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by toyg
2124 days ago
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I think we're getting a bit too liberal with labels. "Trying to imagine all the ways that current technology can affect the human society in the near future and answering the question of 'what can even go wrong?' " is basically just "doing SciFi the way SciFi should be done". There is nothing eminently cyberpunk in the technique. Obviously "SciFi done right" will forever self-reinvent, that's how cyberpunk came to be in the first place; but it has little to do with the health of cyberpunk as a genre. We usually talk of cyberpunk specifically to restrict the argument to a subset of scifi topics and literary aesthetics common to the self-declared cyberpunk artists: the influence of networks, body augmentation, and corporate feudalism (or rejection thereof). A scifi text that does not touch on any of those items, is unlikely to be seen or defined as cyberpunk. So imho a "cyberpunk reinvention" would need to find something fresh to say on those topics. If I were to write a book on reusable rockets, for example, I would be "doing scifi right" (spaceX etc) but not really "doing cyberpunk". |
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This isn't about making stories on reusable rockets, it is about how those reusable rockets would affect the common man's life negatively. You know, "high tech, low life". Of course if that wouldn't make sense (cannot think how reusable rockets could affect everyday life, at least in a direct way), then it isn't much of a fit for Cyberpunk.
Framing Cyberpunk as only about networks, body augmentation and corporate feudalism is IMO too narrow and restricting - these can be the symptoms of high tech but they aren't the only thing that high tech can do or affect negatively.
I mean, what is next? Restricting Cyberpunk works to only be set at night while raining? :-P