[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)