Well said. The setup clearly was an (IMO schlocky) parody of the genre. The meat of it: neuro-linguistic hacking, the raft, the devastating gun called “reason” that was all superb and faithful to the genre.

I think it plays especially well because the parodic exagerations of one era are indistinguishable from the dystopian elements of the future...

> the devastating gun called “reason”

That punchline...

And in the real world there's the Earth model that heavily influenced Google Earth, and the librarian's "intelligence without consciousness" conversational style is lookig pretty damn prescient right now.

I found the main neuro-linguistic hacking plot to be incredibly campy; it certainly took some of the core concepts of the genre and dialed them up to the point where one could argue it was parody.

I found it deeper than most concepts in the genre, the core of that plot is one of the most impotant questions in contemporary philosophy - the realtionship between thought and language.

In this, it stands beside "Bela Legosi's Dead," which simultaneously invented goth and was the perfect parody of goth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKRJfIPiJGY

I think it was a little late in the game to be “foundational”

the bulk of tech foresight - Metaverse, Gargoyles, Earth (Google Earth)... of course it's foundational. the fact it lagged several years behind the sprawl trilogy, mirrorshades, or schismatrix, etc is irrelevant.

FWIW the metaverse goes back to True Names, with cyberdeck roots in Web of Angels…

and microtransactions in Ubik.... *shrug* I mentioned quintessential works rather than "origin stories" to avoid an inevitable "all work is derivative".

edit: True Names surely should have been added in my brief list.

I don’t think True Names is in any way cyberpunk. No mirrorshades vibe at all, which is part of its charm.

I want to assume you're joking, but I've encountered people who earnestly think the essence of cyberpunk is the retro-80s neon aesthetic, so your comment is in Poe's Law territory for me.

Then Sherlock Holmes is far too late to the game to be foundational in the detective story genre (first appearing in 1887, 46 years after The Murders in the Rue Morge).