Altered Carbon actually disappoints me, a bit. I loved cyberpunk back in the '90s, but watching something like that now feels almost... dated? The Asian fetishi

Altered Carbon actually disappoints me, a bit. I loved cyberpunk back in the '90s, but watching something like that now feels almost... dated? The Asian fetishism, the cartoonishly evil corporate overlords, the pageantry of making everything so deliberately cool, in a sort of '80s way. At least Snow Crash had interesting and contemporaneous things to say about anarcho-feudalist suburbia. I love the heck out of Snow Crash, but I think it was one of the last hurrahs of Cyberpunk, and part of its success was that it described a future that was disgustingly uncool. It wasn't a world of chrome skyscrapers bedazzled in holograms and surrounded by sexy cyborgs in Italian three-piece suits. It was trashy - a world of ugly walled-village box-cutout suburbs full of minivans and roided-up teenagers and pizza-delivery vehicles. Snow Crash is a product of its time, since the characters all exude the excessive coolness of the '80s (which came from its origins as a comic, I imagine) but it also created the more modern setting. Modern dystopian lit wallows in the banality of evil.