Cyberpunk

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People are lured by easy money, without understanding the privacy implications of signing up for the block chain.

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I've compiled a timeline of cyberpunk books that, in my opinion, represent significant shifts in the genre and its ideas. Whether it's the early explorations of AI and dystopian futures, the emergence of virtual reality, or the more recent reflections on environmental and social issues, each book on this list adds a unique perspective to the ever-evolving cyberpunk landscape.

However, it takes a village and all that. So I would like to list them here in c/cyberpunk, cross-posting it at literature, to know your opinions on the genre, the books, and if you have any suggestions, complementary or disrupting, on this list.

1. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick (1968): To me, it all begins here. This novel, which served as the basis for the movie "Blade Runner", popularized the groundwork for many cyberpunk themes like artificial intelligence, dystopian future, and the blurred line between reality and the artificial.

2. "Neuromancer" by William Gibson (1984): Often considered the genre defining work, it introduced the concept of cyberspace and explored themes of artificial intelligence and corporate power, and to me it indirectly set the core principle of the genre, "high tech, low life".

3. "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson (1992): This book further pushed the envelope on the concept of virtual reality, offering a blend of ancient cultures, linguistics, computer science, politics, and philosophy, and fucking added fun to the genre.

4. "Ghost in the Shell" by Masamune Shirow (1995): I cheat a little big here by adding a manga series. It deserves a mention, along with the movie, because it dives deeply into the themes of self-identity, artificial intelligence, and societal intrigue that really brought cyberpunk to the world. It had a profound influence on cyberpunk literature and media after it's conception.

5. "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan (2002): This may be a little controversial, as I don't really like the author to be honest, but this novel adds more depth to themes of identity and humanity through the concept of consciousness transfer and immortality.

6. "Accelerando" by Charles Stross (2005): This one added weight to the genre by exploring the societal and personal changes that might happen as a result of the technological singularity, a theoretical point when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. I personally dig this aspect, and try to write more of it.

7. "Windup Girl", by Paolo Bacigalupi (2009): I know, I know, "biopunk". But I refuse to budge on it. To me this retains the core concept of cyberpunk, and is cyberpunk, because it is about technology, and its effect on quality of life and society. But the simple fact that the novel brings this discussion makes it a remarkable point in the genre.

8. "Player One" by Ernest Cline (2011): Another controversial addition here, but this book is a blend of dystopian future with nostalgia for the pop culture of the 1980s, and revives themes of virtual reality and the influence of technology on society, giving breadth (and a new breath) to the genre.

9. "The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020): This near-future novel tackles themes around climate change and global politics, focusing on the power of technology as a tool to combat environmental disaster, and offers a more optimistic view of the future. I like this one here because it brings the discussion to current topics, maintaining the genre alive.

10. "Repo Virtual" by Corey J. White (2020): White's novel explores cyberpunk in an age of late capitalism, AI, and questions about sentience and autonomy. Along with ministry of the Future, this serve the same purpose of maintaining the genre purpose alive and bringing us to the point we are now, which is also a good concept that I agree with: it doesn't need to be about things far away in the future, because soon some of these novels will be about things in the past, and the genre must remain the same still.

By Daniel Liang - https://www.artstation.com/danielliang

My top two are-

New Rose Hotel and Strange Days

languid-lemur asked on the Cyberpunk subreddit what the most cyberpunk thing is in your daily life.

This was my response:

Spending untold amounts of time on executive-function-attenuated addictions to dying corporate ad-driven profit machine engagement platforms that you reopen after momentarily forgetting that you just closed them when the dopamine rewards diminished while your life was happening in the background white noise without you noticing, like the soft hum of the air filters you've forgotten to service for another month. NFC smart watch payments on self-checkout machines for your greater convenience and the lessening need for inhuman interactions and paying fewer retail employees a poverty wage with no benefits, while the smart machine stupidly tells you to remember to take the receipt that you declined to print and tells you to have a nice day and sincerely thanks you for your purchase from the deepest abscesses of its silicon heart. Meanwhile at work you hesitate to deal with the security-obsessed IT administrators who want to lock it all down so the technology is not useable because that's how you prevent issues, deepfreezing 99% of the hard drive so it forgets to remember your files when it reboots over night after an update and a network crash they wait a few hours to tell you about. But at least the black-topped corn starch 3D printed glow-in-the-dark mechanical keyboard caps are turning out decently and the supply chain shortage price-gouged microcomputer hardware you've been waiting for finally arrives via webcam monitored independent contractors so their boss can cowboy up to the mesosphere one more time instead of solving world hunger. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

The Big Book of Cyberpunk is coming out Sep 26, 2023.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576/the-big-book-of-cyberpunk-by-jared-shurin/

One of my short stories is getting republished in it, titled Keep Portland Wired.

This is more of a summary for a series of articles btw.

Go too deep and we'll never want to leave the metaverse. The real universe will be dull by comparison.

Historical cyberpunk has already met up with the present, and present day cyberpunk is becoming a shallow corporate reflection (oh the irony), too caught up in the aesthetic to see itself. A genre like cyberpunk which looks into the soon to come future has to keep evolving to not be a relic of the past.

Cyberpunk has a point - it's a criticism, and a warning. Let's not forget it.

original creator