[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 Now it's just rehashing for the sake of rehashing, and some of the tropes are hilariously outdated but still copied by the faithful.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 But the tropes being familiar and so outdated that using some of them in future settings is positively anachronistic is part of the appeal, just like it is for most of the earlier scifi canon, and Gibson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.