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The Cyberpunk thread


C.T. Phipps
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Cyberpunk is a genre that peaked in the Eighties but it has since gained a considerable second life with homages, pastiches, and deconstructions. This is a thread where we can make suggestions of our favorite pieces of cyberpunk as well as discuss what makes the genre great. Obviously, I'm biased about this as I've written in the genre but I think everyone could do with a little rain soaked neon city in their lives. You can also guess, correctly, that I am partially motivated by the recent release of Cyberpunk 2077.

Recommended Books

Neuromancer by William Gibson: The book that started us all. A group of criminals are recruited by a mysterious employer to break into an AI's cde.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Both a parody of cyberpunk and an excellent example of it. A samurai hacker and pizza delivery guy in the employ of the mob must work with a teenage delivery girl to stop a virus poisoning minds.

Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams: Another fantastic example of the genre. The wired wastelanders are up against the megacorporations from space.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan: The latest example of a classic on this list, Takeshi Kovacs is a UN supersoldier that has taken up anarchism. He is then blackmailed into helping an Earth billionaire solve his own suicide.

 

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5 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Recommended Books

Neuromancer by William Gibson: The book that started us all. A group of criminals are recruited by a mysterious employer to break into an AI's cde.

Argh, no. Not the book, which is a classic, but the idea that it was the first cyberpunk novel. It was definitely the trope-definer, but the genre existed for quite a while before than, even for Gibson who worked in at as early as "Johnny Mnemonic" in the early 1980s. Bruce Bethke's "Cyberpunk" short story and of course the films TRON and Blade Runner were also all doing stuff in that genre in the very early 1980s.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (also arguably The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar, but they tend to separate out three cyberpunk tropes into separate novels rather than combine them) and A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest all employ cyberpunk ideas and tropes long before Neuromancer showed up.

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Yeah, proto-cyberpunk is a good descriptor.

Re: Richard K. Morgan, his standalone Market Forces hits some of the same notes with corporations battling it out quite literally.  Doesn't have much (if any) of the cybernetics or hacking and so on, but the social dystopia would fit cozily in any cyberpunk world you can imagine.

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Some less-generally-discussed but worthwhile reads:

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, set in a future cape town. Big anticorporate focus in this one, follows four main characters through their dealing with how their shit world works. I tend to put Beukes on the Richard Morgan sort of level when she's writing this sort of thing, less flashy with her prose but more mature (Zoo City also has a very cyberpunk attitude but it's urban fantasy. Still a must-read though). She's since gone on to break out much more with a different style of book, supernatural murder thrillers, but don't write off her early work.

Crashing Heaven by Al Robertson, which is kinda cyberpunk-meets-space-opera. Not a classic of the genre but it's worth a read for anyone who thought Hannu Rajanemmi had some great ideas but could do with upping the noir and dialling down the utter madness, and anyone who enjoys Hairlock from Malazan. Should read the sequel which I forgot came out...

Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge. Bit less noir than cyberpunk tends to be, less dystopian, but it has some of the same themes so I'm counting it. It's almost kinda like the book Ready Player One wanted to be and also has shades of the anime movie Summer Wars if anyone's seen that (you should it's cracking). 

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5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Some less-generally-discussed but worthwhile reads:

...Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge. Bit less noir than cyberpunk tends to be, less dystopian, but it has some of the same themes so I'm counting it. It's almost kinda like the book Ready Player One wanted to be and also has shades of the anime movie Summer Wars if anyone's seen that (you should it's cracking). 

I am also firmly in favor of reading Vernor Vinge as formational cyberpunk.  He is an outstanding writer, and furthermore he writes realistically about both science and applied science in the form of technology, and even more importantly, he accurately captures the lives and attitudes of the people working in technology.  His description of one of our Motorola R&D facilities was so accurate that, having read the book before I had a chance to visit the lab, I had a strong sense of deja vu when I actually got there.  If you want to peek into the contemporary reality in the Southwest/West Coast of a cyberpunk world that William Gibson describes from a East Coast perspective, Vinge's The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime are your entry points.

Another writer with a powerful sense of what the environment and the people working in a lab/fab/R&D facility are like is Walter Jon Williams.  His book Days of Atonement is really the top of the pile, a sort of No Country for Old Men of the cyberpunk genre.  Many of our cutting-edge physics and pure science labs are located in the suburbs or small university towns of the southwest, and so a lot of Mormons, first-generation college grads, and salt-of-the-earth support staff work in those facilities.  Williams does a fantastic job with this milieu.  He is also great in his view of how Hollywood would operate in the near-future cyberpunk world with his Dagmar Shaw series.

As my avatar clearly indicates, I am a big William Gibson fan, but don't sleep on Neal Stephenson, either.  The Diamond Age doesn't get a lot of hype, but his use of a duo of female protagonists (who appear to be referenced briefly in some of his other work) is both skillfully handled and attractive to learn about.  Because of the viewpoint of the reader, this book takes some work in order to get into, but it repays the careful reader.  His political near-future thrillers as Stephen Bury (Interface and The Cobweb) have recently become less science fiction and more prescient warnings with the riots in DC last week.

Edited by Wilbur
Riot references
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Speaking as a cyberpunk author myself (Agent G), here's some good indie ones I love:

  • Ghosts of Tomorrow by Michael R. Fletcher: You can create AI by burning out human brains to make them so there's a billion dollar industry for making scans. This includes children trafficked by futuristic cartels. Our protagonists want to kill these guys and with very good reason. However, can our antiheroes affect something that is essential to the functioning of the world's economy?
  • The Immorality Clause by Brian Parker: The Big Easy in the future is a place where you can indulge in every cyber-delight possible, ranging from gorgeous bioroids to designer mental drugs. The protagonist is a cop who has managed to stay clean and avoid becoming swept up in the system until today. Now he's broken the Immorality Clause of his contract and become involved with a machine. But is she just a toy or something else entirely?
  • Drones by Rob Hayes: Memories and emotions can be harvested for sale in the future but the process leaves the donors a numb shell of their former self. For some people, especially those unable to function in normal society, it's a blessing than a curse. Legalization of the process threatens to affect billions of people, though, and the companies involved have hidden the horrifying side effects.
  • Mercury's Son by Luke Hindmarsh: In the future, the environment has completely collapsed and a bunch of religious fanatic Luddites have taken over the world. Like all hypocrites, though, they employ technology to keep control over humanity's surviving cities. One of them is a cyborg from before the war who now has to investigate the murder of one of their own. But are the answers one that he would be allowed to share even if he finds the truth?
  • To Beat the Devil by M.K. Gibson: This is more Shadowrun than Cyberpunk 2020 where the apocalypse happened and God didn't bother to show up. Demons now rule the blasted technologically advanced remains of Earth. The protagonist is a mercenary who plies the black markets between the various feuding city-states with his nano-technology enhancements giving him an ability to fight the supernatural head on. But now someone wants him to fight the corrupt overlords and their armies of criminals. Can you trust the Devil, though?

I have a great fondness for indie cyber-punk fiction. While the classics are great, I think that its kind of in-genre to talk about the books that have gotten published by people who aren't tied to the big corporations.

Edited by C.T. Phipps
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One aspect of the cyberpunk movement that interests me is how Bruce Sterling was supposedly one of the prime movers of the genre as "Chairman Bruce", yet today he and his work seem relatively less prominent.

I bought all his books in the 80s and 90s, and his Hacker Crackdown was one of the books I put on the required reading list for my staff.  But in truth, none of his stories ever grabbed me or resonated with me the way Rucker / Gibson / Banks / Vinge / Stephenson did.

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My Hardwired Review - 4.5/5

 

Spoiler

Cyberpunk is a genre that arose organically during the 1980s as advancing technology as well as a culture of corporate greed set against the backdrop of the Cold War led to a mixture of nihilism as well as utopian skepticism. Basically, many people believed that science would definitely change the world but that the problems of human society would remain the same. People might visit the moon but would they ever deal with systemic poverty or racism? Probably not. Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and Pat Cadigan all contributed the basis for what would eventually become a thriving subset of dystopian science fiction.

Somewhat overlooked but every bit as influential is Walter Jon William's Hardwired. It was the chief influence of Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020 and several other works that were the basis for our popular image of a future gone horribly wrong. It's interesting that the book is actually closer to a Western in many ways than an urban crime noir as so many cyberpunk books. The technology is there but it is a rugged desert in Texas where the majority of the action takes place versus Blade Runner's Los Angeles or Gibson's Sprawl. This helps differentiate it from many of its contemporaries and is another reason I recommend the book so highly.

The premise is centered around two iconic characters. Cowboy is a rich smuggler who drives around the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic Earth inside a neural-linked tank that provides him access to the firepower necessary to do his job. He's given a questionable job that will take him through bandit-ridden territory to deliver medicine that may come from the people he hates most in the world. Sarah is a high(ish)-class prostitute who is taking care of her junkie brother when she undergoes plastic surgery to seduce a rich "Orbital" on behalf of a mysterious client. If they're on the level, it could mean an escape from the hell of the Earth but that's a big if.

The world is a fascinating one with the people of Earth having become citizens in a Third World hellhole following their defeat at the hands of the aforementioned Orbitals. The megacorporations based there now control the world's economy as they devastated humanity's infrastructure with mass-drivers after a brutal but short-lived war that ended in the favor of those with the ultimate high ground. It's not quite Mad Max, Earth has technology as well as society, but they depend on the whims of the solar system's elite. It reminded me a bit of anime's Gundam and if not for the timing, I'd wonder if the creator was partially inspired by Hardwired.

This is a gritty and dark novel but also a fairly short one. Neither Sarah or Cowboy's story last very long and don't intersect but are still able to paint a vivid picture of their awful society. They are both criminals but the society they live in is so manifestly unjust that any actions they take, no matter how cruel, seem justified. Betrayal and treachery are things both of them are prepared for but still manage to hit them because they can't turn down the jobs they know are too good to be true. It adds to the tragedy and pathos of the novel.

I will say that some of the novel's elements haven't aged particularly well and readers should be forewarned. Sarah is hired to seduce a Orbital that has changed from an old male body to a beautiful young female body despite the former being heterosexual. The latter is depicted as simply indulging a personal vice rather than being a transwoman but its easy to see how many readers would have assumed so. "Princess" is certainly not meant to be a character any sympathy or understanding other than being a rich old male psychopath with a Sapphic fetish. This element is the only one that bothered me in an otherwise fantastic book.

In conclusion, Hardwired is required reading for any true cyberpunk fan and doesn't take much time to read. I picked up the 30th Anniversary version that contains additional material from the author that I feel is well worth reading. This is a book that, upon completion, I immediately re-read in order to fully soak up the world created. The audiobook is also excellent and one that I recommend for its excellent narration.

 

Edited by C.T. Phipps
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On 1/15/2021 at 3:32 PM, Wilbur said:

...Many of our cutting-edge physics and pure science labs are located in the suburbs or small university towns of the southwest, and so a lot of Mormons, first-generation college grads, and salt-of-the-earth support staff work in those facilities...

Just to continue the connection between Mormons and cyberpunk, here is an article about how the FLDS operated the company that made the Challenger O-rings.  Now that is truly cyberpunk.

https://jalopnik.com/how-a-cult-built-the-o-rings-that-failed-on-the-space-s-1846151814

Whenever we read a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel where there are weird cults operating high-tech fabs or manufacturing facilities, it always struck me as too "out there".  But It is pretty true to life!  And Walter Jon Williams is the guy who captures that whole entanglement best.

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2 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I feel the Expanse novels have a lot of cyberpunk themes despite their primarily space setting.

It does feel like a lot of space operas basically exist in a cyberpunk setting, but where the cyberpunk elements are backgrounded because of all the space stuff. And cyberpunk also generally exists in a space opera setting, but where the space travel happens off-page (Blade RunnerAltered Carbon).

Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy with its neural nanonics in particular, and when they go back to the arcologies on Earth it goes full cyberpunk.

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A fair amount of military science fiction, or even John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, has an ambient background that is pretty cyberpunk, where corporate governments and their oligarchical executives run things and the common man finds escape and the opportunity to use their practical technical skills through military service in space.  Peter F. Hamilton's Fallen Dragon partakes of that same cup, for instance.

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3 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I feel the Expanse novels have a lot of cyberpunk themes despite their primarily space setting.

They have a decent amount of themes (particularly the Belter/OPA elements) but they almost never actually challenge the status quo, and the heroes most certainly don't. But yeah, Belters are totally Cyberpunk in almost every single way that you can think. 

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  • 5 months later...

My You Can Be a Cyborg When You're Older review - 4.5/5

 

Spoiler

YOU CAN BE A CYBORG WHEN YOU'RE OLDER is a Young Adult affectionate parody of Eighties cyberpunk. It's an interesting twist, implementing a lot of tropes that only adult readers will get and not necessarily all of them but also a great way of introducing the genre to people who wouldn't normally be familiar with it. It also takes a number of pot shots at the sillier ideas in the world of neon, rain, androids, and street samurai. As a fan of both cyberpunk and Richard Roberts' PLEASE DONT TELL MY PARENTS I'M A SUPERVILLAIN series, I was very excited to get into this book.

The premise is that an orphanage in the most run-down part of a decaying urban hellscape is run by a malfunctioning but benevolent gynoid named Ms. Understanding. Vanity Rose is the 14 year old antiheroine of the book that is cursed with machine telepathy (a disability in her world) and fear for the orphanage shutting down at any time. Vanity decides to raise some money for her home and the best way to do that turns out to be organized crime for corporate thugs. However, this turns out to be harder than it sounds (and it sounds quite difficult). Vanity soon finds herself on the run from several shady characters and reliant on her fellow oddball orphans to get out of the mess she's gotten herself into.

Richard Roberts has an immense love of cyberpunk and it shows with every page, making frequent homages to everything from literature to anime to video games. I also think I spotted a few tabletop RPG references as well. That doesn't mean his world is unorginal, though. Indeed, there's several surreal and satirical elements that make it quite fascinating. For instance, one of the largest religions in West Angel City is the Enchanted. People who use bio-modding, cybernetics, and costume jewelry to live their lives in a perpetual World of Warcraft LARP. Except the elves and necromancers are actually willing to kill each other.

There's a couple of gratuitous references as well, like when Vanity spends a chapter as a teenage mecha pilot but these things are likely to bring a smile to your face if you're familiar with the sources the author is drawing from. However, I actually came to really like the garish and strange world that the book depicts. There's even a decent description of a robotic society created from those cast offs that have been left behind to carry out their tasks long after their masters have abandoned them.

Vanity is a good lead character even if I think that making her sixteen years old would have probably fit the storyline better. She does a little too many roof jumping and hacking things for me to buy her as a preteen. Still, it's nice to have a well-adjusted cyberpunk heroine and the fact that the only reason she doesn't swear up a storm is because of a literal profanity filter built into her brain. That was a clever way of acknowledging her "punkness" would never fly in a typical YA book.

I also give props to this book for creating the greatest literary villain of all time: Fry Smiley! A Mr. Potatohead-esque ap mascot equivalent to Amazon's Siri or Microsoft's Clippy. Hated by every single consumer, the AI is slowly simmering in its anger and resentment. I love how Vanity considered him her archnemesis even before the all-powerful program became obsessed with her. He's such a ridiculous and enjoyable character that he makes a wonderful antagonist and one of the more memorable ones I've read this year.

The weird juxtaposition of fairy tale and Eighties cyberpunk is really the heart of this strange brew as you have a technologically created Old Mother Hubbard, elves, undead, and magic combined with all the trappings of Neuromancer as well as Snow Crash. Really, it's surprising it's not MORE like Shadowrun given how crazy it all is. I'll admit that it took a bit to fully immerse myself in the world but by the time I did, I absolutely loved it and declare this my favorite of his books. I recommend between text and audiobook that fans check out the Arielle Delisle narrated version as she does a fantastic job bringing the characters to life.

 

Edited by C.T. Phipps
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  • 4 months later...

I did a listicle of ten indie cyberpunk novels.

I hope people will check them out.

https://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2022/09/ten-indie-cyberpunk-novel.html

10. You Can Be a Cyborg When You're older by Richard Roberts
9. Ten Sigma by AW Wang
8. The Blind Spot by Michael Robertson
7. The Machine Killer by DL Young
6. Mercury's Son by Luke Hindmarsh
5. To Beat the Devil by MK Gibson
4. Ghosts of Tomorrow by Michael R. Fletcher
3. The Immorality Clause by Brian Parker
2. Bubbles in Space by SC Jensen
1. Behind Blue Eyes by Anna Mocikat

 

Edited by C.T. Phipps
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