You know, I was tired of cyberpunk after Eric Nylund's A Signal to Noise basically became king of cyberpunk in my brain. There's nowhere else for the genre to go. It's a dying culture. Like you pointed out, nobody has kids, and that generation will effectively vanish. My personal pet theory is that Babylon in Revelation is the ultimate cyberpunk city, and it goes out in a giant fireball. As it should. :-D
That's an interesting perspective. Though often biblical accounts get hyperbolic. Perhaps the population slowly withers and an atomic reactor melts down when the staff are too disheartened and too few to repair it.
I wonder if there is a place for stories set during a time of cyberpunk cities, but not within them. Some of the coolest parts of Blade Runner 2049 take place outside the archetypical cyberpunk city of LA. We are living through the revenge of the middle American family man upon the tech-obsessed urbanite childless man. I think there is good potential there for a new direction of the genre.
It’s so interesting reading this as someone who caught cyberpunk after its peak, as a 90s baby. My first introduction to it was The Matrix. Still love the genre but these days it feels too close to home.
I think the sub-genre in general overstated the permanence of many corporations (look at how many of the brands in Blade Runner are dead or irrelevant now) and underestimated gentrification.
Cyberpunk film never really amounted to much, aside from Philip K. Dick stories, and PKD wasn't cyberpunk any more than Samuel Delany was (though his Babel-17 and Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones were way cyberpunk, but '60s New Wave as a genre). William Gibson's Neuromancer was the archetype of literary cyberbunk, but Gibson was sui generis, a stylist, not a hard SF guy. The other two of the prototypical cyberpunk authors, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker never made much traction - Sterling because he topped out early with Schismatrix (still relevant and one of the best SF novels) and then went full eco-retard; Rucker because he's just too weird (er... original!). Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was was the full flowering of cybeepunk, but he killed off the genre - had it executed - at the beginning of The Diamond Age. Really, cyberpunk proper was the Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, the rest were just tagged with the term for marketing purposes. So, yes cyberbunk is dead, but it hardly existed in the first place. The gritty tropes will live on, though, at least if SF itself does.
You know, I was tired of cyberpunk after Eric Nylund's A Signal to Noise basically became king of cyberpunk in my brain. There's nowhere else for the genre to go. It's a dying culture. Like you pointed out, nobody has kids, and that generation will effectively vanish. My personal pet theory is that Babylon in Revelation is the ultimate cyberpunk city, and it goes out in a giant fireball. As it should. :-D
That's an interesting perspective. Though often biblical accounts get hyperbolic. Perhaps the population slowly withers and an atomic reactor melts down when the staff are too disheartened and too few to repair it.
I wonder if there is a place for stories set during a time of cyberpunk cities, but not within them. Some of the coolest parts of Blade Runner 2049 take place outside the archetypical cyberpunk city of LA. We are living through the revenge of the middle American family man upon the tech-obsessed urbanite childless man. I think there is good potential there for a new direction of the genre.
I think there is. It'll be very different. Similar to the piece of fiction I'm working on right now.
It’s so interesting reading this as someone who caught cyberpunk after its peak, as a 90s baby. My first introduction to it was The Matrix. Still love the genre but these days it feels too close to home.
I agree. Both too close to home and too distant from reality to be very enjoyable imo.
Accurate.
I'm a literal cyborg (bone anchored hearing aid) and we are all metaphorical cyborgs (smartphones are telepathic).
Cyberpunk doesn't have much left to say. It's now retro futurism focusing on an aesthetic rather than the deeper ideas of the 80s/90s.
I think the sub-genre in general overstated the permanence of many corporations (look at how many of the brands in Blade Runner are dead or irrelevant now) and underestimated gentrification.
Cyberpunk film never really amounted to much, aside from Philip K. Dick stories, and PKD wasn't cyberpunk any more than Samuel Delany was (though his Babel-17 and Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones were way cyberpunk, but '60s New Wave as a genre). William Gibson's Neuromancer was the archetype of literary cyberbunk, but Gibson was sui generis, a stylist, not a hard SF guy. The other two of the prototypical cyberpunk authors, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker never made much traction - Sterling because he topped out early with Schismatrix (still relevant and one of the best SF novels) and then went full eco-retard; Rucker because he's just too weird (er... original!). Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash was was the full flowering of cybeepunk, but he killed off the genre - had it executed - at the beginning of The Diamond Age. Really, cyberpunk proper was the Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, the rest were just tagged with the term for marketing purposes. So, yes cyberbunk is dead, but it hardly existed in the first place. The gritty tropes will live on, though, at least if SF itself does.