[BTCOG]

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]

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://www.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.

[BTCOG]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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/status/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]

(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.