Hacker News Reader

Comment by currymj | Hacker News Reader

The book "Void Star" is an interesting one. It has a William Gibson style plot very similar to Neuromancer but instead of 1980s aesthetic choices, it has 2017 aesthetic choices.

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.

View on HN

> US tech mega corporations are dominant rather than Japan

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.

sure, that's a fair point. Neuromancer trilogy has European family offices, it has an American media/tech company Sense/Net, Zeiss and Braun are mentioned.

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.

Thanks for the recommend, I just grabbed it off Audible.

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.

Cyberpunk 2077 has a very interesting position, there's a lot of interesting architecture detail and layers in what little I've seen of Night City so far (we'll see when the game comes out), including some parts of the city that look usefully old. It just has its own layers of the fact that Night City is an American city, here being designed by mostly Polish artists giving it a strange (accidental?) European sensibility, combined with the idea that in the source fiction (the RPG), Night City was a planned city that didn't ever exist before (the future year) 1994 (Cyberpunk itself was written in the 80s). So there are at least 70-ish years of layers and tarnish to put on the thing, but the fact that it is entirely distinct from a real place was a fictional conceit from the 80s fiction it inherits.

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.

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Night_City

interesting -- i wasn't aware they were sticking that closely to the canon of the source material.

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!

https://jpegfantasy.tumblr.com/image/621139827359875072

The original Blade Runner is a great example of a film that depicts the changing architecture of a city - while we see sweeping shots of mile high sky scrapers throughout the film, on the ground we still see the remains of historic architecture, repurposed and built over - the police station was built within Los Angeles's 1939 Union Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House makes an appearance as Deckard's apartment, and of course the famous Bradbury Building was used as the set for the film's finale. The end result is a city that still feels like it has a history not too dissimilar then the Los Angeles of the real world, extrapolated out to 2019 based on 1980's fears of overpopulation and such.

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.

Interesting. I always thought it was kind of interesting that "cyber-punk" originally meant a type of near future sci-fi, and the term was borrowed to use in various types of "retro" sci-fi (steam-punk, etc).

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.

The other day I described my love for Synthwave music as "futuristic music written today, as though in a past that never was, imagining a future that is still yet-to-be."

>The book "Void Star" is an interesting one

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.

>aftereffects of climate change rather than nuclear disasters

Plenty of 80s cyberpunk/sci-fi depicted climate-change futures; notably, Blade Runner.

Well, put it like that, you could probably swap a few terms (feudal lords for corporations, bandit guilds for cartels, etc etc) and tell "the same kind of story" as Fantasy.

I do agree that some (well, most) of the cyberpunk themes are still very much alive though.

You could, but ultimately it would be harder. In cyperpunk nature is almost never a character or force, but in fantasy words it often is. Cyperpunk aesthetic is also largely about how today’s technology might change the world as it develops. It would be very hard to tell that story in fantasy.

> It would be very hard to tell that story in fantasy.

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.

> Magic-as-technology is a surprisingly under-explored concept

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.

It's common outside of sci-fi as well one of the biggest fantasy RPGs Final Fantasy regularly incorporates "Magitech" as they call it into their worlds.

If you haven't read it before, the Foundation series has this as a theme. There is a priesthood of the atomics, who don't know how it works, just how to run the maintenance manual cargo culting.

Walter Jon Williams, author of the cyberpunk classic Hardwired, also wrote two books in a setting that fuses cyberpunk and fantasy: Metropolitan and City on Fire.

The fantasy equivalent is talking about how their own magic systems can influence society. Brandon Sanderson's two Mistborn trilogies are good examples of this. They don't have that hook to our reality that cyberpunk does, but as a fan of both genres it does carry some of the same vibes.

I thought that sounded familiar. I got the hardcover from a dollar store (for a dollar vs $27 cover price, first printing; I guess they made too many copies?). I'll have to give it a read.

I think that many newer novels are cyperpunk inspired, but that doesn’t make them cyperpunk. The visual aesthetic is just as important as the story telling to the genre.

Sounds interesting. Is the book good?

I'm about 1/3 of the way in; I like it a lot thus far.

Thanks. Need to pick up reading again. Haven't read since I stopped having a commute.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com