Cyberpunk derivatives

That happens with every genre. Genres are labels. You can attach them to works long after the fact, whether the original creator(s) intended or not.

Jules Verne wrote steampunk a century before the term was even coined. Cervantes wrote a novel before novels were a thing (at least in the West), and thereby defined what a novel should look like. The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Greek tradition of epic poetry by at least a millennium, but nobody denies that it's an epic poem.

There are probably only a handful of people in the world using the term stonepunk, while steampunk is quite popular. Most of the obscure references here do not have broad adoption. In order for a genre to have influence it has to have cultural resonance

The Flintstones was in effect an animated remake of popular live-action TV series The Honeymooners, with the stone-age setting as just an added quirky facade to get easy jokes out of. It was, needless to say, never meant as an actual reference to any actual stone-age.

Compare this to, say, Dinosaurs, which (while in many ways similar to The Flintstones) had actual references to contemporary events and phenomena.

I've honestly not seen anything as uniquely cringe as putting the word "punk" on the end of words. I think the dumbest one is the steam one. Yes ok, making hats with gears and pipes on or making radios or computers into some ugly monstrosity with rust coloured paint and extra pipes. Truly a waste.

It might also just be a matter of growing up and suddenly realizing that everything seems so much more defined than previously thought.

Anecdotally, but I also noticed that from around 2000 to 2010, suddenly everything needed to be categorized very specifically.

But what stood out is that people would get very weirdly upset if you put something in the wrong box, and all but start a fight about it (over forums, of course.) This was especially prevalent in the electronic music scene, but happens to this day during video game genre discussions.

I think it is fine to pursue this ever increasingly detailed classification of things (not only in art or pop culture, this applies to other knowledge too, including science). The problem might come if one takes one of these descriptive, post-hoc classifications, ignores the fact that they are often diffuse and imperfect, and then tries to use it as a predictive model to explain and deal with everything, and discard any data that doesn't fit. But people like meta, so it might not even be a problem :)

My school library had maybe 3 foot shelves dedicated to scifi/fantasy.

Today I can buy the most obscure books I want on Amazon.

Maybe that is why we have more taxonomies now.

More nuance is the opposite of a problem.

The anti romantic movement consisting of Hawthorne and Melville comes to mind.

Yes, I think cyberpunk was always film noir inspired. E.g. I seem to recall that William Gibson was influenced by Dashiel Hammett.

That one really stood out to me as well. All of the early Cyberpunk I remember reading seemed noir as hell. But maybe Cyberpunk has become such a big tent that "original" Cyberpunk needs a new name.

Snow Crash is cyberpunk but it would be a stretch to call it noir.

We can hope all of them!

For real though, solarpunk at least has a nicely growing scene on Bandcamp. There's a compilation album of various artists simply called "Solarpunk".

Steampunk actually exists as subgenre of metal, rock, and folk ;)

Heh, then it’s no accident your username references Snow Crash.

You jest, but one of the main features of cyberpunk is a sense of hauntology, the economy of futures that never were:

"Is hauntology, then, some attempt to revive the supernatural, or is it just a figure of speech? The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing."

-- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, emph. added.

Vonnegut. No h. Which book? I’ve read most of his novels and most of what’s considered cyberpunk (well, nothing recent though). I can’t think of any of his books that would fit the cyberpunk genre. Closest might be Player Piano which hits a few of the themes, but isn’t really cyberpunk and is more dystopian.