Is Cyberpunk Dead? A Conversation with Bruce Bethke
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Plenty of 80s cyberpunk/sci-fi depicted climate-change futures; notably, Blade Runner.
I do agree that some (well, most) of the cyberpunk themes are still very much alive though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somebody's an essayist.
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.
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.
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.
But that never happened to punk musi... oh, I see your point.
But it's okay to like things that aren't cutting edge or groundbreaking or Oscar-worthy, too. Critical discussion != criticism.
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.
Here's a vid that talks about exactly what people here are trying to analyze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSvUqhZcbVg
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Though on quick second thought I think there is at least one instance where he does contact her in that space.
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.
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.
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?
To be fair Gibson is often critical of works inspired by his novels and the genre he created.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030811223349/http://www.willia...
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.
The genre itself actually dates back to the 60s.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the 12 year olds are all on call of duty & fortnite. I suspect single player games are in a slightly older age bracket these days
> 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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
"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.
Looking at the "cyberpunk" today, it's a fashion trend in a lot of ways.
Futurist rooted in the way technology is today, projected forward 20-40 years, would look very different than cyberpunk.
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.
If there is anything we have in abundance today is tech that can be horribly abused by those in power.
"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".
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
I think you’re actually restricting the category more than I did.
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.
That some popular works in the genre share some of these tropes doesn't mean that the genre is all about those tropes.
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.
"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 a great interview with the man.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/how-william-gi...
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.
Why do you say that?
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.
— Bruce Bethke — Headcrash
Ecopunk has apparently been done, in 風の谷のナウシカ: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24298259
[1] we started with Tron and wound up with "I put on my robe and wizard hat."
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.
+1 for Tom Clancy though. I grew up reading all the Rainbow Six books.
This is where the term "Yellow Journalism" derives from; but even that aged term came to being well after distrust in news media was common.
Also, handing out and distributing hand-pressed folios was common; and a source of much of the zeitgeist for several political revolutions.
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.
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.
"The way things are going in the world, by the time Cyberpunk 2077 comes out it'll be redundant."
eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU - Tech Noir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ruvzfXQoE - Dark All Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQaH3lh-CA4 - Art3mis & Parzival. Pretty much a music clip for Ready Player One.
They have tonnes more: https://www.youtube.com/user/GUNSHIPMUSIC/videos
Yeah, I'm a massive fan. :)
If there's no GUNSHIP music in Cyberpunk 2077, something's definitely gone wrong. ;)
https://web.archive.org/web/20130716211015/http://www.bruceb...
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.
See:
* https://www.gog.com/game/virtuaverse
* https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/virtuaverse-ost
This happens all the time, Cyberpunk is not above the "laws" of time.
> Bruce: wannabe Shadowrun or Cyberpunk 2077 media tie-in fic.
so yeah, basically an elitist point of view filled with "no true scotsman" kind of platitudes.
that'd be like saying every fantasy sucks because it's just a lord of the ring tie in.
> Bruce: I would dearly love to see a new form of SF emerge that reflects the baseline of now
if only he was a writer. oh wait.
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.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...