7 ms·

The author seems to have wanted to write an article about cyberpunk, but didn't have anything to say. There was no premise or conclusion, simply a few rambling

The author seems to have wanted to write an article about cyberpunk, but didn't have anything to say. There was no premise or conclusion, simply a few rambling thoughts about the current state of technology and media. What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled. Sure, the spaceship crew might have to dispatch some weird bug creatures, or family's robot might have gone haywire, or Big Brother might be watching your every move, but it's taken for granted that technological progress has kept pace, rockets are zooming around, and power has been steadily accruing upward to the government, which is basically taking care of things. The biggest problem might be that the government (or should I say The Empire) has gotten a bit too much control, and some rebels have banded together for the sake of Freedom. The cyberpunk sensibility and vision is not only darker, but significantly more subversive. Power has not conglomerated in the hands of the government, it's been usurped by corporations and wealthy individuals. Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty. Technology never managed to lift mankind out of its daily struggle, humanity never banded together in search of the stars, and the hope of that clean, bright, government controlled future has become a cruel joke.

chme 8y ago
Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. A world where technological and sociological development of humanity went mostly parallel. We now seem to develop technology faster than ourselves. Current SciFi is therefor mostly on the dark and dramatic side.
- colordrops 8y ago
  The Expanse is an interesting mix of Star Trek optimism and cyberpunk sensibilities.
  - auslander 8y ago
    No dark nets, hackers and William Gibson stuff
    - a-saleh 8y ago
      High-tech & Low-life enough for me ;-)
    - freeflight 8y ago
      Instead, it has somewhat realistic space physics, a trade-off I will gladly take. If I want mind-bending stuff there's still Legion and Mr Robot out there, not exactly "cyberpunk VR darknets" but very strong on alternate reality/conscious themes.
      - auslander 8y ago
        Merge Mr Robot into The Expanse, and lets see :)
- freeflight 8y ago
  > Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the human face, forever." - George Orwell
- krapp 8y ago
  The original Star Trek also had a megacorp keeping workers pacified with neurotoxins (The Cloud Minders) sex slavery with advanced pharmaceuticals (Mudd's Women,) genetically engineered elites oppressing baseline humans (Space Seed) and AI run amok (The Changeling, I, Mudd and others.) It was optimistic, but it was also a product of the 60's. Fear of the future was there, it just tended to be presented in political terms, through metaphors of the Cold War and Vietnam, rather than technological.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    The Cloud Minders was the opposite. The neurotoxin was an accident that no one believed existed until the Enterprise arrived, and it made the lower caste violent, not pacified.
    - krapp 8y ago
      Oops. Fair enough.
      - Izkata 8y ago
        Aside... I just happened to have re-watched all of TOS over the past two months. That one was around the middle of last week. Great timing, eh?
    - ajuc 8y ago
      Lol, was it an analogy for lead in fuel in real life on purpose? Cause it's roughly how this worked in the real life (20 years after ban of leaded petrol in each country violent crimes fall dramatically).
      - Izkata 8y ago
        It could only be "on purpose" if they could see some 40 years into the future... The episode aired in 1969.
- Izkata 8y ago
  > I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. If you haven't yet, check out The Orville. It's the spiritual successor to Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek. It got badly marketed as a comedy in space akin to Galaxy Quest, but that was mostly bad marketing. The first episode or two were high on the comedy (and I've heard a theory that they did it to trick Fox into picking up the series), but it rapidly toned down, to where it's more like Star Trek with realistic people instead of a utopian version of humanity without any vices. For a one-episode introduction, if the initial comedy turns you off, I suggest episode 3, About a Girl.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
I love the short story "The Gernsback Continuum" for this reason. Gibson writes about his rejection of a bright, optimistic, pseudo Aryan future for reality. It's framed as a writer plagued by hallucinations, but I read it more as a commentary on the absurdity of classical sci fi in the modern day (or at least, the 80's). All the elegant flying cars and people in white jumpsuits eating food pills are visions of the future from the far more innocent, optimistic era of the 40's and 50's. But writing those same stories now just doesn't make any sense.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
  Yes, "The Gernsback Continuum" is basically Gibson's declaration of abolishing the traditional utopian, optimistic view of the future and the beginning of cyberpunk. Strongly recommended.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
There is one major point you have to consider about sci fi. The rise and golden era of sci fi were during times of great nationalism. This was in large part the US (who I will focus on, but a similar picture is true across the world) had real and present enemies to unify the people against. The "golden age of sci fi" is considered to be 1938-1946. WW2 was 1939-1945. Star Trek of course came much later, yet Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921 and flew nearly 100 combat missions in WW2. To say he this period had an influence on his views and life would be quite the understatement! During these times of nationalism, people looked outward for enemies and inward for unification and progress. You can see this exact metaphor within the federation. The enemies take unfamiliar shapes and forms from other literally alien cultures. Cyberpunk started to emerge during the 60s and 70s, with Neuromancer being released in 1984. We went from World War 2 to Vietnam, the rise of anti-nationalism, and an American people ever more able to find their own enemies from within. We went from a government that culminated in sending a man on the moon to a government that, especially after the end of the WW3 that did not happen - the Cold War, seemed to lack any direction or purpose eventually culminating in a behavior mimicking society of simply finding its own enemies within and eating itself alive. And that trend continues to this very day. The reason sci fi had a utopic future vision was because that's what seemed probable. Today how do you perceive the future in a couple of hundred years? I think "The Expanse* does a phenomenal take of considering this without resorting to trope. I also think Deep Space Nine was also well ahead of its time here. The episode "Past Tense" in particular is something that seems practically prophetic of the times today, down to the exact area and timeline.
pjc50 8y ago
> dramatic shift from the classical view of the future This was always the colonial view of the future, perhaps adapted up to the Eisenhower era. Like everything else, science fiction writing has adapted to post-colonialism. The watershed was probably somewhere around the 60s-70s: > Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty. i.e., the present western milieu from about the 1970s: acid rain, nuclear rain, superfund sites, New York as "no go area". Many of which have actually improved since then but survive as tropes. Remember that the "cyber-" prefix relates also to control systems, both in the sense of industrial control like PID loops and by analogy social control systems through feedback. Look for the control systems. Neuromancer (1982) provides lots of great examples of this; almost every character including the AIs are labouring under external control which they are trying to shake off.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Yes, I think the works of 60s/70s author John Brunner ("Stand on Zanzibar", "The Shockwave Rider") anticipated many cyberpunk ideas even before the Gibson/Sterling era. Key to this idea was a recognition that that the "third world" was going to matter more and more in the post-colonial world.
dnomad 8y ago
The author doesn't really get cyberpunk hence the confusion. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic, yes, but it is no mere aesthetic a la Romanticism or abstract art. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic that asserts that it is real. It's what troublesome about Cyberpunk; unlike goofy classical sci-fi which deliberately juxtaposes a fictional future with our present Cyberpunk insists that it actually is the future. Further, the Cyberpunk aesthetic itself advocates nothing more than the triumph of the virtual/digital/illusory world over the real world. This is the postmodern demon: an illusion that insists illusions are more real than the real world. This is the dreaded hyperreality [1]. The interesting thing about the hyperreal is that the best Cyberpunk art captures so well well is that there's no escape. There's no "going back" to the real world. It is a perfect philosophical trap: all attempts to separate "fake news" from "real news" will accomplish nothing but to further undermine any notion of "real news", all attempts to separate "fake humans" and "real humans" will lead only to the creation of better, more sophisticated, more real "fake humans." Nobody can build a "reality detector" and no victory is possible against the AIs and the other Super Simulators. The horrifying truth is that organizations which embrace this and pour real resources into producing fake news and fake humans have such an enormous economic advantage and that their victory is all but assured. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
Eh. I don't feel like our reality has really resembled cyberpunk in specific so much as grimdark in general. I liked this other article better: http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-present http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-prese...
athenot 8y ago
Yes! Technology has always been about increasing efficiency. But it's always been expensive as R&D requires wealth. It makes sense that the primary benefiters of tech are the asset class who fund them. The outcome is that there are real tech contributions to society but only as side-effects to return on investment for the asset class. Eventually, the goals diverge, as the primary objective of an individual or corporation holding any amount of wealth is to increase it. The counterweights to that trend are open government research, and open-source tech. Encouragingly, much of technology is information itself; and information wants to be free. (Comment sent over IP, leveraging a network built for a government defense system... but using a proprietary device paid for by a job in technology that primarily benefits corporations.)
mindcrime 8y ago
government controlled future What I find amazing is that anybody would utter that phrase and not consider it a "cruel joke" in and of itself. Government is antithetical to Freedom and self-ownership, and there's no particular reason to aspire towards a future where everything (or most everything) is controlled by the government. That is even more true when you realize the truth that "the government" and "the corporations and wealthy individuals" collapse into the same thing in the end. There will (probably) always be battle between decentralized power and power that aggregates in the hands of entities like corporations and governments. Everyone should keep this in mind, and always remind themselves that both governments and corporations are a threat to Freedom, autonomy and self-ownership / self-direction.
- krapp 8y ago
  You shouldn't be amazed that not everyone is, or historically has been, an anarchist who views government as antithetical to capital-F freedom (whatever that's supposed to mean.)
  - mindcrime 8y ago
    While I personally am an anarchist, that isn't actually relevant to what I was saying above. There really isn't any actual question that government (as a centralization of power in the hands of a few) is antithetical to the freedom of individuals to live without fear of coercion. But in this context, I'm not arguing for a totally stateless society with NO government at all. In this context, I'm just saying that I find it amazing that people (apparently) want a "government run future" - a phrase which, to me, suggests a much higher level of government control of the details of our lives, compared even to what we have now. Now we may just be quibbling over the semantics of what "government run future" means, which is fine. It just jumps off the page at me as something that is far from being self-evidently desirable.
    - krapp 8y ago
      Bear in mind, we're talking about the future past, and probably a particularly American one. Before cyberpunk and dystopia in science fiction became more common, certain premises like the value of centralized authority, militarism, colonialist ideals and even eugenics were often taken for granted (depending on the author.)
EthanHeilman 8y ago
>What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled. I know that this is a popular narrative about science fiction of the past but I'm not sure it is actually true. For instance looking at the greats from 19th C. to the first half of the 20th C (although perhaps looking at the greats is not the best approach). 1. Isaac Asimov's "The Foundation" (1942) is about the collapse of an empire and the birth of a new empire. Social science turns out to be more powerful than spaceships but it has some pretty serious failure modes. 2. Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1869) is largely about a rebel. Technology doesn't seem to be fixing problems. 3. H.G. Well's "Time Machine" (1895) has the end of all human civilization and "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933) while utopian is also extremely grim at points. 4. Stapledon's works, "Star Maker" (1937) and "First and Last Men" (1930) which were extremely influential on the science fiction of that time are grand and chaotic. Several of the time periods described could easily be cyberpunk. 5. C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy (1938) is explicitly anti-progress. Cyberpunk was essentially a switch from telling pulpy adventure stories to telling pulpy noir stories.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  Verne's "Paris in the Twentieth Century" (which wasn't published because he was told it was too negative) has an extremely pessimistic view of the future as well. It's and extremely sad book
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  George R. Stewart, The Earth Abides (1949), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), On the Beach, John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (1968) The Shockwave Rider (1975), and The Sheep Look Up (1972). John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd)'s Tripod trilogy (1967) and The Sword of the Spirits, George Orwell (Eric Blair) 1984 (1948), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931), Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962). Much of the work of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. I'd gotten into this with David Brin a few years back on G+ when he was grousing that modern sci-fi is pessimistic in was the classics never were. He is wrong. Though happy stories do tend to sell better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
ataturk 8y ago
As someone who has read most of the genre and taught a college course on the subject, I agree that the article didn't say that much, but it's fine. I appreciate the "lived in universe" whether it is cyberpunk fiction or Han Solo's Millenium Falcon. "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed." I take exception to the ideas about anti-globalism, though. There are plenty of educated people, like me, who are against global plutocracy. The idea that only backwoods hicks support Trump is horribly toxic. Trump is himself a cyberpunk. He's practically a one-man junta against the globalist slavers. He and the faction of the intelligence community that are desperately trying to right the ship deserve our support, not our scorn. Just look at the criminal acts the FBI and CIA have committed, as well as the Dept. of State in fomenting wars and destruction of civilization (Libya, Syria) for the sake of corporate profiteering. 9/11 was the same deal, too--a major false flag designed to enhance big government and corporate profits. Cyberpunks want to tear these people down!

chme 8y ago

Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. A world where technological and sociological development of humanity went mostly parallel. We now seem to develop technology faster than ourselves. Current SciFi is therefor mostly on the dark and dramatic side.

colordrops 8y ago
The Expanse is an interesting mix of Star Trek optimism and cyberpunk sensibilities.
- auslander 8y ago
  No dark nets, hackers and William Gibson stuff
  - a-saleh 8y ago
    High-tech & Low-life enough for me ;-)
  - freeflight 8y ago
    Instead, it has somewhat realistic space physics, a trade-off I will gladly take. If I want mind-bending stuff there's still Legion and Mr Robot out there, not exactly "cyberpunk VR darknets" but very strong on alternate reality/conscious themes.
    - auslander 8y ago
      Merge Mr Robot into The Expanse, and lets see :)
freeflight 8y ago
> Or both the government and big corporations hammering down on the humans... "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on the human face, forever." - George Orwell
krapp 8y ago
The original Star Trek also had a megacorp keeping workers pacified with neurotoxins (The Cloud Minders) sex slavery with advanced pharmaceuticals (Mudd's Women,) genetically engineered elites oppressing baseline humans (Space Seed) and AI run amok (The Changeling, I, Mudd and others.) It was optimistic, but it was also a product of the 60's. Fear of the future was there, it just tended to be presented in political terms, through metaphors of the Cold War and Vietnam, rather than technological.
- Izkata 8y ago
  The Cloud Minders was the opposite. The neurotoxin was an accident that no one believed existed until the Enterprise arrived, and it made the lower caste violent, not pacified.
  - krapp 8y ago
    Oops. Fair enough.
    - Izkata 8y ago
      Aside... I just happened to have re-watched all of TOS over the past two months. That one was around the middle of last week. Great timing, eh?
  - ajuc 8y ago
    Lol, was it an analogy for lead in fuel in real life on purpose? Cause it's roughly how this worked in the real life (20 years after ban of leaded petrol in each country violent crimes fall dramatically).
    - Izkata 8y ago
      It could only be "on purpose" if they could see some 40 years into the future... The episode aired in 1969.
Izkata 8y ago
> I do miss the optimistic view of the original Star Trek series. If you haven't yet, check out The Orville. It's the spiritual successor to Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek. It got badly marketed as a comedy in space akin to Galaxy Quest, but that was mostly bad marketing. The first episode or two were high on the comedy (and I've heard a theory that they did it to trick Fox into picking up the series), but it rapidly toned down, to where it's more like Star Trek with realistic people instead of a utopian version of humanity without any vices. For a one-episode introduction, if the initial comedy turns you off, I suggest episode 3, About a Girl.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

I love the short story "The Gernsback Continuum" for this reason. Gibson writes about his rejection of a bright, optimistic, pseudo Aryan future for reality. It's framed as a writer plagued by hallucinations, but I read it more as a commentary on the absurdity of classical sci fi in the modern day (or at least, the 80's). All the elegant flying cars and people in white jumpsuits eating food pills are visions of the future from the far more innocent, optimistic era of the 40's and 50's. But writing those same stories now just doesn't make any sense.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
Yes, "The Gernsback Continuum" is basically Gibson's declaration of abolishing the traditional utopian, optimistic view of the future and the beginning of cyberpunk. Strongly recommended.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

There is one major point you have to consider about sci fi. The rise and golden era of sci fi were during times of great nationalism. This was in large part the US (who I will focus on, but a similar picture is true across the world) had real and present enemies to unify the people against. The "golden age of sci fi" is considered to be 1938-1946. WW2 was 1939-1945. Star Trek of course came much later, yet Gene Roddenberry was born in 1921 and flew nearly 100 combat missions in WW2. To say he this period had an influence on his views and life would be quite the understatement! During these times of nationalism, people looked outward for enemies and inward for unification and progress. You can see this exact metaphor within the federation. The enemies take unfamiliar shapes and forms from other literally alien cultures. Cyberpunk started to emerge during the 60s and 70s, with Neuromancer being released in 1984. We went from World War 2 to Vietnam, the rise of anti-nationalism, and an American people ever more able to find their own enemies from within. We went from a government that culminated in sending a man on the moon to a government that, especially after the end of the WW3 that did not happen - the Cold War, seemed to lack any direction or purpose eventually culminating in a behavior mimicking society of simply finding its own enemies within and eating itself alive. And that trend continues to this very day. The reason sci fi had a utopic future vision was because that's what seemed probable. Today how do you perceive the future in a couple of hundred years? I think "The Expanse* does a phenomenal take of considering this without resorting to trope. I also think Deep Space Nine was also well ahead of its time here. The episode "Past Tense" in particular is something that seems practically prophetic of the times today, down to the exact area and timeline.

pjc50 8y ago

> dramatic shift from the classical view of the future This was always the colonial view of the future, perhaps adapted up to the Eisenhower era. Like everything else, science fiction writing has adapted to post-colonialism. The watershed was probably somewhere around the 60s-70s: > Technology has not solved hunger, poverty, sickness, or human suffering, in fact in many cases it has made them worse. The environment has been fucked by centuries of industrial abuse, the cities are a mess, drugs and crime are rampant, the streets are dirty, even the rain is dirty. i.e., the present western milieu from about the 1970s: acid rain, nuclear rain, superfund sites, New York as "no go area". Many of which have actually improved since then but survive as tropes. Remember that the "cyber-" prefix relates also to control systems, both in the sense of industrial control like PID loops and by analogy social control systems through feedback. Look for the control systems. Neuromancer (1982) provides lots of great examples of this; almost every character including the AIs are labouring under external control which they are trying to shake off.

jhbadger 8y ago
Yes, I think the works of 60s/70s author John Brunner ("Stand on Zanzibar", "The Shockwave Rider") anticipated many cyberpunk ideas even before the Gibson/Sterling era. Key to this idea was a recognition that that the "third world" was going to matter more and more in the post-colonial world.

dnomad 8y ago

The author doesn't really get cyberpunk hence the confusion. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic, yes, but it is no mere aesthetic a la Romanticism or abstract art. Cyberpunk is an aesthetic that asserts that it is real. It's what troublesome about Cyberpunk; unlike goofy classical sci-fi which deliberately juxtaposes a fictional future with our present Cyberpunk insists that it actually is the future. Further, the Cyberpunk aesthetic itself advocates nothing more than the triumph of the virtual/digital/illusory world over the real world. This is the postmodern demon: an illusion that insists illusions are more real than the real world. This is the dreaded hyperreality [1]. The interesting thing about the hyperreal is that the best Cyberpunk art captures so well well is that there's no escape. There's no "going back" to the real world. It is a perfect philosophical trap: all attempts to separate "fake news" from "real news" will accomplish nothing but to further undermine any notion of "real news", all attempts to separate "fake humans" and "real humans" will lead only to the creation of better, more sophisticated, more real "fake humans." Nobody can build a "reality detector" and no victory is possible against the AIs and the other Super Simulators. The horrifying truth is that organizations which embrace this and pour real resources into producing fake news and fake humans have such an enormous economic advantage and that their victory is all but assured. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

Eh. I don't feel like our reality has really resembled cyberpunk in specific so much as grimdark in general. I liked this other article better: http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-present http://outermode.com/warhammer-40000-is-predicting-the-prese...

athenot 8y ago

Yes! Technology has always been about increasing efficiency. But it's always been expensive as R&D requires wealth. It makes sense that the primary benefiters of tech are the asset class who fund them. The outcome is that there are real tech contributions to society but only as side-effects to return on investment for the asset class. Eventually, the goals diverge, as the primary objective of an individual or corporation holding any amount of wealth is to increase it. The counterweights to that trend are open government research, and open-source tech. Encouragingly, much of technology is information itself; and information wants to be free. (Comment sent over IP, leveraging a network built for a government defense system... but using a proprietary device paid for by a job in technology that primarily benefits corporations.)

mindcrime 8y ago

government controlled future What I find amazing is that anybody would utter that phrase and not consider it a "cruel joke" in and of itself. Government is antithetical to Freedom and self-ownership, and there's no particular reason to aspire towards a future where everything (or most everything) is controlled by the government. That is even more true when you realize the truth that "the government" and "the corporations and wealthy individuals" collapse into the same thing in the end. There will (probably) always be battle between decentralized power and power that aggregates in the hands of entities like corporations and governments. Everyone should keep this in mind, and always remind themselves that both governments and corporations are a threat to Freedom, autonomy and self-ownership / self-direction.

krapp 8y ago
You shouldn't be amazed that not everyone is, or historically has been, an anarchist who views government as antithetical to capital-F freedom (whatever that's supposed to mean.)
- mindcrime 8y ago
  While I personally am an anarchist, that isn't actually relevant to what I was saying above. There really isn't any actual question that government (as a centralization of power in the hands of a few) is antithetical to the freedom of individuals to live without fear of coercion. But in this context, I'm not arguing for a totally stateless society with NO government at all. In this context, I'm just saying that I find it amazing that people (apparently) want a "government run future" - a phrase which, to me, suggests a much higher level of government control of the details of our lives, compared even to what we have now. Now we may just be quibbling over the semantics of what "government run future" means, which is fine. It just jumps off the page at me as something that is far from being self-evidently desirable.
  - krapp 8y ago
    Bear in mind, we're talking about the future past, and probably a particularly American one. Before cyberpunk and dystopia in science fiction became more common, certain premises like the value of centralized authority, militarism, colonialist ideals and even eugenics were often taken for granted (depending on the author.)

EthanHeilman 8y ago

>What I find fascinating about the cyberpunk sensibility is the dramatic shift from the classical view of the future. When you dig into older science fiction it is almost universally accepted that the future will be clean, bright, and government-controlled. I know that this is a popular narrative about science fiction of the past but I'm not sure it is actually true. For instance looking at the greats from 19th C. to the first half of the 20th C (although perhaps looking at the greats is not the best approach). 1. Isaac Asimov's "The Foundation" (1942) is about the collapse of an empire and the birth of a new empire. Social science turns out to be more powerful than spaceships but it has some pretty serious failure modes. 2. Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1869) is largely about a rebel. Technology doesn't seem to be fixing problems. 3. H.G. Well's "Time Machine" (1895) has the end of all human civilization and "The Shape of Things to Come" (1933) while utopian is also extremely grim at points. 4. Stapledon's works, "Star Maker" (1937) and "First and Last Men" (1930) which were extremely influential on the science fiction of that time are grand and chaotic. Several of the time periods described could easily be cyberpunk. 5. C.S. Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy (1938) is explicitly anti-progress. Cyberpunk was essentially a switch from telling pulpy adventure stories to telling pulpy noir stories.

TremendousJudge 8y ago
Verne's "Paris in the Twentieth Century" (which wasn't published because he was told it was too negative) has an extremely pessimistic view of the future as well. It's and extremely sad book
dredmorbius 8y ago
George R. Stewart, The Earth Abides (1949), Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), On the Beach, John Brunner Stand on Zanzibar (1968) The Shockwave Rider (1975), and The Sheep Look Up (1972). John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd)'s Tripod trilogy (1967) and The Sword of the Spirits, George Orwell (Eric Blair) 1984 (1948), Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931), Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962). Much of the work of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. I'd gotten into this with David Brin a few years back on G+ when he was grousing that modern sci-fi is pessimistic in was the classics never were. He is wrong. Though happy stories do tend to sell better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature

ataturk 8y ago

As someone who has read most of the genre and taught a college course on the subject, I agree that the article didn't say that much, but it's fine. I appreciate the "lived in universe" whether it is cyberpunk fiction or Han Solo's Millenium Falcon. "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed." I take exception to the ideas about anti-globalism, though. There are plenty of educated people, like me, who are against global plutocracy. The idea that only backwoods hicks support Trump is horribly toxic. Trump is himself a cyberpunk. He's practically a one-man junta against the globalist slavers. He and the faction of the intelligence community that are desperately trying to right the ship deserve our support, not our scorn. Just look at the criminal acts the FBI and CIA have committed, as well as the Dept. of State in fomenting wars and destruction of civilization (Libya, Syria) for the sake of corporate profiteering. 9/11 was the same deal, too--a major false flag designed to enhance big government and corporate profits. Cyberpunks want to tear these people down!