting and new can be said about this, but that it has become a codified trope you can write on autopilot.
It's easy to say it was always like this, but it's false. Yes, Gibson drew from pop culture, and he used it to create something new, for whatever reasons. Now it's just rehashing for the sake of rehashing, and some of the tropes are hilariously outdated but still copied by the faithful.
Or in his own words: https://twitter.com/greatdismal/status/1164240403270270976?l...
(and the Matrix was both an iconic film and something which borrowed more directly, liberally and naively from Neuromancer than most of the low effort stuff)
I agree cyberpunk now is anachronistic, which has its own appeal. I did say I liked its aesthetics! It's a world that could have been, but never really was. Sort of like Stranger Things is anachronistic and I like it for it (well, the first season, anyway).
But that's the thing, isn't it? Some other commenter in this thread mentioned that cyberpunk originally was about rebellion and now it's about nostalgia. I am of course more cynical, I think many authors (of videogames, anime, etc) simply copy the looks because that's the easy part.
The nostalgia is doubly puzzling because the world described by cyberpunk is not nice, it's hopeless. It's almost like feeling nostalgia for the world described in Orwell's 1984. Not exactly though, because there's adventure and a rich cast of rogues and lowlives in cyberpunk, whereas in 1984 everything is hopeless, gray and doomed, but still... it's weird to long for any dystopia.
The Matrix: you definitely have a point. The Matrix, style-wise, was impressive when it opened! But I feel the same irritation towards the abuse of effects and tropes it brought into the cinematic world.
I've never seen Gibson describing Neuromancer as a critique of Reagonomics or having any particular political agenda. Interested to see it if so! I don't think of Gibson having nearly as much "political" agenda or grounding as some other early "cyberpunk" writer's like Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker.
(I don't think Gibson himself referred to his work "cyberpunk" or "punk" originally)
[1]: https://ew.com/article/1994/08/26/william-gibson-first-man-c...
Slums and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich I understand, but what do cyberspace and AI's (two of Neuromancer's more original and iconic themes) have to do with Reagan? Nothing, from what I can tell.
Gibson had of course famously never used the internet when he wrote Neuromancer (on a typewriter).
See https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1988/demo/p23-15...
In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is “allergic” to Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely generic. Your comment makes me wonder if that was a commentary on the works derived from his initial vision in the Sprawl trilogy.
I remember this a bit differently? I thought she wore nondescript de-branded clothing specifically because she had a behavioral/neurological/information processing/sensory overload condition that caused her to have tics and flip out in the presence of excessive visual input. I remember her intentionally choosing this clothing, as it jumped out at me. And I thought she wore Levi’s, not that it matters, though they do have minimal brand motifs compared to some brands.
I didn’t finish the book, and it has been a while, so I could well be mistaken or outright wrong. I don’t remember TH being mentioned specifically.
This is about an unexpected encounter with these clothes (not wearing them), and it doesn’t sound good to me.
Tommy Hilfiger clothing was considered kinda prep style, but got appropriated by street style and a lot of rappers would wear it in the 90s up til Tommy outed himself as a racist, by publicly saying that he didn’t want black people wearing his clothes, as he thought it brought down the value of the brand, or some such racist drivel.
That is to say, I am curious what style or aesthetic she’s recoiling against. To me, it seems like she’s vaguely working class attired, and recoils against professional costumes.
But beyond mil spec, the whole Blue Ant series is just a beautiful tableau of different fashions and designed objects. Made me really want a Curta.
I’ve always loved the the affordable beauty line:
“In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”
He specifically said this about the game: "The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me."
"Capitalism is very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a 'motley painting of everything that ever was'."
I suspect you could combine the "vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics" with a more modern political critique. To some extent, I feel like the original Deus Ex game is still relevant as it tangles with the corruption of power and how technology enables that process, which is more relevant than ever.
If you're one of those folks inexplicably bitter about prerelease trailers then maybe I can understand your stance. But dismissing the monumental amount of effort that it has taken to deliver what some of us perceive as one of the highest works of art in the genre, is ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(role-playing_game)
I also loved the game. Really don't understand all the hate it received.
I definitely think CDRP had a lot of help world building from the source material (perhaps leaning on it too much) but I'd definitely buy a sequel, maybe not on launch though!
I can't say anything about C2077 because I haven't played it, I can just repeat what Gibson said about it. And he didn't play it either, he was just judging the trailer.
What I can say is to note the three things you mentioned, "transhumanism, sex and corporate power" are also explored in other highly derivative and uninspired works of cyberpunk-influenced fiction, like Altered Carbon. Boy, was I disappointed by that show [1]! It's completely shallow, uninterested in exploring the philosophical ramifications of the technology it introduces, and instead goes for flashy visuals, endless action and explosive gore. I watched season 1 because I wanted to know whodunnit -- it was disappointing -- and season 2 was unbearable.
Whether you agree with me or not that Altered Carbon on Netflix was garbage, at least you must concede using those cyberpunk tropes you mentioned is not enough to determine quality or complexity of the plot and/or message. They are just tools in a toolbox, and can be used to build something interesting or something utterly uninspired, just another "gritty" cyberpunk copycat.
---
[1] and from what my friends tell me, the book series is not fundamentally different. Only the details vary.
Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon books (as well as his Black Man, published as Thirteen in North America) are very angry and bleak in tone, from what I recall. (But they were not angry at technology itself, the way the characters of the Altered Carbon TV series were; in-universe characters weren't trying to eliminate the cortical stack in the books.) They also have some spectacular action sequences, which is probably why they were picked up for TV. They have some horrific tortures (both in VR and out of it), much worse than shown in the TV adaptation, which is why I haven't re-read them like I did Neuromancer.
But as a fan of the genre I think that CP2077 did what it set out to do and then some. And while those points may be somewhat tired cliches -- and admittedly these are my favorite kinds of narratives so I don't really care -- the only pieces of any kind of media that made me truly feel like I was in the driver's seat roleplaying that experience was the original Neuromancer and Cyberpunk 2077. Not Rifts RPG, not Blade Runner, not The Ascent (and holy shit what a suprise blessing that game was), nor anything else.
One dimension of Cyberpunk as envisioned by William Gibson genuinely was explicitly aesthetic, in the way in which it was meant to be understood and experienced. So derivatives focusing on that aren't necessarily missing the point.
However, it's still certainly possible to reproduce those aesthetics in bad ways, or to lean on them to the exclusion of any deep message or story of any kind, etc. And it's certainly fair to criticize any given derivative for shallowness of vision. So, as a criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 it's perfectly appropriate, but I don't think execution of aesthetics in and of itself misses the point.
Point of correction: I'm trying to convey what Gibson said. If there's a generalization, it's not mine but his. The guy invented cyberpunk, so I think he has a right to holding very strong opinions about it.
I do tend to agree with Gibson, but I also like the aesthetic and I'm content reading and looking at cyberpunk, as long as it's not too lazy.
I'll look harder later ;)
Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem being stuck in the past. But I see his point.