After reading “The Peripheral” for the n-th time, I started wondering how the “old school” cyberpunk novels presented a different vibe from the more modern cyberpunk-inspired content.
What I mean - and I’m afraid I cannot express precisely what crossed my mind - is that 90s-00s cyberpunk novels (Gibson especially, but non just him) gave ample space to describe and discuss the social and ethical implications of their cyberpunk societies.
I think modern cyberpunk-insipred contest is somewhat lacking from this standpoint. The common basic premise is that things went bad somewhere in the past and now are going even worse. Storylines are, basically, “people managing their own shit, and wow there’s so much tech involved”.
With some exceptions - see Doctorow’s works, always socially-oriented - I think everything is much more monodimensional.
But it’s me, as usual. Any thoughts on my rant?
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I would like to hear some specifics from you on this, but I agree the popularization of cyberpunk has brought writers into the fold who aren’t as interested in the philosophical angles, and are more interested in the aesthetics and tropes.
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To some extent, I feel like in the '80s and '90s there was still room to discuss the social and ethical implications of those cyberpunk societies because not much of it had come to pass - it was still well within the realm of dark fantasy and was ripe with either warning or hope potential.
But these days, we’ve reached that technological saturation point where we’ve already tried so many of the things that were in those early stories and have seen the negative impacts that they’ve had. Whereas the system was “open” when those early works were written, it’s much more closed now and people are just having to spend all their energy dealing with the known quantities of the tech implementations and encroachment that we actually got.
Doctorow’s works are a good call-out, as are all the stories from the Black Mirror series and even the Love Death + Robots anthologies. A lot of those stories are centered around social implications of “everyday technologies” or impacts of the likely future progression of technologies that are in their infancy or adolescence today.
And like @vestige said, there’s also a lot of people that are just into the aesthetic more than the ethos, and that colors their writing. I feel like too many authors are just throwing their hands up and saying, “well what can we actually do about it?” as opposed to trying to make points or suggestions of things that maybe we could do.
You began three paragraphs with the word “But”
I feel like this has happened to science fiction in general. I agree part of it is authors being drawn to the trappings but not necessarily the substance of the genre. The result ends up being a generic plot line with a veneer of a genre.
I think the other part is how publishers select which novel/author they do a big run for. Their goal is to sell as many copies of something as they can. So they try to select things with the broadest generic appeal, which, in their minds, is something dumbed down. Things with nuance or messages tend to get classified as too “cerebral” or “preachy.”
So we get novels that might be mildly entertaining that we then forget once we read the last page. The AAA game market is stuck in this same quagmire.
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