Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

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I am confused, modern Science Fiction has gone way beyond Cyberpunk. It takes into consideration what having real AI might mean for the world, or what a post-scarcity society might look like, or how horrible/painful the transition to that post scarcity society might be, as all the current holders of power do everything they can to maintain their grip on the world.

Modern science fiction describes worlds where people can clone their consciousness 50 times over, where it is possible to adjust the perception of time, and where plans take millennia to come to fruition.

Accelerando by Charles Stross. Recursion by Tony Ballantyne. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Yes, these are all evolutions of previous ideas, but Science Fiction has always built on itself.

You're not confused, the article is confused. It boils down to a gripe against the suffix "-punk" and it tries to make some connection between that and the lack of originality that is to be expected when art meets mass-market.

And then at the end, it blames the authors! "You may need to drop the -punk suffix". The authors I know hate the categorizations, but fans keep sticking labels on them. At least the labels publishers and bookstores attach are broad brushes like 'Science Fiction', 'Romance', or good old 'Literature' for the works that have managed to shake off their burdens.

Sounds like we have a developing punkgate on our hands

Even The Culture Series, which Iain Banks started in the late 80's, is post-cyberpunk.

I almost feel like the author of the blog went and read Altered Carbon for the first time and somehow thought it was a continuation of Gibson and Stephenson's work. Neither of their latest stuff feels very "cyberpunk" to me. Maybe more so with "The Peripheral", but certainly not Seveneves.

Charles Stross Accelerando is fantastic, one of the best books I have ever read. I wish I could find more like it. There are some great videos by him where he talks how hard to establish a realistic fictional world 50-100 years from now as opposed to 1000 years in the future (where you can come up with anything-ftl, wormholes and so on).

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