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Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo de
by vilhelm_s 9y ago
Indeed! But then again, I think the genre boundary between cyberpunk and fairy tale was always permeable. In Count Zero, evolved AIs posses people like vodoo deities. In Serial Experiments Lain, dead people live on as ghosts in cyberspace. While Snow Crash plays it for laughs, the idea that Ancient Sumerian gods live on as latent patterns in our brains (ready to override and erase our consciousness if the right word is spoken) is pretty Lovecraftian too.
Maybe one of the purest exponents of this "Lovecraft-via-cyberpunk" aesthetic is Nick Land; his early works are very influenced by 1980s cyberpunk science fiction, and (as far as I can make out from his rather opaque writing) his main thesis is that the combination of AI and Capitalism will evolve into an entity literally beyond human understanding, which will get rid of us all as it goes on to pursue its own inscrutable goals...
- WorldMaker 9y agoAbsolutely, did not mean to imply I wasn't standing on the shoulders of giants in that genre cross-over, more that the existential dread seems to get more dreadful today [0] than in early cyberpunk. In addition to examples you list, certainly Charles Stross' Laundry series is a particular influence for me here as well. (One book of which was so close to home I felt a need to only read it outside during daylight.) [0] ETA missing splice: as opposed to "punk"/DIY/rebellious/creatively-destructive. It's almost hard to imagine we've crossed some blurry line where early cyberpunk seems almost positively hopeful compared to reality.
- gasbag 9y agoYour last sentence also sounds a lot like Economics 2.0 (and some other things) from Charles Stross's magnificent book Accelerando.
- WorldMaker 9y agoThat work is rumbling in the back of my head in every bitcoin discussion.