> 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.
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.