> cyberpunk’s nihilistic dystopian vision has run out of steam
Cyberpunk is NOT advocating for dystopia, it's WARNING US about it.
Cyberpunk is NOT advocating for dystopia, it's WARNING US about it.
my personal favourite solarpunk inspired designs, was Vincent Callebaut Architectures’ proposal for the new roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral after the fire
Imagine being so fucking smug you want to radically alter the reconstruction of a priceless historical building to make a political statement.
Pretend? It's literally in the first sentence of the wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk
"combination of lowlife and high tech" ... juxtaposed with societal collapse or decay
Citation: Thomas Michaud, "Science fiction and politics: Cyberpunk science fiction as political philosophy"
It does not get more political than that.
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/09/notre-dame-roof-vincent-ca...
I see nothing smug there, just a smart and appropriate upgrade. It fits seamlessly onto the rest of the structure, while the former roof was just a boring affair.
Cyberpunk was social and political commentary from the start. Solarpunk is too, but feels less genuine. It feels like a corporate feel-good aesthetic designed for pharmaceutical television commercials hocking anti-depressants.
I've never seen much in the way of social or political commentary from steampunk. Steampunk is extremely kitsch. It looks cool, but there's not much more to it than looking cool and invoking pseudo-nostalgia for the 19th century. At best you get some weak commentary about 19th century colonialism and industrialization chewing people up, but mostly this genre is about glorifying the Victorian/Industrial style.
If you fundamentally alter the way it looks, it is no longer a historical reference. It is something new, albeit with an interesting history / story.
If you redesign it, you should also rename it.
When something is repaired to the best of our ability, the future can look back on it and understand the context that we were trying to make it as it was - and all the hallmarks of this era will be identifiable as the minimum amount.
If we redesign it, we make it more about us and our current time. the future will likely be able to redesign it better, so it's just going to look like an ugly patch that is way too extra.
If we prefer to make the building about us and our current time, we should just destroy the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch as a full redesign.
to soften you up for acceptance of "there is no alternative" via shock doctrine.
Furthermore, also depending on how and where you look at it,
we've long overtaken the warnings of 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and following, at least partially.
He also calls an underground, generally unpopular aesthetic "tired". Cue my eyes rolling to the back of my head so hard they snap connecting nerves...
So... one big cyberpunk movie every 10 years? Games every few?
Marvel, fantasy, all that other pop culture garbage sees new movies on a seemingly monthly cadence.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore cyberpunk as a genre and warning and seethe at watching the optimistic yuppies drag 'punk' through the mud with their 'rebellion against negativity' garbage. But cyberpunk is not a popular genre.
Also I'm pretty sure Star Wars and Star Trek were as big, if not bigger.
Yes, The Matrix had a huge impact -- I was there for it. But that was as much about the revolution in VFX and cool shots than it was about having a cyberpunk setting. Besides, all of the followups (save for the Animatrix) have been duds.
CP2077 came to be because CDPR likes to take unknown franchises and elevate them to greatness; this is true for both The Witcher polish novels and the Cyberpunk TTRPG. While I think the demand for cyberpunk is certainly there, as evidenced by the folks' enthusiastic support for CP2077, I would not consider cyberpunk to be the dominant force in sci-fi. (The lukewarm reception for both the modern Blade Runner remake and the new Matrix confirm this opinion for me) I would suggest you consider your thoughts in a wider context.
> two most inflential sci fi movies of all time
Can you qualify this statement a bit more? I don't really agree here. The Matrix doesn't even appear in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films and the numbers here aren't worthy of the kind of praise you're heaping on it: https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Matrix#tab=summ...
It wasn't even the highest grossing film the year it came out, as it was eclipsed by Star Wars: Episode 1.
It's obviously going to be somewhat subjective, but if take film critics or scholars words to have any weight since they are constantly comparing these things, The Matrix and Blade Runner are almost always at the top of 'Most Influential Sci-fi Movies of All Time' lists. e.g.
Empire: 1. BR 4. Matrix https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-sci-fi-mov...
Screenrant: 1. Matrix 4. BR https://screenrant.com/most-influential-sci-fi-movies-of-all...
Vogue: Not ranked but both are in the top 10 https://www.vogue.com/article/most-influential-sci-fi-films
Cultural ifluence doesn't equal financial success. (There are tons of best seller books out there that sell far more than classics ever have, but are forgotten about almost immediately after). The impact both films have had on popular culture is gigantic. Think of all the movies, TV shows, and cartoons that parodied or copied their styles. There's tons of scholarship out there on it too, but still it's always going to be somewhat subjective.
But yeah I somewhat agree that cyberpunk style was starting to die out in the early 2000s, I just think it had a revival recently due to the fact that certain elements of cyberpunk really came to fruition in recent years. https://bluelabyrinths.com/2018/12/05/cyberpunk-1-0-visions-...