The internet killed CP. Compared to swirling neon ice-encrusted data fortresses we were promised it's so banal and full of lolcats the whole thing collapses.

Cyberdecks replaced by video game consoles.

phone phreaks replaced by custom ring tones.

Flechette pistols replaced by the MOAB (what is more banal that a really big conventional bomb?).

And the Matrix is just an MMORPG right?

The internet did ruin a lot of cyberpunk, because it established a flawed reality to the subject.

Also the failure of VR is notable as well.

Because the technology was never going to be as good as Gibson intended it, when it was actually realized in the 1990s, the result was incredibly disappointing.

Its like when you see a talking robotic dog in a cartoon and go "how cool" and then you see it in real life and you go.. "lame..". Its like that with VR and Cyberpunk, that suddenly when all the cool stuff actually happens you end up going "man Oblivion was over hyped bullshit" .. erm... *cough* well its like that with Cyberpunk as well, you could say Gibson exaggerated a bit too much - and this is why Cyberpunk was ahead of its time.

Cyberdecks as consoles.. this is all too true.

We can of course bring this stuff back simply by reinventing the technologies that Gibson predicted.

Sadly we will never live in a Cyberpunk world since too many stupid people are ruining it for the rest of us.. Evidence, just look at the fucking internet!

quote:

And the Matrix is just an MMORPG right?

No, it's just an over-hyped, derivative film.
If someone did "visualize it differently, refresh the ideas and style" then it wouldn't be cyberpunk, it would be something else.

Is Surrealism dead? Yes
Dada? Yes
The Beats? Yes
The SF New Wave? Yes

I'm sorry to break it to you, but turning Neuromancer into a game in the 21st century is like selling Penny Farthings in the 20th. The world has moved on.

Well, let it move a little further on and it will reclaim what once was ours. Brian Aldiss said in that court trial where Lucas and associates defended Star Wars from myriad charges pf plagiarism that when he saw Star Wars he was delighted to see manifested on the screen what he'd read in books as a child: Space Opera. (Looking mighty swell.)

Cyberpunk is dead; cyberpunk will be back.

Perhaps it needs an incantatory formula. Here's the one Aldiss conjured for Space Opera:

(1) Style and Mood staunchly traditional
(2) Hitherto unknown places to explore
(3) Continuity between Past and Future
(4) Tremendous sphere of space/time
(5) A pinch of reality inflated with melodrama
(6) A seasoning of screwy ideas
(7) Heady escapist stuff
(8) Charging on with little regard for logic or literacy
(9) Often throwing off great images, excitements, aspirations
(10) The Earth should be in peril
(11) There must be a quest
(12) There must be a man to match the mighty hour
(13) That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures
(14) Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher
(15) Blood must run down the palace steps
(16) Ships must launch out into the louring dark
(17) There must be a woman fairer than the skies
(18) There must be a villain darker than a Black Hole
(19) All must come right in the end
(20) The future in space, seen mistily through the eyes of yesterday.

I go now to practice my louring, yo gnarly dada daddios. Surreally.

quote:

Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:
And the Matrix is just an MMORPG right?

Dude, reality is just an MMORPG.

And the subscription fee is your soul.

Lets look at it like this then:

As I see it, within popular culture we have a shit load of demand for Cyberpunk Media as I guess the fans haven't let go of the concepts. The authors however have.

As I see it really only requires someone to start supplying it again for it to take off, they just need to stick to the template that Neuromancer set, else then its just not cyberpunk anymore, as what Kradlum said.

My game exists merely as an attempt to try and do it. If I fail miserably so be it, we'll just throw it on the heap with the rest of the attempts. However I've got a good feeling I can pull this off - how much of it is debatable and how good it will be I've got no idea. We'll just have to find out when we get there. I'll try to run concepts and ideas past everyone when they come available.

I'm a 100% Cyberpunk purist and don't forget that. If I don't stick to that let me know and I'll slap myself a few times.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:

quote:

Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:
And the Matrix is just an MMORPG right?

Dude, reality is just an MMORPG.

And the subscription fee is your soul.

That's why I never play. I like this game called life. Only thing it charges is death, and that's E-Z.

quote:

I'm a 100% Cyberpunk purist and don't forget that. If I don't stick to that let me know and I'll slap myself a few times.

And if we just like watching you slap yourself? Hmm... I guess that's kinda cyberpunky too.

quote:

As I see it really only requires someone to start supplying it again for it to take off, they just need to stick to the template that Neuromancer set, else then its just not cyberpunk anymore

But then, is it cyberpunk or is it pastiche?
Do the themes in Neuromancer translate to the present day? Ronald Reagan isn't president any more. If a young William Gibson sat down to write Neuromancer today would we get Neuromancer or Fight Club?

quote:

" (wiki) The Star Wars series of films by George Lucas is often considered to be a pastiche of traditional science fiction television serials (or radio shows). The fact that Lucas's films have been influential (spawning their own pastiches - vis the 1983 3D film Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn) can be regarded as a function of postmodernity."

The problem with it as a genre is it's a one trick pony. Cyberware, disaffected youth, hipster cool. That doesn't even amount to much of a genre so much as trappings.

Take away Gibson's prose and vision to extrapolate not the technology but what the technology would do to people existentially and psychologically and you have a limp turn of bad sci-fi.

Cyberpunk is pretty fucking cool if you're 15-22 years old, but after that it's passe. If there hadn't been a William Gibson the genre wouldn't be seen as anything to bark about at all.

I know we're all fans of Bill's and I am certainly a huge one, but if I take a step back and look at Gibson's talent, his prose, his style, his naunced meaning, I see what Shakespeare did for bawdy groundling fair, I see what Graham Greene did for the potboiler, Lucas and Spielberg did for serials.

The allusions aren't perfect, but Gibson was a literary monster in the gutter of literature. The genre itself is still pretty much a cheese fest.

Hmm damn so I guess I'll be giving up on this when I am 23 then :P. You just assume that the genre is aimed at youth and being uneducated, and yeah this is where Neuro I guess hits as a popular culture piece (and why Kahn's adaptation would no doubt follow suit and be MTVish to the extreme due to that it is popular culture for the teens (Sterling and Gibson both know younger and younger people are picking up their books to figure out what the fuck was going on all this time)). There is a way of doing this without it coming off "Cool" but rather "Meaningful" without going all semiotic.

Maybe this time we don't have to make Neuro intended for the computer geeks and technophiliacs but rather just those who want to pass on by and enjoy themselves - as I want to establish this game I'm making isn't going to cause some magic imaginary revolution. So I guess you guys don't want this to be an historical thing, I get that and don't worry it won't look it. It still has to have references to the time it was made however, but we need to make it timeless in a way which means pushing CP away from its Sci-fi origins - and doing that is fucking hard. But I guess it can be done without going all post-CP.

Am I getting confused yet? or am I making sense? cause I've got no idea.

quote:

The problem with it as a genre is it's a one trick pony. Cyberware, disaffected youth, hipster cool. That doesn't even amount to much of a genre so much as trappings.

There's more to it than that. There's the Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade spectral presence. There is the debris of the culture of one's time and the futurity that seems most convincing from where one stands. The gadgets can diminish considerably. They're not the buzz.

The future ain't what it used to be, right? And distance lends enchantment. Let the future become even less what it used to be and the punk will revive. No, it won't be Mr.C's face-slappingly purist CP. But he'll recognize it when he sees it and will rejoice.

Cyber opera. Space punk. Some guy went to the exosphere and back in a privately made gizmo last year or so.

Sure the Golden Age of sci-fi is "15-22". Let's say the genre officially closed in '99, with All Tomorrow's Parties and The Matrix.

So, give it 15-22 years

Meanwhile, guys like Mr.C will keep their flame burning like Spielberg/Lucas kept theirs, like Gibson kept that early 60s New Wave, passed it through Burroughs and Pynchon, and 20 years later brought back New Wave, doing it the way Spielberg/Lucas did bringing back the serials and space pulps: What if adult, literary sci-fi *didn't* suck?!?

Most of cyberpunk sucked, including the stuff everyone likes. Most noir sucked. A whole lotta Twain sucked, even.

when ye gonna write another Neuromancer? When ye gonna write another Maltese Falcon? When ye gonna write another The Lady in the Lake? When ye gonna write another Huck Finn?

I won't, but someone will dust off the best parts of it, parts that looked so great to us in the day but, ere long, we realized mostly sucked, and turn it into what if it *didn't* suck?

BTW, you should trust my optimism. If I'm right, the real next Star Wars is not too far off, pushed further back owing to Lucas' trying to reinvent himself. (Had to. We'da shot him if he hadn't tried. We almost shot him anyway. )

Actually I'd go to say the genre died in 2000 when Deus Ex was released. I'm interested to know how DX3 is going to wind up since it could actually do pretty well, conceptually its on the right track (referring to the artwork).

quote:

Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:
Actually I'd go to say the genre died in 2000 when Deus Ex was released. I'm interested to know how DX3 is going to wind up since it could actually do pretty well, conceptually its on the right track (referring to the artwork).

The trailer I saw looked like it was about gen-engineered humanity via nanobots. What did you think?

http://bp1.blogger.com/_ejVhPSXllX0/R_uE2qs-PvI/AAAAAAA...Hb3o/s1600-h/dx3.JPG

Got Concept Art?

quote:

Originally posted by Mr_Cyberpunk:
http://bp1.blogger.com/_ejVhPSXllX0/R_uE2qs-PvI/AAAAAAA...Hb3o/s1600-h/dx3.JPG

Got Concept Art?

So THAT'S where they make Legos.

Certainly there's still demand for cyberpunk or at least much of what people perceived it was about. Bruce Sterling has relinquished (finally) his chairmanship, the backlit-animated Star Wars In Cyberspace are as over as the Cold War, the Neuromantic honeymoon with the razorgirl is burning out, the dress code, color schemes, literary armatures may have shifted here and there, but I think cyberpunk is definitely still jockeying strong if you look closely at the dead-channel water we're swimming in. Not only in the more obscure "pure" cp otakus reverently weaving oilskin and chrome tales, polishing the sheening hyper-specular polygons of cyberpunk Buzz Ricksons, but also in the veins of the broader geek and even mainstream milieu. (as "geek" and "mainstream" themselves evolve synonymous...) Coming to mind are Shirow-san, Avalon, Richard K. Morgan, Stross, or even the most recent Die Hard to name just the tip of the black iceberg. The pendulum of the Pentium clock has cycled back, just as the "straight world" of 1984 and the "hip world"s flower nirvana on Earth merged to produce the 90's, and as most every other movement-countermovement, (communism-capitalism etc.) cyberpunk has uploaded and CVSed with consensus reality to produce the Now.

Except, the 60's movement was primarily ideologically/culturally driven and orthogonal to economics, whereas cyberpunk is not only those but also deeply technological or at least symbiotic to technological advance -- in particular information technology -- and was implicitly therefore deeply connected to economics from the get-go. And as Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins or anyone who sifts seriously through the kudzu and smog of the climate change issue will tell you: money trumps ideology every time. As Jeff poignantly stated at the '07 Beyond Belief conference before the self-righteously brimstoning Four Horsemen, "Why is it that people no longer believe in a flat Earth but they still believe in Genesis? The answer is very simple. The day you can make your living sailing around the circular Earth is the day you've stopped believing in a flat Earth. Evolution just hasn't risen up to the level of putting bread on the table." We are nearly at or have already reached the point where most people cannot make their living without navigating the digital waters of cyberspace. Which has indeed become much of our daily aquarium.

So cyberpunk has had that little but incredible Edge, as the pendulum swung back, as in the mainstreamed, watered down but Blockbuster-accessible Matrix, Neo dove back to be assimilated into the mainstream of Smith. So the Kuang virus of cyberpunk was jacked into the minds of all those young entrepreneurs and alienated programmers and geeks, and later the world; perceived as another cute gummyworm of "alternative culture" cool to be hunted, commodified, hung up by the dozen in Hot Topic. Meanwhile, the worm slowly ate and continues to eat and transform the deep structure of reality into it's own program, the analog into the digital: transforming the way we shop, the way we eat, the way we dress, the way we relate, the way we have sex, the way we emote, the way we learn about the world, the things we value, everything. Slowly, techno-economically, without bloody revolution or even much media coverage- CBS nightly is quietly digested along with everything else and transformed into Google, the few Luddites last-minute screams eaten by the shadowy shark-like thing of the market, without cries but little Rousseau-esque whimpers. Cyberpunk isn't over- in more than one sense, cyberpunk is (becoming) everything.

Sense(/Net) #2:

Charlie Stross on the future of science fiction.

Self-proclaimed first man on post-cyberpunk's singularital moon and Posthuman Shangrilah Chairman Charlie Stross goes postal on SF and elaborates his and Generation N's strange attractor (or not so strange, given his post-geographic, Neuromantic childhood) to Cyberpunk 2.0. The clear and present crisis he perceives and addresses is that, without substantial path-adjustment, the "Capital 'F' Future" Monumentos of culturally far-away galaxies are and will continue to see their calcified 20th century monoliths detonated into bits of Stephenson meme-fodder, whole intergalactic civilizations and bookstore shelves resigned to spook country, ghost towns, blowing in the dust of red dwarves and dotted with space cowboys in elderly-accessible rocketships, telling grand ivory tales to the tumbleweed in a Bolinas outskirt. Cowboy boots.

Enter cyberpunk and all its post-ness, the mirror(shades) in which the coming generations of geeks found themselves and self-identification. (and all cross-pollinations, permutations, and reincarnations of cp since) Justin Long's Case Macx, KMFDM iPod in one hand, haxxing the planet (for the non-zero-sum good) whilst WoWing simultaneously on multi-threaded Linux book in the other. Watch him soar, black-caped out-cleverer of ol' slow Uncle Bill, free-er of Microserf minds with one hemisphere uploaded to a digital and boundaryless manifold without cubicles or bibles, where you create yourself down to the last qubit. The Futurism will be Geek or It Won't Be.

Stross open sources The Big G on several nodes, namely in the Bigendian chorus on the techno-change driven volatility of the present leaving only risk management, Pattern Recognition, Altered Carbon, Cryptonomicon, and Accelerando. The Game Design Doc for Halting State is sketched and whiteboarded with animatics right there. Lets Put The Future Behind Us indeed, Jack.


The political and ideological concerns that lay at the core of the original SFnal project don't interest the very people they used to appeal to in the 1940s and 1950s, because they're obsolete. And the outward trappings and glitz that were used to sugar-coat the politics have been adopted with glee by the purveyors of mass visual entertainment. Thus, the emperor has been robbed of his suit.

We've arrived in a different future, and central planning doesn't work. Things are fast, chaotic, cheap, and out of control. Ad hoc is the new plan. There's a new cultural strange attractor at work, sucking in the young, smart, deracinated mechanistically-minded readers who used to be the natural prey of the SF movement. It's geek culture. You can find it in the pages of Wired (although it's a pale shadow of what it used to be) and on Boing!Boing! and Slashdot. You can find them playing MMORPGs and hacking their game consoles. These people have different interests from the old generation of SF readers. And unfortunately they don't buy many [fiction] books, because we aren't, for the most part, writing for them.

This isn't to say that they don't read. There is a literary culture that switches on the geeks: it started out as a branch of SF. Yes, I'm talking about cyberpunk. But while cyberpunk was a seven day wonder within the SF field, which subsequently lost interest, the geeks recognized themselves in its magic mirror and made it their own. This is the future they live in, not the future of Star Wars and its imitators, of the futures of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. And in addition to cyberpunk — the golden age SF taproots of their field — some of us are beginning to address their concerns. Among the quintessentially geek authors, the brightest names are Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow and Douglas Coupland and (in his latest incarnation) Bruce Sterling. (I'd like to append my own name to that list, if only to bask in their reflected glory.)

The authors I listed above are not writing SF for your traditional SF readers. They are writing something quite different, even if the forms are similar, because the underlying assumptions about the way the universe works are different. There's no need for the readers to internalize a bizarrely rehashed bundle of strange ideological preconceptions about the role of science and technology in society, which have accreted remorselessly since the 1930s until much modern science fiction is incomprehensible and alienating to the outside world; that's because they are writing fiction that is based in the world-view of the present day. You don't need to study golden age SF and its literary conventions to get Neal Stephenson, because rather than constantly referring back to it, he references (a) the science fictional zeitgeist in popular culture, and (b) the cultural milieu and outlook of WIRED's readership. Which is why he managed to write a 1100 page novel about cryptography with a plot that didn't quite join up in the middle, and it still outsold everything else on the map. He's got your audience, right here, buddy, right here in the palm of his hand. Thanks to generation slashdot.

The audience I'm talking about is today's successor to the traditional SF readers of yore. They're smart, not brilliantly well socialized because their energies have been going elsewhere, and they increasingly self-identify as geeks. We are competing for their attention time with computer games, video, the internet, and fuck-knows-what new bleeding edge media that haven't made it our event horizon of self-absorption yet: anime, manga, machinima, your guess is as good as mine. They don't, yet, have a separate section in the bookstore, but they know what they like to read and they get it from the fringes of the mainstream and the edges of the genre and the core of the slipstream. And their time is coming. If you're a writer and you still want to be in business in something vaguely resembling SF in thirty years time, study them.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

quote:

Cyberpunk isn't over- in more than one sense, cyberpunk is (becoming) everything.

bingbingbingbingbing. Even with the potentially pretentious/portentous parentheses.