[HN Gopher] The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk ___________________________________________________________________ The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk Author : sebastianvoelkl Score : 311 points Date : 2022-04-05 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sabukaru.online) (TXT) w3m dump (sabukaru.online) | KaiserPro wrote: | I read Neuromancer a few years back, I liked it. I do don't | normally read scifi as it tends to annoy me. However this didnt. | | One thing that really stuck out for me was that _everyone_ had | memory foam mattresses. The slums, the really slick holiday | homes, everyone. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | > One thing that really stuck out for me was that _everyone_ | had memory foam mattresses. The slums, the really slick holiday | homes, everyone. | | Interesting; I guess it could be explained in-universe by | economies of scale, that is, (memory) foam mattresses being | faster and cheaper to produce than other types of mattresses. | I'm thinking of spring mattresses, which actually have parts | and different materials, whereas foam can be just a single | block I think? And when you think about logistics, memory foam | can be compacted and vacuum sealed for transport. | Apocryphon wrote: | Has anyone read his Bridge trilogy? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_trilogy | | > The trilogy derives its name from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay | Bridge, which was abandoned in an earthquake and has become a | massive shantytown and a site of improvised shelter. | | Seems sadly two heartbeats into the future for today's Bay Area | pmoriarty wrote: | Honestly, this sounds a bit like some of Philip K Dick's work, | which was set in the Bay Area after a nuclear war... he wrote | it about 50 years before Gibson, though I'm sure Gibson must | add something original to the mix. | | I once asked Gibson whether he was influenced by Philip K Dick, | and he said that he didn't read Dick when he was young, and was | more influenced by Pynchon instead. Still, despite his denial, | he seems to be retreading a lot of ground first covered by Dick | himself. | Apocryphon wrote: | I just started reading _Bleeding Edge_ , which very much | reads like a cyberpunk book in terms of dropping dozens of | unelaborated references and allusions, or maybe like Douglas | Coupland. Though I'd say it feels more like one of Bruce | Sterling's lighter works- _Zeitgeist_ in particular- than | something more like classic cyberpunk. (I've always | associated the genre with brand-dropping, though that happens | a ton in John Brunner's work, which predates Gibson.) | Independently, Pynchon also does that often, even in his | novels not about high technology. | mindcrime wrote: | Funny you would ask: I _just_ finished _All Tomorrow 's | Parties_ about a week ago, as the end of a massive read/re-read | of William Gibson. I started with Neuromancer and read the | Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy back to back. | | I'd read everything at least once before, except _Idoru_ and | _All Tomorrow 's Parties_, so this was a chance to kinda do it | all at the same time, finish the stuff I had not read, and | kinda have all this William Gibson in my head at more or less | the same time. | | Having done all that, I'll add this; if you've only read | _Neuromancer_ , or even only read just the Sprawl Trilogy, | definitely consider giving the Bridge Trilogy a shot. It's | markedly different in many ways, but still very Gibsonesque and | definitely worth reading. The big differences, IMO, are that | the Bridge Trilogy books are less "futuristic" and have less | focus on tech technology qua technology, and focus more on the | people and their interactions and choices, etc. | danielodievich wrote: | So I really like this book and reread it every other year. High | octane fun that tickles my programmer's fancy. | | I like really well made books, so the edition I have is the | Easton Press https://www.eastonpress.com/signed-editions/william- | gibson-n..., from Ebay although mine is unsigned. | | There is an a Suntup Editions version that is to drool over | https://suntup.press/neuromancer, especially the Numbered | Editions. Completely impossible to get except for thousands of | dollars on Ebay. I have a Suntup Edition 451 Fahrenheit and it's | amazing, so I can only imagine what this one looks like. And the | circuit design has an Easter Egg, although I don't know what it | is. | | High quality rare books can be an expensive hobby... | bpiche wrote: | Go get it signed at one of his talks.. | q_andrew wrote: | The Sprawl trilogy and its fashion/world is formed a lot by | politics. Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated | critique of Reaganomics and the problems it exasperated (or, at | the very least, failed to address). The rampant drug abuse, | sovereign corporations, the ever increasing gap of poverty and | technology -- I think a lot of derivative media adopts these | elements to look cool (without actually understanding their | context or meaning). | brimble wrote: | > Gibson himself says that Neuromancer is an exaggerated | critique of Reaganomics | | The (now-)standard Cyberpunk settings strikes me as, in part, | asking "what would it _really_ look like if David Friedman 's | ridiculous capitalism fan-fic happened?" | | His _The Machinery of Freedom_ was published in '73, and was a | big part of the Reagan/80s zeitgeist. | ethbr0 wrote: | I'd imagine looking back, a lot of _Neuromancer_ and pre- | ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written | in an information-scarce world. Versus the information-excess | world we now live in. | | In the former, I remember concepts being so much bigger and | more concrete. E.g. the "War on Drugs" or "Reaganomics". These | were things that existed because powerful people said they did. | And there was debating, but ideas were still clearly defined. | | So even though CP authors were imagining our future, it was a | pretty fundamental shift to go from books-at-libraries to | everything-anywhere-all-of-the-time. | | Now, every concept seems to have much fuzzier conceptual edges. | Because there are a million opinions about it circulating | publicly and loudly. | pmoriarty wrote: | _" I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre- | ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written | in an information-scarce world."_ | | There's just as much scarcity of valuable information | today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of | garbage which is more accessible than ever before. | rektide wrote: | That information glut, if it does so exist, leads more | towards dis-belief imo & skepticism, especially in the | main. | | Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways | to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before | we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and | the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the | peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the | delusional & extremists have outsized visibility. | | The disbelief keeps growing. We dont need Adbusters as much | because the thin transparency of the world, of being sold | garbage mounds of low-grade content is well known, we | understand how shallow things are. And disbelief keeps | rising. | | In contrast to the higher trust, respected mainstream | media, the limited availability of information which came | before. Which gel'ed the world into place, which created | shared beliefs & allowed agendas to be driven. Where-as now | the all-defector anti-agenda is the default mode for many. | ethbr0 wrote: | I'd never thought about info virality (aka memeticness) | that way, but it's a good perspective about the phase | change that seemed to happen between past and present. | | I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their | virality, which has stayed constant throughout time. | | But the cost of transporting information from one person | to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and | pretty much every conceivable metric). | | Consequently, things that would not have spread virally | in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do. | | It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, | not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves. | | But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when | newspapers and radio were popularized as well. | TranquilMarmot wrote: | The Sprawl trilogy is my favorite series of books. Probably the | only books that I've read over and over... and over. | lawrenceyan wrote: | I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science | fiction, now in their 40s/50s?, think of the world we live in | today. | mindcrime wrote: | _I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science | fiction, now in their 40s /50s?, think of the world we live in | today._ | | As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect | there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us. | | Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old | adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings | very true. Clearly in certain sense we _are_ living in "the | cyberpunk future". But by the same token there are obviously | regards in which we are not (so far as we know). | | I continue to see Cyberpunk as stimulating and fascinating in | terms of thinking about the potential of technological | developments, while continuing to be a warning about the | dangers of certain paths that we might go down (and in some | cases, are arguably already headed down). While I'm not as | anti-advertising in the general sense as many HN'ers, I will | say I dislike the way so much of what we call "tech" has become | all about finding ways to serve more ads to more people, more | efficiently - as opposed to working on finding better ways to | purify water, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, etc. And I | believe that there are company executives out there who would | actually authorize the deployment of Max Headroom style | "blipverts" even if they were exactly as flawed as described in | Max Headroom. Not all would, of course, but I expect they | exist. | | My relationship with cyberpunk is a bit weird though, because I | also don't share the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments often | associated with "punk" ideology. In fact, I'm very much an an- | cap[1]. So while I enjoy this fiction, I don't always interpret | the political bits the way some others might. And as much as I | see mega-corporations as an affront to human values, human | decency, freedom, etc., I see governments as equally so (or | more so). Both are just ways to concentrate power and oppress | people in my book. _shrug_ | | Anyway, speaking more generally, I think the world we livein | today is amazing in many ways, and kinda sucks in quite a few | ways. I see Khan Academy, Youtube, Wikipedia, Project | Gutenberg, inexpensive but crazy powerful computers, ubiquitous | bandwidth, hand-held computers (smart phones) that are | basically straight out of science fiction, etc. as adding so | much to our world and enabling so many things. But at the same | time, you can't ignore climate change, pollution, poverty, | rising sea levels, the recent surge in something resembling | what you might call "right wing populist fascism", etc. and not | be a bit bothered. | | We can put men on the moon, but we have people living in | cardboard boxes. It's frustrating because I'm convinced we can | do better. _sigh_ Sorry for the long rant. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism | runesofdoom wrote: | Anyone interested in the roots of cyberpunk might also be | interested in John Brunner's 1968 novel *Stand On Zanzibar*. | cyberpunk wrote: | _cough_... My mother may have something to say about that. | JKCalhoun wrote: | Not his 1973 novel "The Shockwave Rider"? | mindcrime wrote: | _The Shockwave Rider_ should definitely be considered | something like "proto Cyberpunk" IMO. And regardless of | that, I'd absolutely recommend it to anyone who hasn't read | it yet. | | I just picked up a copy of _Stand on Zanzibar_ , looking | forward to getting into that soon. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | The film "Heavy Metal" from 1981 also had some of this | aesthetic. So did the magazine counterpart (still in | print!) | mindcrime wrote: | You know, I feel silly admitting this, but I still | haven't ever watched "Heavy Metal". Now I'm thinking I | should make that my top TODO item after work tonight. | That's been on "the list" for, like, forever. | pmoriarty wrote: | The BBC made a fantastic radio play out of _Neuromancer_ : | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo | nathias wrote: | Gibson's failiure was the failiure of punk in general, it was too | cool and not edgy enough and was easily incorporated into | mainstream. | pmoriarty wrote: | Is that a failure or a success? | giraffe_lady wrote: | success if you're trying to make money failure if you're | trying to make change | nahuel0x wrote: | William Gibson was inspired by Jean "Moebius" Giraud, check this | quote from the man himself: | | > "So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that | the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large | part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that | this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New | York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of | the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk'. Those French guys, they | got their end in early." | | In particular, "The Long Tomorrow" by Moebius/Dan O'Bannon | published in 1977 on Heavy Metal magazine was very influential to | Gibson. | btbuildem wrote: | I quite appreciate the author's use of Death Burger art as | illustration in the article. For me it captures the aesthetic of | modern cyberpunk quite well. | henriquecm8 wrote: | Death Burger is probably my favorite artist | alx__ wrote: | I was stoked to see the Necromancer poster used as the header | image. Have a print of that in my house. Love the artist's | style. | | https://citadel9.com/ | syngrog66 wrote: | I reread Neuromancer recently and it was surreal reading all the | refs in it to The Matrix. literally | | I'm rereading Snow Crash now and you cant go 10 pages without | reading about The Metaverse. and so much of its VR world reminds | me of Ready Player One | | everything old thats good seems to get endlessly reinvented, | riffed on, or just blatantly ripped off? lol | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | > I reread Neuromancer recently and it was surreal reading all | the refs in it to The Matrix. literally | | Given how time goes, I'd say it was the other way around with | the references. | jandrusk wrote: | I just start reading Neuromancer on my Kindle last night and then | this post pops up on HN. :) | Ninjinka wrote: | I read Neuromancer a few weeks ago, and couldn't get into it. I | love books like Snow Crash and The Three Body Problem, but didn't | track what was happening Neuromancer half the time and the other | half I didn't care. I realize this is probably a personal defect, | as so many others laud it as a masterpiece. | JKCalhoun wrote: | > When Gibson penned his opening line 'the sky above the port was | the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel' he merged | reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic | today | | It feels like Gibson was riffing on the vibe created by John | Foxx's "Metamatic" [1] in 1980 (never mind his "Ultravox!" [2] in | the years before that). Maybe it was Foxx though that claimed he | was channelling the mood of novels like Ballard's "Crash" [3] | from 1973. Computerization, synthesized music, alienation were a | part of the zeitgeist of the 70's, 80's. | | [1] https://youtu.be/dgaLF2F5LWg | | [2] https://youtu.be/3vy4eZ69Tj8?t=71 | | [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_(Ballard_novel) | mindcrime wrote: | Regarding J.G. Ballard, my understanding is that the early | Cyberpunk authors were all absolutely heavily inspired by his | works. Somebody (I forget who) said something to the effect of | "We were all competing to see who would out-Ballard who". | pmoriarty wrote: | _Blade Runner_ was a much more obvious influence. | leach wrote: | I just got into the sprawl series over the past couple of months. | Finished Neuromancer and count zero, now blazing through Mona | Lisa overdrive. | | It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to | pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world | and think about it for a while. | | I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level | so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy right now. After | I'm done ill probably read Gibsons other stuff because he is | really good. | ad-hominem wrote: | EugeneOZ wrote: | I'll write my comment to outweigh the negativity towards the | game. | | I'm still enjoying the game, still riding through Night City, | finding new details every day: in the roads, tunnels, on the | walls. A random pedestrian might have some link to a book or a | movie - you just need to check their clothes and phrases. So | exciting. | | REDEngine is great - of course, performance is awful, but the | idea of ray-traced lights is great and it looks amazing. Also, | the details level and the skin rendering - are truly amazing. | | Of course, the game needs more, much more work - to make it more | entertaining, deeper. But still, it's an interesting world, and | I'm pretty sure the price was fair. | | One of the most interesting and entertaining parts for me: Cyber | Engine Tweaks. Some days I spend more times for hacking than | playing:) | kemayo wrote: | I think you're being too specific. This article, I'm pretty | sure, is about the aesthetic of the entire genre of cyberpunk, | rather than the video game Cyberpunk 2077. | EugeneOZ wrote: | Yes, my first line mentions it. | kemayo wrote: | Ah, I see what you were going for. It's a bit confusing | that you didn't put this in the thread about Cyberpunk | 2077, so I assumed you were commenting on the article | itself. | the__alchemist wrote: | I finished reading Neuromancer a week ago. I'd played Cyberpunk | 2077 recently, and Dystopia further back. So many of the concepts | from those games appear to come directly from Neuromancer! I | stumbled upon articles implying they were _indirectly_ | influenced; Neuromancer evidently created a whole genre! | | Btw, compared to hard scifi like Stephenson (relevant comparison | due to Snow Crash), Neuromacer isn't really there; its strengths | are outstanding creativity, world-building, character development | (including top-notch implied backstories), personal interactions, | and artful descriptions. | ethbr0 wrote: | Mike Pondsmith (and the R. Talsorian Games authors) basically | picked up the then-recent _Blade Runner_ (82) and _Neuromancer_ | (84) threads and ran with them in CP88. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020 | hajile wrote: | You should read Snow Crash. While Neuromancer created the | style, Snow Crash added in a lot of missing elements and had | the benefit of being written 8 years later and by someone with | some with a lot more knowledge of computing. | the__alchemist wrote: | Loved it! | pmoriarty wrote: | I tried reading it, and couldn't get in to it. It tried to be | funny but wasn't (to my taste), and just seemed very | childish. I liked _Neuromancer_ and _Count Zero_ much more. | newsclues wrote: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome | throw1234651234 wrote: | Gibson pioneered the genre - you have to give him that. He is | very much off on a lot of details though. For example, in his | other books, his descriptions of mercenaries are comical at | best for anyone who has a passing familiarity with the topic. | Nonetheless, I place him up there with Stephenson. All this | DESPITE the fact that Stephenson stands in a league of his own | - he pioneered "post cyberpunk" with Diamond Age and went from | having as much style as Gibson to as much scientific grounding | as Asimov. With that said, Stephenson's latter books are all | science, no char dev, no (interesting) story. | | I really can't think of an author who can stand with | Stephenson. Vernor Vinge comes close, but not there on style. | Then there are authors with a single good idea that are worth | reading, but nowhere near Stephenson's level (e.g. the author | of The Forever War). | | P.S. Obviously I am not so subtly fishing for people to argue | with me and give me book recommendations. Just not the Tri-body | Problem please - it falls in with The Forever War - cool | concept, cool (very long) intro, not much else. | soco wrote: | I loved the Jean le Flambeur trilogy of Hannu Rajaniemi. It's | a similar experience to reading Neuromancer in the 80s. | the__alchemist wrote: | Adrian tsicoholsky's Children of Time duo are the only Sci-fi | books I've read that can stand with Stephenson. Give it a | try! (Assuming you're not an arachnophobe) | Apocryphon wrote: | Bruce Sterling should also be remembered as a major | contributor to the formation of the genre, on par with Gibson | and Stephenson. _Islands in the Net_ grounded future | speculative tech in emerging real-world geopolitics, and | _Schismatrix_ took the genre into far future space, | introducing the concept of cybernetics vs. biological | augmentation. | 8bitsrule wrote: | pmoriarty wrote: | Also see Greg Bear's _Blood Music_ , which came out a year | before _Neuromancer_. | | There was also an early book about VR, which I can't | remember the name of. It was about a reviewer of "apples" | which gave the people who ate them something like a VR | experience. | | Finally, the grandaddy of all of these was _The Machine | Stops_ [1], by E. M. Forster. Written in 1909, it predicted | virtual reality, something like the internet, internet | addiction, chat rooms, and more. | | [1] - https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/mater | ials/th... | Jon_Lowtek wrote: | "Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net": not as gritty-noir as | Neuromancer, not as pop-cynic as Snow Crash but a genre | classic imho. | | T.R.Napper is also worth looking out for. "Neon Leviathan" is | not what i would call a masterpiece, but the author seems | promising. | gpderetta wrote: | Personally I think that Gibson is vastly superior to | Stephenson. | | As for recommendations about post-cyberpunk: our own cstross | has written plenty of great books (Accelerando in primis); | I've liked anything that Peter Watts as written so far | (Blindsight is the most famous, but the rifters saga is also | good and the Sunflower cycles is excellent). Alastair | Reynolds writing is very uneven, but world building is | excellent and so are many of his stories (even outside of the | Revelation Space universe). | | More generally, Egan (hard sci-fi), Banks (space opera) are | some of my favorites. Vance, Wolfe for something more on the | fantasy side. | pmoriarty wrote: | Both Egan and Vinge have been very disappointing to me. I | read them because they wrote a lot about the singularity, | but found them to be extremely boring, dry and | unimaginative. Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ was also very | underwhelming. | | I'm more of a fan of Dick, Herbert, and Lem. | scrapheap wrote: | I really enjoyed Stephenson's early works, but his later | works I've read have all felt like they needed a bit more | editing. Don't get me wrong, they're good, but would have | really benefited from cutting some of the filler out or | admitting they were multiple works and publishing them as a | series. | nurbl wrote: | Having not managed to finish a Stephenson book since "Snow | Crash" (which I liked) i may not be in the best position to | recommend something to you, but I really like Greg Egan. | Truly idea-driven SF which also has interesting enough | characters and story. I also like that his books are pretty | short, even his trilogy is probably shorter than any single | Stephenson book. Very little "fluff". | Keyframe wrote: | Anything in particular you'd recommend? First time I hear | about the guy. | mwigdahl wrote: | _Diaspora_ and _Permutation City_ are both excellent. If | you don't want to commit to a full novel, his short story | collections are all fantastic as well. | vmoore wrote: | Cyberpunk aesthetics are mostly hidden IMHO. I saw a few Youtube | videos of chip factories that make flash drives, SSDs and | integrated circuits, etc and was amazed at the efficiency & | precision of the robots that make them. If you want to be | reminded we're living in the future, visit some of these | factories, they're mind blowing. | mmaunder wrote: | I'm constantly amazed at how Metaverse aficionados quote Snow | Crash and and other 1990s works as cornerstones of cyberspace, | when Gibson invented the term and Neuromancer was written in | 1984. Gibson is the original. The passage where Case connects to | the matrix (also a Gibson term) again for the first time once his | nervous system is repaired is heartbreakingly beautiful. I relate | to it as a young phone phreak growing up in South Africa in the | 80s and 90s when I would bluebox the home country direct phone | trunks to connect to BBSs in the USA. When I could not get | through, usually because they were filtering my seize tones, I | felt the same deprivation. And when I finally connected I felt | the same elation Case feels in this scene... | | "Please, he prayed, now-- | | A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. | | Now-- | | Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler | gray. Expanding-- | | And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the | unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D | chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the | stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority | burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and | high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military | systems, forever beyond his reach. | | And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant | fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face." | sneak wrote: | To be honest, the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts | of Neuromancer that hold up least well. The dirtbags, crime, | sex, and drugs are all still perfect, and I imagine will remain | so. | mmaunder wrote: | They're a 38 year old metaphor. | | Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we | still don't have "professional road surfers", but that | doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant: | | "Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter | wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one | consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke | telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, | rubber tread on the bottom, swiveling on a ball joint. As the | wheel rolls, the feet plant themselves one at a time, almost | glomming into one continuous tire. If you surf over a bump, | the spokes contract to roll over it. If you surf over a | pothole, the rubber prongs probe its asphalt depths. Either | way, the shock is thereby absorbed, no thuds, smacks, | vibrations, or clunks will make their way into the plank or | the Converse hightops with which you tread it. The ad was | right - you cannot be a professional road surfer without | smartwheels." | paparush wrote: | You wanna talk about contact patches? | wiredfool wrote: | I am sooooo glad I read Snowcrash _after_ I stopped | driving pizzas. | jvanderbot wrote: | I just don't like snow crash. Does that make me an outlier? | The whole thing was silly and far too jrpg for my taste. | | I mean, stealing the whole "skitchn" thing and slapping | "Smooth move, ex lax" on a car when they try to shake you | is just campy. | | "Poor impulse control" -- just slapstick comedy at that | point. | TranquilMarmot wrote: | I always read Snow Crash as a bit of a parody. Over the | top, but in a fun way. It's definitely not a serious | novel like Neuromancer is. | grapeskin wrote: | It felt like a hyperactive 14 year old's anime | fanfiction. | | Fun for five pages, but when that tone keeps going, my | brain just ends up feeling burnt out. | sleepybrett wrote: | it does not, it's a shit book. Diamond Age is better | though. | throwanem wrote: | It _is_ campy and frequently cheesy, and I think probably | influenced somewhat by anime which was in the 80s and | early 90s both very different from what it is now, and | still in the US a very niche sort of taste in that you | had to be somewhat "plugged in" even to have heard about | it - it wouldn't hit more widely until the mid- to | late-90s Web boom made awareness and access much more | broadly available. | | That's part of the fun in my view, but it's equally fair | just not to like it - _de gustibus_ etc. Or maybe it 's | just a timing thing; I first read it when I was young and | it was new, and maybe that has as much to do as anything | with why I liked it so well and still regard it fondly. | nimithryn wrote: | Snow Crash was apparently originally envisioned as a | graphic novel, hence the tone | tessierashpool wrote: | if you like that, you should definitely check out the | tornado chasers' car in _Heavy Weather_ by Bruce Sterling. | bpiche wrote: | username checks out | pmoriarty wrote: | _" the descriptions of the metaverse are the parts of | Neuromancer that hold up least well"_ | | I'd be interested in reading descriptions of cyberspace that | are better than _Neuromancer_ 's. | | So far I haven't found any. | jvanderbot wrote: | The commentary I've read (and agree with), is that the | metaverse itself just didn't hold up. | | The internet did not become a new reality. Instead, our own | reality is melding with the internet through always-on | devices and miniaturized sensors and wide wireless | networks. | | Instead of some kind of digital lovecraftian portals hidden | away in parts of realspace that connect to this magical | deadly realm, the modern vision of cyperbpunk should | probably have included something more like an ethereal | plane -- a perfect mirror of the real world that happens to | ignore its physical constraints and provide ways to | manipulate and bypass the realspace. | ant_li0n wrote: | I love Gibson but prefer the Bridge Trilogy over the | Sprawl Trilogy. It's a lot closer to what you're | describing, and the characters are way more interesting. | Characters in the Sprawl seem so two-dimensional to me. | bpiche wrote: | The Bridge trilogy is fantastic but as a fun counterpoint | I respectfully refer to you the two deuteragonists of the | _first book_, Berry Rydell is a huge meathead and | Chevette Washington has less depth than Snow Crash's | Y.T., to me, which is saying something. | | The data analyst guy who ends up obsessing over the VR | idol and ends up in a cardboard box in the Tokyo subway | is super super interesting. Probably my favorite part of | the whole trilogy. If I am not mistaken, Gibson actually | took a lot of inspiration for that character from his own | experiences with photography. The ability to intuitively | line up the right F-stop, shutter speed, and film speed | with a scene and natural light in a second is the | inspiration for the way the analyst intuitively senses | 'nodes' in a social network. | | And I personally think that it is this notion that led | the author to write about causality in the Peripheral- | Agency series. | bpiche wrote: | Wasn't it Gibson himself who wrote this, right in the | beginning of Zero History if I'm not mistaken, when Cayce | is meeting with some French artist in a warehouse in the | outskirts of Oakland? The artist is making an augmented | reality installation of a cyber whale that you can see in | real life with mirrorshades. | | And then the artist says 'the internet is e-ver-ting'. | relaxing wrote: | Depends on your criteria, I guess. As a poetic fantasy, | they are superb. But it's maddening how little sense they | make as a way to navigate computer networks. (Why would you | visualize servers and executing code in a 3D space that you | have to physically navigate, when you could just... execute | a command. Gibson's genius was recognizing that real | computer hacking wasn't cinematic, and making up his own | system.) | | I still love his vision. | narism wrote: | I think that's mostly because he didn't know anything | about computers when he wrote it :) | | "I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I | didn't know anything about computers," he says. "I knew | literally nothing. What I did was deconstruct the poetics | of the language of people who were already working in the | field. I'd stand in the hotel bar at the Seattle science | fiction convention listening to these guys who were the | first computer programmers I ever saw talk about their | work. I had no idea what they were talking about, but | that was the first time that I ever heard the word | 'interface' used as a verb. And I swooned. Wow, that's a | verb. Seriously, poetically that was wonderful. "So I was | listening to it as an English honours student. I would | take it back out, deconstruct it poetically, and build a | world from those bricks. Consequently there are other | things in Neuromancer that make no sense. When the going | gets really tough in cyberspace, what does Case do? He | sends out for a modem. He does! He says: 'Get me a modem! | I'm in deep shit!' I didn't know what one was, but I had | just heard the word. And I thought: man, it's sexy." | | https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william- | gibson... | | His other inspiration for cyberspace is presciently | metaverse-like: | | The idea came to him from watching kids playing arcade | games - "it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be | inside the games, within the notional space of the | machine" - and an advertisement at a bus stop for Apple | computers. "Everyone is going to have one of these, I | thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside | them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind | all of the computer screens would be one single | universe." | | https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/22/william- | gibson... | bpiche wrote: | That last line must be the best one in the whole book. It has | remained with me for years. Thank you for sharing this. | officeplant wrote: | It always confuses me when I hear much older people (I'm 34) | mention Snow Crash and never Gibson's works. Younger people | would be more understandable, but a handful of the tech | podcasts I use for background noise at work are staffed by | 50-70 year old tech folk that grew up with Gibson. | pkdpic wrote: | And didn't Gibson write the screenplay for the film adaptation | of Johnny Mnemonic where they coined the term iPhone in that | one random scene for two seconds? Or did I imagine that? | | Anyway I guess thats like the opposite of cyberpunk... or is | it? :shrug-emoji: | squeaky-clean wrote: | Neuromancer isn't really my kind of scifi but Gibson's | descriptions are so good and poetic I get the urge to re-read | select chapters at least a few times every year. | at_a_remove wrote: | Gibson has a cameo in _Wild Palms_. | | PAIGE: This is William Gibson, Harry. | | HARRY: Oh, yeah... _Neuromancer_ , right? | | PAIGE: He invented the word "cyberspace." | | GIBSON: And they'll never let me forget it. | pmoriarty wrote: | Wow. _Wild Palms_.... I don 't hear that one mentioned often | (or ever). Glad to hear I'm not the only one who's seen this | weird, obscure, flawed gem of a series. | res0nat0r wrote: | This finally came out on Bluray not long ago. I remember | seeing part of this in the early 90s and was trying to try | and find it again forever but it was never available. | | https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Wild-Palms-Blu-ray/245856/ | at_a_remove wrote: | And to go with it, _The Wild Palms Reader_ , which has | all kinds of little columns, clips, and so forth. I have | the Blu-Ray and the Reader sitting in my "COVID Isolation | Hotel Media Crate," waiting for the day I test positive. | user22 wrote: | I remember watching this on Fox and being transfixed. I | curious how my reaction to it would be today. Need to watch | it again. | mensetmanusman wrote: | One of the famous lines from the movie Hackers (1995): | | "Hack the Gibson!" | | Must have been a call-out :) | nimithryn wrote: | The writing is beautiful, but I think Neuromancer has failed to | capture a modern audience due to some of the stylistic choices | Gibson makes (I'm not necessarily arguing they are _bad_ | decisions - I personally enjoyed the style - although I think | one _could_ argue that). | | For instance, Gibson frequently skips exposition, and he | delivers the narrative with a disconnected, stream-of- | consciousness feel that is meant to evoke the sense of | disconnection when "channel-hopping" or digging through large | amounts of information on the internet. Combined with the | frenetic pace of the story it can be confusing if the reader | isn't paying close attention. I'll add that this was also | Gibson's first novel. | | Compare to Snow Crash, which has a pulpier writing style (it | was original envisioned as a graphic novel) or even The Matrix, | which has a tight narrative. Those are more accessible to a | mainstream audience. | | Edit: formatting | bpiche wrote: | I have to disagree, Snow Crash is interminably long, like | most of Stephenson's books. Neuromancer's whole Ocean's 11 | Straylight run job is a very clean story. | nimithryn wrote: | To each his own, but I don't think the length of the book | has anything to do with the clarity of the narrative. And | I'm _definitely_ not arguing that Stephenson writes novels | that are less confusing than Gibson in general (I liked | Anathem! But cmon) I'm just arguing that the style in Snow | Crash spells out what's going on more literally than in | Neuromancer. | ychompinator wrote: | A great and terrible book, Gibson repeatedly throwing you in to | mountains of not yet explained language and concepts before | dragging you out of confusion a chapter later is frustrating and | tiresome, however I could not help coming back for more. I regret | nothing. | criddell wrote: | I have to read his books twice. The first time I just plow | through, confused the entire time. The second pass is where I | can enjoy it, but there are still a lot of times where I read a | sentence and struggle with parsing it. | shon wrote: | His new books are the same. I love it! =D | mindcrime wrote: | Gibson's works definitely demand multiple reads, IMO. I have | read _Neuromancer_ around 5 times now, and I 'd say I "get | it" a little bit more each time I read it. Even now, 30+ | years after I read it the first time, it still fascinates on | a re-read. | motohagiography wrote: | Funny, I read it and then studied it at an alternative high | school in the early 90's, and see Neuromancer as just a presumed | part of my culture. I read this post as a bit like someone saying | when we talk about poverty in rich western countries as | "Dickensian," there was a real person named Dickens who actually | wrote stories of some renown about those themes. | | However, what fiction, art and comics were to us in a time before | we could see pictures on the internet of literally everything, | travel everywhere, and read the thoughts of random strangers on | every conciavable topic, is what cyberpunk signifies now. | | Gibson seemed to escape the category of genre and get treated | "seriously," as "literary," fiction that is usually character | driven, (vs plot driven and didactic fantasy sci-fi) but in | Neuromancer's case the technology was so alive it became a | character, or so the conversation at the time was about the book. | | Literary fiction was a way to extend your experience by | developing an empathy for complex characters and exercise it in a | way that could be applied to relationships with real people. You | could tell when someone had read Catcher and the Rye because it | was like they had adopted the mannerisms of another friend you | hadn't met. The idea and aesthetic of being or becoming cyberpunk | - an anti-hero with super power competence at manipulating the | tech substrate of your environment and system you both existed in | and were against - was what a generation of young hackers adopted | from Neromancer the way boomers read 'Catcher'. | | At the time, Neuromancer's Case, Artimage, and Molly replaced the | Holden Caulfields, Sebastian Flytes, and Larry Darell (characters | from different famous literary novels) as character archetypes a | lot of young readers oriented their aspirations and identities | around, where relationships with these characters often set them | on a real life trajectory. If you read Neuromancer and became a | hacker, it's a lot like reading Brideshead Revisited and | accepting your sexuality, or reading Razor's Edge and dropping | out and living in an ashram. | | Fiction before the internet did that, where it was personal | experience of a relationship with characters and it had | downstream effects on the culture. Post-internet on instagram or | a blog someone follows, the characters are literally more real | because these are people sharing their lives, but also less | complex because the text and images are still representations | created by people who aren't deeply thoughtful and practiced | writers, and by being real, they don't provide ideals or open | aesthetics. Internet people/characters don't provoke and leverage | imagination that lets the reader create new and beautiful things, | rather, they create concrete symbols to imitate and compare with | directly. | | When I read the article I was nostalgic, but thought it's not so | much cyberpunk that is the artifact of the past, it's that the | aesthetics and experience of fiction as a perfect, distant, and | open ended ideal that draws out the readers imagination to create | something new themselves that feels gone. As in I don't miss | cyberpunk so much as I miss fiction being meaningfully upstream | of culture the way it seemed to be before the internet. Anyway, | piqued. | jmyeet wrote: | I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. Maybe because so many | people raved about it or that I read it many years after it was | written. I honestly don't know. It was... OK. But amazing? I | don't see it. | | I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about | science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was | written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, | philosophies and politics of that time. Like it's hard not to | look at the original Star Wars and not see the impact of 70s | aesthetics. | | Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. There was | a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were "taking | over". The depiction of a dystopian future dominated by megacorps | mirrors fears of Japanese culture and influence. | | 40 years later this dystopian future still hasn't eventuated. | Jon_Lowtek wrote: | >> _Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately. | There was a pervasive fear in the 1980s that the Japanese were | "taking over"._ | | I strongly disagree. The core elements are transhumanism, post- | liberal capitalism, high tech and low lives with a lot of pulp | and noir: sex, drugs and violence at the street level. There | are no heroes, no epics, just deeply broken people getting into | a mess of intrigues as everyone just tries to fill their own | egoistic needs, deal with their personal demons, or gets | dragged along a path of least resistance. Claiming this is fear | of xenos taking over is to close ones eyes for the very | problems of our culture in favor of blaming someone else. The | dystopian future has been there all along, you are just to | sheltered in your uptown community to know about the perils of | addicts and the girls that grew up in the house of blue lights. | anotherman554 wrote: | "Cyberpunk as a genre stems from xenophobia, ultimately" | | Why does mega-corporation mean Xenophobia against the Japanese? | Bladerunner, which came out around the same time, has mega- | corporations which aren't run by the Japanese. So does Robocop. | The second Sprawl book and third Sprawl book both have wealthy | villains who are not Japanese. | noirbot wrote: | Also, isn't Tessier-Ashpool in Neuromancer specifically a | Swiss company and generally European? | qiskit wrote: | > I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. | | Same. No doubt it was an influential book. But I didn't find it | well written or that interesting to be honest. I've read | neuromancer once. I've read Dune maybe a dozen times. Also, | other two books in the trilogy were even worse. | | Maybe the hype was so great that nothing could live up to such | expectations. I remember being so excited to finally read | neuromancer only to be let down. | hindsightbias wrote: | Gibson admired the new (Japan) and the old (England). Perhaps | the genre is xenophobic, but I don't think that's his bent: | | https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefiction... | RobertoG wrote: | I read it again recently and I found it still pretty | interesting. | | From a SF aficionado point of view, Neuromancer world has: | | -An economy that rely on ubiquitous computer networks. | | -Colonization of low orbit. | | -An AI rebelling and doing its own thing. | | -Digital downloads of personalities. | | In 1984.. I mean, OK, the concepts already existed, but it | really break with most of the SF that was being done until | then. | | It's the beginning of a really dark SF, that I suppose was the | point: "If we follow the current path, the future will look | like corporate feudalism". | | By the way, from a political point of view, the fear of the | Japanese taking over is now the fear of the Chinese taking | over. I will let the "dystopian future dominated by megacorps" | comment as an exercise for the reader. | matthewdgreen wrote: | I think to focus on Neuromancer's use of Japanese culture is to | stay at the surface level. The background of Neuromancer is one | of income inequality, human destruction, and almost-absent | government and community (partly caused by a ubiquitous global | information network that seems to have broken everything.) We | don't have brain-computer interfaces today and Chiba City isn't | the center of the tech world (maybe that's Shenzen now ;) but | we sure have the income inequality and broken societies. | | I was a sci-fi fan growing up, and Neuromancer wasn't the | _first_ cyberpunk novel along these lines (I would definitely | recommend The Shockwave Rider for that) but it was one of the | most striking spec-fi books I read that presented a realistic | future that could be traced to our own world and critically: | that _wasn 't better than it_. | | Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main | observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't | rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine. | themadturk wrote: | Gibson has always said he regards his futures as ultimately | optimistic, because we're still here, not having been | destroyed in a nuclear war that looked all too possible in | the time it was written. | XorNot wrote: | Gibson has been pretty adamant that interpreting the Sprawl | setting as a dystopia is not quite understanding it: the | Sprawl is a quality of life _upgrade_ for a lot of Earth 's | citizens today. | matthewdgreen wrote: | Neal Stephenson gives a spicier take on this in Snowcrash: | "... the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical | inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer | of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be | prosperity." | pmoriarty wrote: | _Neal Stephenson gives a spicier take on this in | Snowcrash: "... the Invisible Hand has taken away all | those historical inequities and smeared them out into a | broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would | consider to be prosperity."_ | | I don't get it. What does being Pakistani have to do with | anything? | jmyeet wrote: | Stephenson is referencing the effective slavery that is | brick kilns in the subcontinent in particular [1]. It | also applies to India and possibly Bangladesh. | | [1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/10/21/the- | spiralling... | brimble wrote: | So many mega corps being Japanese is a product of anxiety | about Japan at that time--maybe not even Gibson's anxiety, | exactly, but if you were around then and projected which mega | corps were gonna be prominent in your nearish-future setting, | you'd really be swimming against the current if you _didn 't_ | make a lot of them Japanese. | | Much of the rest of it, though, isn't about Japanese culture, | corporate or otherwise, but seems to me like taking AnCaps | like Friedman seriously. Many elements are straight out of | that kind of, ah, thought. | Jon_Lowtek wrote: | Name three japanese mega corporations with significance in | the story of neuromancer | pmoriarty wrote: | Ono-sendai, Mitsubishi-Genentech, and Hosaka. | pmoriarty wrote: | _" Ironically, reading Neuromancer in my older age, the main | observation I have is how optimistic it is. The seas aren't | rising and the climate seems to be doing just fine."_ | | Gibson has gone on record multiple times in saying that he | doesn't write about the future nor does he try to predict the | future, but sees himself as always writing about the present. | matthewdgreen wrote: | He writes about the present in the same way that a | winemaker deals in grape juice. | omarhaneef wrote: | Also true of Lord of the Rings, or watching Star Wars etc if | you didn't read/watch it early on (either when it first came | out to the world, or early on in your life when you were new to | the genre). | | I won't speculate on why this is the case, but some people | claim its because the innovations are copied so quickly the | original becomes just another copy of itself. | themadturk wrote: | To my youngest son (born in 1994), _The Phantom Menace_ was | his favorite Star Wars movie for years. Many of our feelings | about "the best" of something depends on how it coincides | with our formative years. For me the original _Star Wars_ was | highly influential(I saw it on its first run, between junior | and senior year in college), but the most formative science | fiction movie for me was _2001: A Space Odyssey_ (seen on | first run in a Cinerama theater). | | (My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. | I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard _The Barney | Movie_ t00 highly.) | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Re: Lord of the Rings, while the language itself is a bit | outdated and it can be quite tedious in a lot of places, it | still set a benchmark that - at least as far as I'm aware - | hasn't been met yet in other books in the wider fantasy | genre. I've read a few, some of the serialized form, but they | often feel awkward and derivative; often full of male power | fantasies, coming-of-age hero's journey tropes, worldbuilding | that somehow always feels derivative of LotR (which in itself | was derivative of others as well I'm sure, but said others | have been forgotten or replaced by that of LotR), and they | often seem like the goal of the author is volume, write as | many books as they can (thinking of Robert Jordan and the | like) just to get all their worldbuilding in there. | pmoriarty wrote: | Check out Stephen Donaldson's _The Chronicles of Thomas | Covenant, the Unbeliever_. | | It's about a leper from the modern day who finds himself in | a fantasy world he doesn't believe in, and rejects the | power he has. That's pretty original. | sprkwd wrote: | Incredibly underrated series. As is his Gap Series. | omarhaneef wrote: | I agree with your critique of many of the derivatives | (without naming any in particular), but feel it also | applies to the original. And while the original has some | bright points, so do many of the derivatives. | pmoriarty wrote: | _Neuromancer_ was groundbreaking in its time. I read it when it | came out in 1984 and it blew me away. | | These days so much other media has been influenced by it that | it doesn't look nearly as original. | | But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies | about: | | - cyberspace inhabited by AIs | | - neural interfaces | | - corporate armies | | - insanely rich people living in Earth orbit | | - genetically engineered assassins with body augmentations | | - slum-dwelling hackers who break in to corporate data stores | | _Neuromancer_ brought all this and more in to popular | consciousness in a blinding flash. | | After _Neuromancer_ , Gibson came out with _Count Zero_ (which | I liked even more than _Neuromancer_ itself) and _Mona Lisa | Overdrive_ (which wasn 't nearly as good as either of the books | that preceded it). I stopped reading Gibson after that. | kasey_junk wrote: | Gibsons later work is worth picking up. None of it is as mind | bending as the Neuromancer books but they are good and | interesting in other ways. | | I've really enjoyed his last two. | CodeMage wrote: | > _I stopped reading Gibson after that._ | | I found "The Peripheral" to be refreshingly good. I would | recommend giving it a read. | staindk wrote: | I'm quite a bit younger than you, and not entirely clued up | on cyberpunk and related genres, but I'd think "Blade Runner" | (1982) and its source novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric | Sheep?" (1968) brought many of the same/similar ideas to the | fore a while earlier. | | Neuromancer still sounds ground-breaking and I hope to read | it one day. | | As an aside - something interesting I just found was Gibson's | thoughts on Blade Runner. He had seen the first 20 minutes of | it and thought his book would be seen as a copy of the film. | [1] | | Edit: I uh finally read the article after spending ages in | the comments and see that they mention this exact incident in | there. Whoops. | | [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://www.wil | lia... | themadturk wrote: | My favorites are the Bigend trilogy, especially the first, | _Pattern Recognition._ It 's like he decided the real word | (in 2001) was science fictional enough. | after_care wrote: | * I don't think you are appreciating the gain in power | corporations have acquired in the last 40 years. Those fears of | corporations becoming more powerful turned out to be very | justified. | | * Cyberpunk is a very humanist point of view. So often the | tragedy in cyberpunk is that humanity is oppressed by a | bureaucratic or technical system. | | * All art is a product of its time. | 01100011 wrote: | Context is important. | | I've heard young people argue that the Beatles weren't all that | great, and then go on to name modern artists who would have | never existed without them. | | I'm late Gen-X and my wife is late millennial. We watched Pulp | Fiction together and she didn't get it. I realized then how | much of it was groundbreaking because of the time of its | release. Someone watching it now just won't be blown away like | I was when I first saw it. I imagine if we went back and | watched Blade Runner it would be another forgettable movie to | her and not the groundbreaking masterpiece it was when I saw it | for the first dozen times. | | Reminds me of the Steely Dan song 'Hey Nineteen'... | sbisson wrote: | Amusing to see that the last line of the piece refers to "sci-fi | on speed", as amphetamines were the drug of choice for the | spiritual forefather of the movement, Philip K Dick... | sho_hn wrote: | I was in a bookshop in Germany the other day, and saw a | "Neuromancer" cover with a cool stylized photograph of Seoul, | South Korea, in the background. The most perfect metaphor for the | West's present switch-over from Japanmania to the Korean Wave. | | Similarly now have the modern Korean alphabet bleed into the neon | signs of Cyberpunky streets of more recent movie productions | where in the past you had Japanese or Chinese writing systems. | The shifting representation of Asia in Western exoticism/escapism | content is fascinating to observe. | | Edit: Photo of the cover: | https://eikehein.com/stuff/neuromancer_seoul.jpg | throw1234651234 wrote: | "The most perfect metaphor for the West's present switch-over | from Japanmania to the Korean Wave." if this is a thing, it has | been largely unnoticed. I think educated people think of SK as | one of the few countries competing with US tech income (others | being Australia, Japan, Singapore, and some (but very few) | parts of England (London Finance), Germany (not sure on this | one), and Switzerland (banking )). Other than that, Korea goes | mostly unnoticed by the west. | Psyladine wrote: | Japanophiles in the 80s were excessive. Scifi from the era | has these undertones (Running Man, in 1986, has a bunch of | execs being served sushi in post-apocalyptic california, by a | geisha). Rising Sun in 1990 personified this fear that Japan | would eclipse the US in tech, economy and culture, before | they imploded with what we "now" consider an inevitable | result of overheated economy. | | Try flying through Minnesota, Wisconsin, the automaker | capital states. Airports full of now-yellowed directions _in | Japanese_ for the consideration of what was frequent | visitations by their competitors. | | It was a no-brainer to bet on Japanese tech in next | generation...even Gibson's dated "5MB of hot hitachi RAM" was | far-sighted when he wrote it...just not far enough. | pmoriarty wrote: | _Blade Runner_ (filmed in 1981) has a famous scene in a | street-side noodle joint where the characters speak a | mishmash of Japanese and other languages. Another famous | scene features a geisha on a giant computerized billboard. | | _Blade Runner_ was based on a Philip K Dick book from | 1968. _Neuromancer_ is pretty obviously influenced by | these. | krapp wrote: | William Gibson actually saw Blade Runner before he | finished his final draft for Neuromancer. He almost | didn't publish it because he was afraid people would | think he was ripping off the movie. | batman-farts wrote: | Another interesting contemporary work by a writer who's | still relevant is James Fallows' "Looking at the Sun." A | solid attempt at sense-making the late 80s economic | situation vis-a-vis Japan for the American middle | management class, contrasting their institutions with | ours... but China is just kind of a shadow in the | background of the whole thing. | BTCOG wrote: | The West (specifically in my experience, the United States) | have been buying up everything tech and auto South Korean for | pushing over a decade now at this point. Kia and Hyundai | automobiles are now running against the Japanese cars here. | Samsung and LG electronics are highly popular, as the | Japanese versions were a decade or three prior. It's now more | Samsung, LG, etc here in the US than it is Sony, for example. | Also in agreement with a poster above how the Korean cinema | is just now taking off since around 2019. Prior to the movie | Parasite, I can't even think of a popular South Korean film | taking root here but most have seen Parasite and quite a few | were into Squid Game. This is a relatively new thing. | pmoriarty wrote: | _" Also in agreement with a poster above how the Korean | cinema is just now taking off since around 2019."_ | | _Oldboy_ , which was made in 2003, was a pretty popular | South Korean film... though nowhere near as popular as | _Parasite_. | sho_hn wrote: | We're talking in a pop culture context here, where even just | in 2020-2022 Korea and Korean culture/heritage has had | significant soft power success in a number of markets/media: | | - Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink | - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, | so a bit murky on what product is flowing there) | | - Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot | rooted in Korean schoolyard games) | | - Ditto cinema (Parasite, a story about social mobility woes | in Korean society, winning all the Oscars) | | - Ditto gaming (PUBG, other MMOs) | | - Ditto literature (bestellers including "Kim Jiyoung, Born | 1982", again on social issues in the country) | | - Ditto cosmetics exports, beauty trends ("Korean Week" in | malls, say), etc. | | - Even some Western productions focussing specifically on | Korean diaspora/ethnicity (e.g. most recently the expensive | "Pachinko" on Apple TV+ (and the novel it's based on), or | stuff like Kim's Convenience) | | I think you can definitely make a case that Korea is the | Asian-country-du-jour among the Western audience (and that's | before you get into, say, Latin America, which is far deeper | into Korean TV content, also bleeding over into Latin | minorities in the USA). | throw1234651234 wrote: | That's an interesting perspective. The only thing I can | relate to here is Squid Game, but it went mostly unnoticed | as a "trend shift" by me, because it seems to just fit the | trend of Korea having pretty good movies (Chingoo, Old Boy) | for the niche audience that liked things like Japan's | original Battle Royale. | | Also, the trends of Korea seem to very much run in parallel | with the trends of Japan - overworked business people tired | of working all the time with a lack of meaning. | | Pretty informative post, thank you. | sho_hn wrote: | Thanks! I do think there's a shift there from niche | audience to much more significant mainstream attention | (which can of course be fleeting, which was also kind of | built into the original argument: attention moves on from | time to time ...). I do recall the time when movies like | "Old-boy" were favorites among the arthouse | track/festival circuit-going audience as well, but those | were never the headlining poster in a multiplex the way | that a "Parasite" now pulls off. | | I lived and worked in Korea for a German tech company for | a few years (since returned to Berlin), working on-site | with customers, and since about 2018/19 there's a very | significant uptick in other people showing an interest | and asking me questions about the experience. This often | takes the form of "my teenage daughter is a BTS fan and | learning Korean" and things like that. | | Korea and Japan have a lot of shared history and have | deeply affected one another, and in particular the | business culture and the economic structure of Korea are | heavily informed by Japanese influence, yes. | | - | | On a completely separate note, re interesting depictions | of fantasy-Asia in a Western popculture/punk context: The | headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's | "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok. I've never | been to Thailand and can't comment on how ham-fisted or | not this may be, but it was also an interesting step away | from the Japanese culture-dominated vibes of speculative | fiction pre-2000. | throw1234651234 wrote: | I will check it out, thanks again! | Psyladine wrote: | >The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, | Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future | Bangkok. | | Bacigalupi falls for japanophilia with the Japanese | fetishization of geisha (the windup-girl of the title). | His emphasis on mechanical power (i.e. springs and animal | labor) was interesting though. | Krasnol wrote: | Germany here. | | Besides Squid Game and Parasite, I've not heard of most of | them and in the case of PUBG, I wasn't aware it was from SK | or in any way special in this seemingly endless pool of | "the same game with another skin"-genre. | sho_hn wrote: | Sure, but is there a Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian | film or TV show you think just as many people around you | know from the same time frame? And I mean, that's still | anecdotal - what isn't anecdotal is that the upscale | KaDeWe department store I live nearby in Berlin had a | Korea week a while ago, and so on. And whose pop music | export has flash mobs and dance troupes dancing to it in | the streets of every major city for years now? | | As for gaming, I think another good example is the | celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure | you there's plenty of young kids who can name them. | | In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of | attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're | relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only | one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is | the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the | time Neuromancer was written. | | I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't | nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, | though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is | also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how | media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. | Depends on the metric. | | Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but | that's more related to economics and politics - although | Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and | very topical example to the contrary! (There's other | interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had | successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai | for example, but so far it's not really converted over to | the mainstream for Chinese film.) | Vadoff wrote: | The recently popular Lost Ark is another video game by | Korea. | | I'm surprised you've never heard of the kpop groups BTS | or Blackpink in Germany. | scrapheap wrote: | If you liked Neuromancer then you should read True Names by | Vernor Vinge. | alphabetting wrote: | Thanks for rec. Neuromancer is an all time fave. Amazing how | well it has held up | pmoriarty wrote: | I went on a Vinge binge when I'd heard that he was the | originator of the singularity concept. Didn't like any of his | work, including _True Names_. I liked _Neuromancer_ and _Count | Zero_ way more. | kemayo wrote: | It's impressive because it's ~3 years before Neuromancer, and | in many ways it's a better predictor of "the internet" as a | cultural thing. It nails a lot of the social aspects of online | forums, for instance. It lacks the raw _style_ of Neuromancer, | alas. | pmoriarty wrote: | E. M. Forster predicted something like the internet and | online forums in 1909 in _The Machine Stops_. | ngc248 wrote: | Cyberpunk and head crash by bruce bethke is also good | bpiche wrote: | gh0st, if you're watching this, I'm still looking for the rabbit | hole. | smm11 wrote: | The sleeper was a thing once upon a time. Might still be. | kemayo wrote: | > When Gibson penned his opening line 'the sky above the port was | the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel' he merged | reality and the digital in a way that seems almost prophetic | today | | Tangentially, I find the generational aspect of that line fun. | Depending on how old the person you're talking to is, this will | mean (as originally meant) a gray/staticy color, or a searingly | vivid blue, (or, I guess, something else like a graphical "no | signal found" screen in the most modern interpretations). | | As with much sci-fi, it's a story of "the future" that's | thoroughly grounded in the present day it was written in. | Tarragon wrote: | Such a vivid line of description in both interpretations but | also a radical change to interpretation. | Gravityloss wrote: | I was sick at home and finally picked up the Neuromancer which | had been sitting in the bookshelf for years. | | It was an experience indeed. At many points, very high concept | (which of course has been copied to death). At other points, | naive. Surprisingly few things felt old fashioned. | | The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and motivation | of people. It felt very much like an adventure game where | everything revolves around the main character. | | EDIT: To clarify, I liked the book very much. | karpierz wrote: | The protagonist is so addicted to the Internet that he's | willing to do literally anything to be able to use it again. If | that's not a relatable motivation, I don't know what is. | ugl wrote: | don't forget the speed addiction! | idontwantthis wrote: | I think he got addicted to speed so he wouldn't have to | dream about the internet as much | nirav72 wrote: | We have adderall now. Speed with a PG rating | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I don't think that's a very kind thing to say about the | medications for people for who ADHD medications like | amphetamines and methylphenidates have meant a huge | improvement in quality of life. | InitialLastName wrote: | That it has helped people doesn't make the comparison | untrue. | | We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that many drugs with | reputations of illegitimate/illegal use are readily | provided to patients (including children) in a | pharmaceutical context, most notably amphetamines and | opiates. | nirav72 wrote: | My point was that plenty of people use adderall without | being diagnosed with ADHD. | cstross wrote: | The word "internet" doesn't appear in Neuromancer because in | most respects it hadn't been invented yet. | | While DoD declared TCP/IP the future standard for military | networking in 1982, IBM, DEC, and AT&T only adopted TCP/IP in | 1984, a couple of months before Neuromancer went on sale. | Gibson notoriously wrote it on a manual typewriter circa | 1982-83. (It took a year from acceptance to put a novel | manuscript into production back then: very often, it still | does.) | | ARPAnet existed in 1982, Public BBSs had been a thing for a | while. But the publicly accessible global information network | with visual representations of corporate presence? That was | all in his imagination. | cubano wrote: | The Source? Compuserve? AOL? | | Those three come quickly to mind that were certainly trying | very hard to be the " publicly accessible global | information network with visual representations of | corporate presence" you are speaking of. | pmoriarty wrote: | AOL didn't exist when _Neuromancer_ was written. | | While the others did, Gibson seemed not to have been | aware of them, and he didn't even own a computer at the | time. | | You can tell his vision of cyberspace came entirely from | his imagination because it doesn't even remotely resemble | any actual computer systems of the day. | ethbr0 wrote: | Early cyberpunk tends to be power fantasy wrapped in dystopia. | So, Hellblazer with more blinking lights and megacorps instead | of demons. | | And it bears remembering that Gibson was 34 when he wrote | _Neuromancer_. | | You can see a shift in his characterization by the time he gets | to _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ (a book and 4 years later). And | certainly with the subsequent Bridge trilogy. IMHO, the Sprawl | trilogy that starts with Neuromancer gets better with each | book, even though the first is the most famous. | | Also, plug for _Void Star_ , which I recently finished after a | recommendation here. It sits somewhere in Bridge-era Gibson | tone, but with the quintessential "What the hell is going on?" | Cyberpunk mystery that a lot of retro-CP authors drop. | https://www.amazon.com/Void-Star-Novel-Zachary-Mason/dp/1250... | batman-farts wrote: | It's definitely worth reading the whole Sprawl trilogy. It | establishes something of a pattern in Gibson's work where | characters from the first book in one of his trilogies return | in the third, changed. The scene where Molly and the Finn | reunite in Mona Lisa Overdrive is quite powerful. | apalmer wrote: | I definitely understand your take, it is definitely an unusual | mixture of hard near sci fi concepts and pulp sci fi 'drama'. I | personally enjoyed it immensely but can definitely understand | why someone would not. | Gravityloss wrote: | Oh, I did enjoy it immensely! I guess this my review was high | praise - coming from a Finn. | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | > The biggest let down was the unrealistic behavior and | motivation of people. It felt very much like an adventure game | where everything revolves around the main character. | | I feel it's like this for two reasons: | | 1) Gibson himself says that he hasn't been a very good writer | making Neuromancer, and that this is one of his weaker works, | | 2) but then again, we see the world from the POV of the | protagonist and his brain filter. Case is not a very | complicated man and this is how he sees the world. He chooses | to focus on these things, and he treats people around him like | NPCs. (Giving a convincing perspective of a character is what | good writers do, so I think Gibson wasn't a shitty writer after | all.) | corysama wrote: | In the interview/documentary | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territorie... | Gibson is quite self-deprecating. He attributes several aspects | of the book that people love to his inexperience as a writer. | The main character is cold and vague because he didn't know how | to write a fleshed out character. People jack-in a lot because | he was uncomfortable writing scene transitions. Something like | "What do you say?? He got up and walked down the hallway to the | apartment elevator and out the front door to the sidewalk'?" | noirbot wrote: | Which is interesting because his descriptions of travel and | scene transition in the most recent 5 books of his are deeply | flowery and some of my favorite bits of his writing. I | suppose writers change and grow over time, and I wonder if | some of his style now is due to him trying to fix what he saw | as flaws in his earlier work. | Ekaros wrote: | They do for example I started to skim through Heinlein's | Beyond This Horizon(original release in 1942) and it is | pretty horrid, quite badly aged and disconnected... | Although it is translation the comments by others aren't | exactly praising. | | Writing is like any pursuit, you just need to do it to | develop and become better at it. Just like coding. | whoopdedo wrote: | Reminds me of Gene Roddenberry needing to invent teleporters | because the Enterprise couldn't land on a planet. | horsestaple wrote: | I couldn't finish the book, it just had too much unexplained | fictional techno-jargon to be able to enjoy for me. I know thats | the style of immersion he was going for, but it didn't click for | me, even though I'm a big sci-fi reader. | shon wrote: | Gibson is still telling the same story. If you read his more | recent works, like The Peripheral, you'll see it. It's still | Cyberpunk. The aesthetic has been modernized. It's less neon and | more black and a little too familiar, but the message is the | same: Even in an overtly corrupt world, knowledge and information | are supremely powerful. Because of this, an underdog can beat the | system change everything. | | As a 16 year old kid back in 1990, this message meant everything | to me. It inspired me and gave me hope. His new stuff has less | neon but is just a great to read and feels the same to me today. | stakkur wrote: | The 80's were my 20s. It's hard to explain to younger folks how | the 80s (especially early 80s) felt, culturally. The whole | 'Japan, Inc.' thing was in full swing, and the general feeling | was that Japan was eating the world. 'Tech' was this fresh, semi- | mystical thing, still opaque to much of the public. | | Gibson latched onto that cultural wave and took it into a | possible future, and it was exciting to me. Today it's | interesting to see that technofuture both commoditized and | idolized. | | Now in my 50s, it's still interesting but seems a bleak and not- | terribly-human place that I don't want to live. | mindcrime wrote: | _It 's hard to explain to younger folks how the 80s (especially | early 80s) felt, culturally. The whole 'Japan, Inc.' thing was | in full swing, and the general feeling was that Japan was | eating the world. 'Tech' was this fresh, semi-mystical thing, | still opaque to much of the public._ | | I'm just a little younger than you then, but I remember the | 80's pretty much the same way. Japanese manufacturers | (especially of cars and consumer electronics) were sort of | "eating the world" and computers and high-tech were still seen | as very mysterious and mesmerizing and had a real mystique | about them. | | Interestingly, for me, the mystique and mystery of high-tech | largely persisted up until about 2010 or so. Maybe a little | later, maybe 2015 even. It's only been in the last few years | that it seems to be wearing off. Not sure if that's just a | reflection of my becoming older and more cynical and harder to | impress, or if its down to changes in society/culture at large, | or what. But my recent re-reading of the Sprawl and Bridge | trilogies was, in part, I think an attempt to recapture some of | that. Not sure if it worked or not, but it was fun reading all | that stuff. | | _Now in my 50s, it 's still interesting but seems a bleak and | not-terribly-human place that I don't want to live._ | | There are aspects of the "cyberpunk future" that still seem | appealing in some regards, but it doesn't necessarily feel like | the exact world I'd want to live in, that's for sure. | cwkoss wrote: | Japanese 80s City Pop is one of my favorite musical genres - an | outgrowth of the huge economic growth happening in Japanese | cities. Big funky happy instrumentals and lyrics often alluding | to glamorous lifestyles, social isolation and an unquenched | loneliness. | | It was a very interesting time in Japan's history, which I | personally think has a lot of parallels to the current west- | coast tech bubble. | | Check out: | | Fantasy - Meiko Nakahara | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kt8HP1VEPU | | Zhen Ye Zhong nodoa/Stay With Me - Miki Matsubara | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEe_yIbW64w | | I Can't Stop The Loneliness - ANRI | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bALJxjL8jw | | 4:00 A.M. - Taeko Onuki | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sOKkON_UnQ | daedalus_f wrote: | I love neuromancer and its sequels, and like this blogs | aesthetic, but good god the tracking makes it hard to read. | wanda wrote: | Reader view? | | The reader view really highlights how short the article is, now | that I'm looking at it. | | I think tracking is letter spacing right? It is pretty rough. I | think you can enforce fonts and at least in Firefox and Safari | you can add custom CSS to help with that sort of thing. I don't | think Chrome offers the same feature without an extension. | the_af wrote: | One thing I read somewhere -- and it might have been an interview | with Gibson or with someone else talking about his work -- is how | much William Gibson despises derivatives of cyberpunk in the | books, videogames and movies that followed. | | Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon | lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes | Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the | point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was | PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of | affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique | of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then. | | I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not | anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired | retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought | the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti- | punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing | nothing else with it. | | That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem | being stuck in the past. But I see his point. | npteljes wrote: | >I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. | | He specifically said this about the game: "The trailer for | Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic | 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me." | | https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1005958197654351872 | lobocinza wrote: | Then someone criticized him (on Twitter) for not | understanding cyberpunk. :) | bpiche wrote: | Maybe it was Action Button who put it best when he said | Cyberpunk 2077 is the gamer chair of cyberpunk, and I'm | paraphrasing. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnBKX_vdYQI | jrochkind1 wrote: | Curious if someone can find a URL for Gibson saying such | things. | | I've never seen Gibson describing Neuromancer as a critique of | Reagonomics or having any particular political agenda. | Interested to see it if so! I don't think of Gibson having | nearly as much "political" agenda or grounding as some other | early "cyberpunk" writer's like Bruce Sterling or Rudy Rucker. | | (I don't think Gibson himself referred to his work "cyberpunk" | or "punk" originally) | kemayo wrote: | I did a cursory search, and there's certainly "What I tried | to do was give people a future that is the world of the | Reagan '80s carried five steps forward and the volume turned | up 20 clicks" in an article[1] from 1994. | | [1]: https://ew.com/article/1994/08/26/william-gibson-first- | man-c... | pmoriarty wrote: | This sounds very hand-wavy, and I wish Gibson was more | explicit in drawing the connections. | | Slums and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich I | understand, but what do cyberspace and AI's (two of | _Neuromancer_ 's more original and iconic themes) have to | do with Reagan? Nothing, from what I can tell. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Based on other stuff I've read him say, I feel like he | might actually indeed be implying that things like slums | and the dominance of megacorps and the ultra-rich are to | him more central/significant themes/aspects of | Neuromancer than AI's or cyberspace! Or at least that | they are more central/significant than people focused | only on the cyberspace thing recognize. | | Gibson had of course famously never used the internet | when he wrote Neuromancer (on a typewriter). | NoraCodes wrote: | Have you read much of Gibson's other work? He's very clear | about his attitude towards sci-fi as a way to examine the | present day in many of his essays. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Yep! Oh for sure, as a way to examine the present! Just his | political commitments or agenda, if any, aren't as obvious | as some peers. i'm curious for places he's revealed them in | interviews! | dempedempe wrote: | That's interesting. I guess the two are coming from very | different places. Gibson comes from a place of rebellion. The | current fascination with cyberpunk comes from a place of | nostalgia. | orev wrote: | > And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily | copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it. | | In Pattern Recognition, the character Cayce is "allergic" to | Tommy Hilfiger clothing because the style is so completely | generic. Your comment makes me wonder if that was a commentary | on the works derived from his initial vision in the Sprawl | trilogy. | bpiche wrote: | Cayce's black bomber jacket and Fruit of the Loom shirts and | black Levis make a terrific outfit. The mil spec sneakers in | that same series are described with similar care. | | But beyond mil spec, the whole Blue Ant series is just a | beautiful tableau of different fashions and designed objects. | Made me really want a Curta. | BTCOG wrote: | This is contrary to numerous interviews where Gibson praises | aesthetic and for example, says that Blade Runner spot-on | nailed what he was going for with Neuromancer. Gibson all | throughout Neuromancer equally himself focuses, almost hyper- | focuses on surface textures and visual aesthetic to juxtapose | antique forms and purpose with high tech modern materials. It | would seemingly be at odds for him to not like aesthetic and | neon and city "Sprawl" after going to lengths to directly | praise Ridley-Scott's "spot-on" interpretations. | the_af wrote: | I don't think it's contrary. | | First, Blade Runner came BEFORE Neuromancer was released, so | it cannot have been a derivative, and there weren't any good | representations of the aesthetic on screen either; its | visuals broke new ground in many senses. Gibson rightly | feared that: | | > _" BLADERUNNER came out while I was still writing | Neuromancer. I was about a third of the way into the | manuscript. When I saw (the first twenty minutes of) | BLADERUNNER, I figured my unfinished first novel was sunk, | done for. Everyone would assume I'd copped my visual texture | from this astonishingly fine-looking film."_ | | [source: https://web.archive.org/web/20070926221513/http://ww | w.willia...] | | Are there any other _visual_ works of cyberpunk that came | _after_ Neuromancer and that Gibson praised? There must have | been, but how common were they? | | Second, I don't think Gibson's main objection was the | aesthetic, but rather, that derivative works didn't do | anything with it. They just copied, losing the punk spirit | and rebelliousness. | [deleted] | BTCOG wrote: | I think that's a great assessment. Other than being great | friends with Bruce Sterling I'm not aware of afterward | works considered derivative that he's directly praised. | Maybe some Stephenson works and Sterling? | notahacker wrote: | This. | | For example here[1] is an interview in which Gibson waxes | lyrical about pop culture, imagery, prose style and selective | use of detail, and also says he didn't "have the patience" to | flesh out details like the backstory of what was supposed to | actually have happened to the US because they'd only detract | from the reading enjoyment. He's saying that he was | influenced by how cheesy Cold War era blockbusters could | imply a lot happened with a few well chosen casual words, not | claiming to make a case for a different politics or to | channel Brave New World | | And let's be brutally honest, the politics of Neuromancer | isn't really more sophisticated than "counterculture is cool" | and a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as right wing | tendencies in Golden Age SF. The writing is fantastic, but | it's all about imagery and ideas. Even his polemical writing | on Singapore and the Golden Age seem more concerned that | paternalistic ideas of ideal societies are _dull_ than | anything else. | | Even the most cynically commercial use of cyberpunk cliches | embraces the idea that counterculture - or at least 1980s | cyberpunk idea of counterculture - is cool | | [1] http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/gibson_interview.html | the_af wrote: | Well, like I answered in another comment, Blade Runner is | not a good example because Neuromancer wasn't published by | then, and also because it was a groundbreaking visual work | of art, not a derivative one (yes, I'm aware of | _Metropolis_. The point still stands.) | | > _" [...] a determination to avoid what Gibson sees as | right wing tendencies in Golden Age SF"_ | | That was no small feat. It seems pretty major to me. It | took me some work to mature from my young SF fan self to | notice the rightwing undertones in much of it. Call it | naivete, if you want. | | What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? | Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye- | popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so | ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to | deviate so much as an inch from them. | notahacker wrote: | I haven't said anything about Blade Runner. I reference | Gibson claiming inspiration from the line "you flew the | Gullwing over Leningrad, didn't you?" in Escape from New | York because he loved how 'a casual reference could imply | a lot', which is all about his admiration for the style | of SF (and trope-heavy style at that). | | > What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? | Cyberpunk today is codified as a consumer-friendly, eye- | popping style, complete with a collection of tropes so | ingrained fans will fight you to the death if you try to | deviate so much as an inch from them. | | But eye-popping style was all it ever was. _Neuromancer_ | didn 't fight against John Campbell's opinions on | slavery, or capitalism, or Cold War politics, it just | wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia | because Gibson thought that was a much less boring | setting for a story than conservative utopias. | the_af wrote: | Well, the comment you were replying to with a "this" did | mention Blade Runner. | | > _" [Gibson] just wrote about punks and hacking in a | neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much | less boring setting for a story than conservative | utopias."_ | | You are not wrong, but I'd argue that it had a meaningful | message beyond plain aesthetics when placed in the right | context, i.e. when Neuromancer and cyberpunk were born. | Now it's just the aesthetic, and the "message" of hi-tech | lowlives and evil megacorporations is a lazy one, just | rehashing mindlessly what was before. I'm not saying | _nothing_ interesting and new can be said about this, but | that it has become a codified trope you can write _on | autopilot_. | | It's easy to say it was always like this, but it's false. | Yes, Gibson drew from pop culture, and he used it to | create something new, for whatever reasons. Now it's just | rehashing for the sake of rehashing, and some of the | tropes are hilariously outdated but still copied by the | faithful. | notahacker wrote: | It certainly had more novelty when it was new! But the | tropes being familiar and so outdated that using some of | them in future settings is positively anachronistic is | part of the appeal, just like it is for most of the | earlier scifi canon, and Gibson seems to have enjoyed | consuming trope-heavy genre fiction far too much to be | precious about people doing the same with themes he | invented or popularised. Not everything he's written | mashed up ideas with such originality either. | | Or in his own words: https://twitter.com/greatdismal/stat | us/1164240403270270976?l... | | (and the Matrix was both an iconic film and something | which borrowed more directly, liberally and naively from | Neuromancer than most of the low effort stuff) | the_af wrote: | (At this point this is a conversation which I hope we | both find interesting,. Don't read anything I write as | trying to counterpoint anything you say, it's not my | intention) | | I agree cyberpunk _now_ is anachronistic, which has its | own appeal. I did say I liked its aesthetics! It 's a | world that could have been, but never really was. Sort of | like _Stranger Things_ is anachronistic and I like it for | it (well, the first season, anyway). | | But that's the thing, isn't it? Some other commenter in | this thread mentioned that cyberpunk originally was about | _rebellion_ and now it 's about _nostalgia_. I am of | course more cynical, I think many authors (of videogames, | anime, etc) simply copy the looks because that 's the | easy part. | | The nostalgia is doubly puzzling because the world | described by cyberpunk is not nice, it's _hopeless_. It | 's almost like feeling nostalgia for the world described | in Orwell's _1984_. Not exactly though, because there 's | adventure and a rich cast of rogues and lowlives in | cyberpunk, whereas in 1984 everything is hopeless, gray | and doomed, but still... it's weird to long for any | dystopia. | | The Matrix: you definitely have a point. The Matrix, | style-wise, was impressive when it opened! But I feel the | same irritation towards the abuse of effects and tropes | it brought into the cinematic world. | notreallyserio wrote: | Ironically, focusing criticism on the aesthetics is itself | "staying shallow". Much cyberpunk media does serve as a | critique of the status quo or an imagined future dystopia, as I | assume he would prefer, but with some neon on the surface. | the_af wrote: | I don't think Gibson minds the aesthetic in particular; what | he is saying, if I understand him correctly, is that nobody | cares about cyberpunk _except_ for the aesthetic. There 's | nothing beyond it. If there is something, it's the same old | tropes about big bad evil 80s-style corporations, usually | with a vague Japanese or Asian theme. Everything that was | novel about cyberpunk has now been absorbed into the | mainstream and has become just another trope to be used by | videogame/movie/anime authors. | | It's as lazy as it gets, and definitely not punk. | pmoriarty wrote: | _" It's as lazy as it gets, and definitely not punk."_ | | Reading is not very punk, though arguing what punk is is | definitely punk. | Loughla wrote: | I would argue that reading, today, absolutely is punk. | When the main-stream is delivered at a sixth grade level, | in 15 second sound bites with talking heads or funny | dances behind it. . . what is more punk that being | extraordinarily well-read? | TremendousJudge wrote: | >what is more punk that being extraordinarily well-read | | Having recently been to several punk rock shows (read: | damp basement noise fests), I'd say: having a blue collar | job, being against "the system", doing copious amounts of | cocaine and speed on their time off, and having their | entire body blasted with tattoos such as a hand flipping | you off, a trash can overflowing with garbage, and many | insults. I thought this particular kind of people didn't | exist anymore, but no, they're still alive and moshing in | the basements of most cities. | teknopaul wrote: | After cyberpunk came steampunk (and all the other x-punks) | devoid of anything but visual aesthetic; | | He has a point IMHO; | | Big fan of Invurt:: groks cyberpunk; made no attempt to | copy the aesthetic; | clem wrote: | Gibson has only himself and Sterling to blame for | steampunk, given their joint work on The Difference | Engine. | ghostpepper wrote: | What is Invurt? | dylan604 wrote: | 1/Vurt naturally ;P | | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17401136-vurt | Cthulhu_ wrote: | I'm not entirely convinced of that attitude; plenty of | science fiction in a cyberpunk setting have strong | underlying messages, of e.g. personal identity, capitalism, | privacy, overpopulation, sex work, drugs, classism, AI, | environment / global warming, etc; some of the big names | there would be (imo, I'm no expert and I can't think of | much) Ghost in the Shell, Altered Carbon, The Matrix, some | episodes of Love Death & Robots and even Black Mirror, to | name a few. | yike321123 wrote: | drBonkers wrote: | Capitalism's greatest superpower is absorbing all critique and | selling it back to consumers as a luxury good. | brimble wrote: | As in Black Mirror's "Fifteen Million Merits". | the_af wrote: | Insightful observation. Also depressing. Probably why Gibson | dislikes this trend. | cubano wrote: | Not bad, but I personally think its superpower is always | being just the tiniest bit better than everything else... | EricE wrote: | Funny, that! | obese44 wrote: | very insightful, that is 100% your original quote | BlueTemplar wrote: | Mark Fisher : | | "Capitalism is very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's | film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic | entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with | which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari | say, is a 'motley painting of everything that ever was'." | ghostDancer wrote: | You can get it in a t-shirt probably. ;-) | mherdeg wrote: | I liked Paolo Bagciaglupi's "The Calorie Man" (which I read in | "Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology") as an example of this | kind of "if we project today's state of affairs 30 years into | the future, what is the dystopia it produces?" line of | reasoning. | | The story is about megacorporations greedily controlling the | supply of food via patents on GMO crops in a post-peak-oil | society. There's no artificial general intelligence lurking in | the electrons to save or doom us, just the consequences of our | own choices. | jrochkind1 wrote: | I really recommend Bagciaglupi's "The Wind-Up Girl", which is | kind of the novel expanded from The Calorie Man. It is | dismal. | blaser-waffle wrote: | Great book. | | My friend is Thai and said he (Bagciaglupi) couldn't speak | the language to save his life, but otherwise liked the | book. | the_af wrote: | I read a scathing review by a Thai that accused | Bacigalupi of engaging in Orientalism, which of course he | was. And still, not being Thai myself, I enjoyed the | novel immensely, thought its greater themes were very | interesting, and I think it wasn't dismissive of Thai | culture, even if it dealt in stereotypes. | | I suppose Gibson is guilty of this as well, only with the | Japanese instead of Thai. It doesn't bother me. | the_af wrote: | Don't forget "Yellow Card Man"! | | Most of his stories in "Pump Six and Other Stories" are | very good. Depressing, but good. | lsaferite wrote: | I loved that book and the world the author created. | the_af wrote: | Oh, I'm well acquainted with Bacigalupi's work and I think he | is not writing mere derivatives, but actually updating the | concerns and doing something interesting with them. The | aesthetic is completely different as well. | | I've no idea if Gibson has read Bacigalupi or what he thinks | of his work, but _I_ am definitely a fan! | throw1234651234 wrote: | Cyberpunk 2077 is very much a disappointment in every sense | other than the scope of the project. Every single aspect of it | is a cheap, shallow rip-off. It adds nothing of value to | anything, though enjoyable in the way Mortal Combat is. Still, | Mortal Combat was far more ground-breaking and original - that | about sums up how much of a "derivative work" Cyberpunk 2077 | is. | tomc1985 wrote: | What? It was a fantastic game that spent a lot of time | ruminating on topics like transhumanism, sex, and corporate | power. It let players explore heterosexual and homosexual | romantic relationships in first person and uncensored. | Character writing is for the most part top-notch. The | universe is unfailingly coherent and incredibly fleshed out. | Few games have moved me to the point of tears in the credits, | but this one did. | | If you're one of those folks inexplicably bitter about | prerelease trailers then maybe I can understand your stance. | But dismissing the monumental amount of effort that it has | taken to deliver what some of us perceive as one of the | highest works of art in the genre, is ridiculous. | deadbunny wrote: | I'm with you 100% the game is a mess from a gameplay point | of view but the story (and load of side stories) is | fantastic if a little cognitive dissonance inducing when | being constantly told "You're dying! Hurry do the thing!" | Then spending 10 hours dicking about. | | I definitely think CDRP had a lot of help world building | from the source material (perhaps leaning on it too much) | but I'd definitely buy a sequel, maybe not on launch | though! | zrav wrote: | Just as the Witcher games are basically fan fiction paying | homage to Sapkowskis books, CP2077 needs to be seen as a | homage to many classics of the cyberpunk genre. | Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell | to name a few obvious ones (I also see a lot of Elysium in | it, FWIW). The story CD Projekt synthesized based on the | concepts of these works is very fitting and surprisingly | consistent, IMO. And because it's a homage, criticizing the | lack of original ideas in the plot/world misses what the | creators apparently set out to do. What _can_ be criticized | is that they fell short of their technical ambitions. And | despite its flaws, I found the game to offer quite a | remarkable experience. | the_af wrote: | > _" It was a fantastic game that spent a lot of time | ruminating on topics like transhumanism, sex, and corporate | power"_ | | I can't say anything about C2077 because I haven't played | it, I can just repeat what Gibson said about it. And he | didn't play it either, he was just judging the trailer. | | What I _can_ say is to note the three things you mentioned, | "transhumanism, sex and corporate power" are also explored | in other highly derivative and uninspired works of | cyberpunk-influenced fiction, like Altered Carbon. Boy, was | I disappointed by that show [1]! It's completely shallow, | uninterested in exploring the philosophical ramifications | of the technology it introduces, and instead goes for | flashy visuals, endless action and explosive gore. I | watched season 1 because I wanted to know _whodunnit_ -- it | was disappointing -- and season 2 was unbearable. | | Whether you agree with me or not that Altered Carbon on | Netflix was garbage, at least you must concede using those | cyberpunk tropes you mentioned is _not_ enough to determine | quality or complexity of the plot and /or message. They are | just tools in a toolbox, and can be used to build something | interesting or something utterly uninspired, just another | "gritty" cyberpunk copycat. | | --- | | [1] and from what my friends tell me, the book series is | not fundamentally different. Only the details vary. | lobocinza wrote: | It's easy to criticize but fun to play. | glenstein wrote: | Right, and I wouldn't want to generalize too much from that | example, as I think parent commenter does. | | One dimension of Cyberpunk as envisioned by William Gibson | genuinely was explicitly aesthetic, in the way in which it | was meant to be understood and experienced. So derivatives | focusing on that aren't necessarily missing the point. | | However, it's still certainly possible to reproduce those | aesthetics in bad ways, or to lean on them to the exclusion | of any deep message or story of any kind, etc. And it's | certainly fair to criticize any given derivative for | shallowness of vision. So, as a criticism of Cyberpunk 2077 | it's perfectly appropriate, but I don't think execution of | aesthetics in and of itself misses the point. | the_af wrote: | > _" as I think parent commenter does"_ | | Point of correction: I'm trying to convey _what Gibson | said_. If there 's a generalization, it's not mine but his. | The guy invented cyberpunk, so I think he has a right to | holding very strong opinions about it. | | I do tend to agree with Gibson, but I also like the | aesthetic and I'm content reading and looking at cyberpunk, | as long as it's not _too_ lazy. | glenstein wrote: | And my point was, and is, that I don't think he's making | the point you seem to think he is making. And sure, he's | got every right to be opinionated, but you're not quoting | or citing anything (although I understand you're | referencing a tweet of his re: Cyberpunk 2077 and are | referencing an interview), so what we are working with | here are extrapolations that you and I are attributing to | him. | the_af wrote: | Fair enough. I'm struggling right now to find the exact | interview where he said many of the things I'm probably | misquoting him about. | | I'll look harder later ;) | after_care wrote: | I've come to disregard Gibson's disdain for deviated works. | Disregarding Gibson's authority and deviating on his art in a | way that pleases the creator is very punk in spirit. | ipnon wrote: | In his defense, there are few things more punk than disdain | for derivatives and veneration for originality and | progenitors. Punks are a conservative bunch. They're still | playing the same records from 50 years ago like they came out | today. | yike321123 wrote: | Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk | genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with | less than any real messaging behind it. I guess to say it | more plainly it's what you see the rock or rap genres of | today as. While very few people "innovate" just like the | music industry the writing industry is a monopoly full of | those whose only interest is in revenue generation and | shiny lights rather than the actual message. While it may | be fun to rather generalize and insult others to put on the | face of superiority. Maybe think bigger. | YeGoblynQueenne wrote: | >> Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk | genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs | with less than any real messaging behind it. | | Yes, well, like punk-punk. See Jello Biaffra and The | Melvins, "Those dumb punk kids will buy anything": | | _Hey, we 're back Show us how much you care | | The merch booth's right over there | | And if our scam works What a bandwagon it will be_ | | https://genius.com/Jello-biafra-those-dumb-punk-kids- | will-bu... | | And music: | | https://youtu.be/reUcpCVMUag | the_af wrote: | > _" the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre | I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with | less than any real messaging behind it"_ | | Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil | corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and | alienating ways" _used_ to be a radical message but it 's | not anymore. Now it's just a trope. So I disagree with | what some are saying that cyberpunk is currently used to | convey a message; it's not, in general. It's used to | convey a _trope_ that 's lost most of its barb. | | All in my opinion, of course. And Gibson's. | pydry wrote: | >Agreed, and it's important to note that the message | "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless | and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but | it's not anymore. | | "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is | hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a | civilizational level from actual nazis. | | Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather | see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less | disney shit for this reason alone. | | It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming | true goes away. | the_af wrote: | Well, but evil evolves and the pitfalls of society do | too. You cannot stick to representations of the past. | Also, cyberpunk was supposed to be a vision of the | _future_ (used as an excuse to look at the then-present | time)! | | More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, | _unless presented in an innovative way_ , feel derivative | and boring to me. | | I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game | that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a | message that has become a trope. | pydry wrote: | Most books and games feel derivative and boring to me. | That isnt about the use of well worn tropes thats just | sturgeons law in action. | Jiro wrote: | >"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is | hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a | civilizational level from actual nazis. | | It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to | invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis. | blaser-waffle wrote: | > "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is | hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a | civilizational level from actual nazis. | | Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's | doing much except creating painfully generic stock | villains. | | People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US | and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why | they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a | thought terminating cliche. | pydry wrote: | >How's that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's | doing much except creating painfully generic stock | villains | | Those tiki torch people arent exactly running the country | now are they? | brazzy wrote: | > "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is | hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a | civilizational level from actual nazis. | | ...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a | country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes. | pydry wrote: | Yeah, so creating a nazi military batallion out of a nazi | paramilitary to fight an ethnic civil war against | Russians may not have been the genius military move | Poroshenko thought it was :( | mmcdermott wrote: | > evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless | and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but | it's not anymore. | | It seems like you would have to go pretty far back to | find a time where that would be a genuinely radical | message. The 19th century saw the trusts and rail barons. | There was also the East India Trading Company and its | affect on India. | | I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd | like to), but I always got the sense that humanization | and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk | and the dystopian world created by corporations was one | of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, | though. | blaser-waffle wrote: | > I haven't read Gibson's work specifically (though I'd | like to), but I always got the sense that humanization | and dehumanization were the primary themes of cyberpunk | and the dystopian world created by corporations was one | of the dehumanizing factors. That may not be fair, | though. | | A quote from one of the RPGnet moderators, something to | the effect of... | | "Transhumanism is about how technology will fundamentally | reshape how we live, and how we perceive what it means to | be human. Cyberpunk is how it won't." | IgorPartola wrote: | I think in retrospect you can say what you said. But | think about your stereotypical grandfather whose big | ambition was to be a company man, to work his way through | life and be rewarded with a modest pension and a | reasonably comfortable retirement. Think also about the | fact that while in the US this is less of a dream now, in | Japan this sentiment seems alive and well. | munk-a wrote: | Your sterotypical grandfather who worked 9-5 and earned | enough every five years to buy a new house in a | relatively middle-of-the-road job did so because of a | prosperity boom following WW2 which was built on the back | of repairing economic hardship and was a rather unique | time in history even for being a boom portion of the | cycle. Compare that to your father working in the 70s | where twice annual cost-of-living adjustments to account | for rapid inflation were the norm - or the 1920s and | earlier in America where the majority of people suffered | under absolutely atrocious working conditions and lived | entire lives trapped in debt cycles to a single company. | | It ebbs and it flows - there are times in history you can | fondly remember for their plenty and times you can | remember for their scarcity. | | The only really new trend, IMO, is that in the modern | world (I think for the first time ever) working | continuously for the same company is a financial trap. | The strangest innovation of the current day is that churn | is accepted and retaining skilled employees is de- | emphasized compared to... hiring new replacement | employees with less skill. This incredibly bonkers habit | has gained wide enough acceptance that it's sort of the | default business state. | jefurii wrote: | Just because "evil corporations are greedy and use tech | in soulless and alienating ways" isn't radical any more | doesn't make it any less true. | glenstein wrote: | >Agreed, and it's important to note that the message | "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless | and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but | it's not anymore. | | I have to express a hard disagree here. I think the | message can be made at higher or lower resolutions, in | vague or deep ways, and can comment not just on broad | vague themes but in deep ways about specific mechanisms. | | The merit and pertinence of the message as radical | criticism is going to have everything to do with ground | level execution of details, depth of world building, | clarity of vision, etc., which will turn out different | depending on any particular media. | | I do think it's fair to say that most things downwind | from Neuromancer can be fairly assessed as tropey, but I | think that's a sturgeon's law thing rather than something | unique about the genre as distinct from other genres. | rainonmoon wrote: | Plenty of punks are making and listening to new music. Your | nearest major city undoubtedly has a punk scene in which | people play shows, record and put out each other's albums, | and otherwise build a community very much focused on the | present and future. Are they stuck 50 years in the past or | is your idea of them? | ascagnel_ wrote: | > I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. | Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and | forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a | rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk | writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the | direction the world was going back then. | | I'd argue that another game released in 2020 understood the | "punk" part of cyberpunk much better than CP2077 -- Umurangi | Generation. Instead of giving you a gun, the game gives you a | camera, and tells you to go out and document how everyday | people are reacting to the end of the world. The game was | primarily inspired by the early 2020 brushfires in Australia, | while its add-on DLC pack Macro was heavily influenced by the | protests following the death of George Floyd, and both heavily | criticize how the state misleads, reassures, and generally | fails to respond to dire situations. | | Errant Signal did an excellent deep-dive (and spoiler-filled) | video essay on the game: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctkeq8IpdQA | BolexNOLA wrote: | This game looks absolutely fascinating. Getting it | immediately - thanks for recommendation! | newsclues wrote: | You love the aesthetic and understand the meaning, it's people | who cash in on the style that irks the creator. | | I've always loved the the affordable beauty line: | | "In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic | about his lack of it." | ineedasername wrote: | I think the aesthetic, whether Gibson likes it or not, is | interesting & compelling enough to stand on its own, outside of | any specific or inherent social commentary. Though I agree that | as an environment for stories its no longer well suited to | commentary on society today. Some of what he envisioned has | become mundane parts of everyday life, in some form or another. | Others never much materialized. For the former, well, mundane | doesn't cut it if you're after edge-walking commentary on | society's direction at the intersection of technology and human | behavior. | | Charles Stross's early works came in at tail end of cyberpunk, | lets call it the silver age, and to me they read like they're | trying to find a way forward for the genre, and he ultimately | decided that wasn't the way to go. So he branched out from | there, including to near-future sci-fi. This was ultimately a | dead end because he kept finding that, no matter how strange | the plot, by the time a manuscript was really starting to take | its final form he was already proven right by current events. | And publishing schedules being what they are, his book wouldn't | hit shelves until a year or more later at which point they'd | read like derivative commentary on year++ old events. | Essentially, his predictions were pretty good, but his expected | timeline was far too generous: the future was coming too fast. | All of his work is worth reading though, and I think his | Laundry Files & Merchant series would appeal to different, | somewhat overlapping sets of HN readers. For one of the most | interesting mind fck time travel stories, check out his short | work Palimpsest. | telchior wrote: | You're right on in your first sentence. Aesthetics trump | message when art reaches wide popularity. | | ... I swear that I used the word "trump" above | unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies | using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil | Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly | speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! | the artists themselves speak up about how much they despise | the people using their music. The fact that the message is | being misused couldn't be clearer. But the people using it | are there for the aesthetic: the general sound and feeling of | being rebels, ahead of the curve, etc. | | And honestly I think that's a good thing. Creative reuse | results in good and bad; jazz and Christian rock. Creators | can't control their art once it's in the public, and the | world would be a smaller place if they could. | | Sorry I didn't reply to the part about Charles Stross, it | looks like an interesting commentary but I'm not familiar | enough with Stross in particular. | EricE wrote: | lol - if you think Trump was part of the political | establishment you clearly weren't paying attention! | user_7832 wrote: | Anybody who was/is as rich as he was even when he started | is inherently a part of the political establishment, | especially so when you don't just stay low and mind your | own business (see: Bezos' impact on unions in the US) | telchior wrote: | He wasn't when he ran; he is now; neither fact matters at | all for the point, which is that the message of the art | (the songs being used in campaign events) was being | misused / destroyed, by direct testimony of the artists. | Same as Gibson saying he doesn't approve of how his | cyberpunk message is being used. | RangerScience wrote: | Strongly recommend the Laundry files. Note that they start | rougher (hewing very close to the original concept of "grumpy | sysadmin in weird circumenstances") but quickly mature into | more. | BlueTemplar wrote: | As he half-jokingly describes himself : | | > Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer | Science, making him the world's first officially qualified | cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died). | | More about that close future scifi dead end : | | http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the- | craz... | | Including a... pandemic novel ! | | https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- | static/2020/04/reality... | depingus wrote: | Neuromancer was a critique of the era that birthed it. Reagan | might be gone, but the frameworks cemented into place back then | are still the same frameworks we operate under today. Gibson | may have unintentionally been predicting the future. As the | world further aligns with the cyberpunk dystopia, the | mainstreaming of cyberpunk aesthetic is inevitable. | | I'm reminded of that line in The Matrix when Neo breaks The | Oracle's vase, "What's really going to bake your noodle later | on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said | anything?" | themadturk wrote: | As Gibson himself has said, science fiction is a commentary | on the moment in which it's written, and almost never | succeeds in predicting the future. That doesn't mean it can't | help shape the future (which I think Neuromancer did, at | least a little). But that's a different thing. | willis936 wrote: | CP2077 appears shallow on the surface. Compared to Deus Ex the | gameplay feels shallow. Story wise though... I'm not sure | playing as a terrorist who detonated a nuke in a city and rose | from the dead to finish the job is well within the "playing it | safe" area of current storytelling. | munk-a wrote: | And, honestly, outside of the main story the setting is | absolutely dripping with theme and care - buggy the game may | be, but poorly written it is not (in most cases - there were | definitely some misses). | | Hell, cyberpsychosis, a pretty plot-minor series of | encounters, delves into one of the more interesting | considerations in the game. That a fair number of people are | unable to handle the implant tech at all and lose their | ability to function in a balanced way - each encounter has a | harrowing series of notes about the person degrading into | insanity and each is just sort of... ignored by most of the | people around it and accepted as a cost of technological | advancement. | | I know the devs get a lot of hate, but I think that there is | a whole lot of heart and soul poured into that game. | ipnon wrote: | Gibson said he came up with Neuromancer by imagining what would | happen if Reagan became president for life. | [deleted] | cehrlich wrote: | And he basically has, in spirit. | dleslie wrote: | Cyberpunk 2077 receives too much grief for its rejection of the | mainstream state of affairs, making it quite punk. IMHO. | | The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your | character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an | influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play | in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible | achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the | result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start | a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair | amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the | present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout | the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a | misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and | pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner | loves who they are and not what they look like). | | And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification | of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical | but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought | and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are | recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a | hot commodity. | | The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, | plastic and superficial culture. | AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote: | The main character, and therefore the player, is actually | warned about this conclusion when a similar character does | early on. | | The problem with playing the capitalist game is that it | demands all of you, and never guarantees anything back. | Mountain_Skies wrote: | Sorry to gatekeep but corporate produced anything cannot be | punk. At most, they can serve as a rent seeker for passing | along punk to the masses but that's not even what Cyberpunk | 2077 is. This is 100% corporate, focus grouped, committee | approved, beige trying too hard to be punk. Which is fine if | taken for what it really is but what it really is, which | isn't punk. | dleslie wrote: | Try to gatekeep all you want; but punks failed to defend | their anti-corporate credibility and not only tolerated, | but embraced corporate appropriation of their culture. They | rode out punk's credibility while riding on boards from | Zumies, wearing Hot Topic, and listening to Sum 41 . | | CDPR is about as authentic as you'll find in high-budget | video game development; and as I enjoy high-fidelity | entertainment, as well as Pondsmith's take on Cyberpunk, I | quite enjoyed CP2077. | rainonmoon wrote: | It's tragic that you refer (erroneously) to "punks" so | firmly in the past tense, while awarding credibility to a | company best known for its exploitative overtime | practices. How's the view from Arasaka Tower? | dleslie wrote: | It's best known for its award-winning games and its | digital distribution network. | | The alleged egregious overtime was acknowledged as a | voluntary undertaking by several team members, and it | seems as though the journalists didn't bother to | investigate into the allegations they received from a | couple of complainers and opted to report them at face | value. | | Having worked in the game industry for quite some time | that whole mess of negative reporting looked more like | journalists acting like ambulance chasers, thirsty for a | hit piece to drive hate clicks to their websites, than it | was a condemnation of CDPR's culture. The subsequent | response from the company affirmed my understanding, | where they publicly apologized for bugs, reported to | shareholders about their efforts to correct internal | development processes, and so forth. | | As though working an extra 8h a week during the final | months before a hard deadline is either unheard of or | intolerable. There was no exodus of talent from CDPR. | munk-a wrote: | Calling something corporate is far too vague for any sort | of meaningful qualification. Neuromancer was published by | Ace a subsidiary of Penguin - thus making it the product of | the corporate machine. | | I will whole hardily agree that corporations manage to | water down a lot of interesting things to drive mass market | appeal but building something interesting within a | corporation doesn't negate its message. We live in a world | where 90%[1] of genuine political discussion happens hosted | by either Google, Facebook or Reddit - those are our forums | for discussion in the modern world. | | I'd also just briefly disagree with litmus testing and | gatekeeping as generally useful concepts - in almost all | the cases they're applied they're used to try and reduce a | complex spectrum discussion into a binary choice (aka | capital punishment, weed legalization, abortion legality) | and they add nothing of value - merely providing an easier | tool to help clump a wide discussion into the theming of Us | vs. Them. | | 1. I have no facts for this but I think it's a reasonable | ballpark. | willis936 wrote: | Then there is no punk now. Every inch of life within | society has been co-opted by moneymen. | | You, by living in society, are not punk. The novels you | label as punk are not punk because they are made for | profit, advertised to appease and sedate a sense of | counterculture, and bought with money made from corporate | work. | | Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify. | blaser-waffle wrote: | > Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify. | | Plenty of other punk types. Train hopping crusty punk | types come to mind. Moxie Marlinspike has a few great | stories about hanging with that crowd. | indigochill wrote: | IIRC, the Cyberpunk RPG is explicitly all about the aesthetic. | I find it obnoxious personally, but on some level I respect | that it knows what it wants to be and is that. I do think it's | a certain strain of punk, but a different one than the more | politically-minded Gibson punk. | | I suspect you could combine the "vaguely Japanese inspired | retrofuturistic aesthetics" with a more modern political | critique. To some extent, I feel like the original Deus Ex game | is still relevant as it tangles with the corruption of power | and how technology enables that process, which is more relevant | than ever. | api wrote: | I think that's a case of an artist hating their work once it's | on the canvas, which is incredibly common. | the_af wrote: | Hmm, I don't think Gibson hates his work. What do you mean? | cwkoss wrote: | I wonder what Gibson thinks of solarpunk. I think its a very | compelling aesthetic, and much more rejecting of societal norms | (particularly around consumptive consumerism) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-05 23:00 UTC)