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No, it's not the exact same "cyberpunk" of the 80's; the first species of mohawked, glitter wearing, cold-war surviving Cambrian fish are very different from the more warm-blooded, green, Cenozoic varieties with better haircuts we see today,

Well said, all of it, but I disagree.

I think the current crop of transhumanist/cyberpunks are more of the lungfish, indicative of evolution but not actively practicing it.

Fundamentally the DNA reamins largely unaltered. While your Cenozoic cyberpunk couldn't get out of the water for fear of drwoning in air, your Cabrian can only do so for brief hops, and neither of them will turn into lemurs no matter how long you give them.

I see cyberpnk like I see goth, it's OK when you're a certain age, at a certain rebllious period, when you are, as they say, tragically hip.

But after that cyberpunk become nostalgic, it becomes quaint, it gets lost to the dustbins of reminiscing with one's GI Joes and Star Wars toys, with wanting to be a ninja, with thinking looking cool was being it.

It can't evolve becuase it's an adolescent phase, it something one passes through, not something one sets in and begins investing their future in.

I still enjoy many of the troped, they have a cool edginess to them, but, after a certain period of time, edginess itself becomes naievte, rebelliousness for its of sake becomes cliched and the anti-conformity of cyberpunk is just another tribe.

It doesn't evolve because it is the breath of raw, unctous youth, it is the teenager in all of us, made manifest and turned into an illusory future as if, somewhere down the line, we'd all be cool, we'd all be outlaws, we'd all get on with techonlogy to such a degree that it would liberate us from the mundanity of daily life.

But it won't. The tech helps foster that mundanity and truly being "punk" calls for far more ingenuity and far greater complexity.

Cyberpunk, for all it's nifty tricks is fundamentally a very simplistic view of the world and no such view can ever be free of anything it purports to rail against.

Also, vat ninjas are just fundamentally silly.

And the fragments of hologram that slip through one's fingers are not shrads that cut the cortex but instead confetti, for a party long over, a group passed on a state of being that was simpler in its revelry and bohemian tatses than anyhting that might persist in revelling or being bohemian past a certain sell-by date could ever be.

We were all of us very young, we had a time, but when the party's over and the lights come up we see the chrome is not burning put has peeled, the neon looks tacky and the drugs have lost their luster.

There are deeper water to explore, and while we do not regret the fete we know it does not point toward tomorrow.

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Cyberpunk, for all it's nifty tricks is fundamentally a very simplistic view of the world and no such view can ever be free of anything it purports to rail against.

Wait, wait... Let me get this straight: there was/is such a thing as a Cyberpunk Movement? (I'm jist being silly, although, come to think of it, there was. In fact it moved me although I never got in step.)

If there was a phrase, a moment, a slogan, a cusp, where the youth aspect of what we more or less call cyberpunk was announced, it was, I think, in Winter Market, when the guy said:

"You can't see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they're twigging to it, that they aren't going anywhere."

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Also, vat ninjas are just fundamentally silly.

Quit talkin' 'bowt my mama.

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We were all of us very young, we had a time, but when the party's over and the lights come up we see the chrome is not burning put has peeled, the neon looks tacky and the drugs have lost their luster.

I was, like, 40. Never could stand the chrome, and mirrorshades just made me think of mall, not ninjas. I never saw that much actual street neon in Gib's work, but I did notice how often he used neon as an adjective, although it didn't bother me until maybe my third book of his.

Just the thought of doing LSD now gives me a headache.

Funny:

"...casing mankind's extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems."

I remember how fantastically savvy seemed "mankind's extended electronic nervous system" back then. Just fact now: "rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix".

But this:

"monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems."

still dangles above my crib like glow-dark stencils. It's cheesy now but that dark-glow paint still shines like freshly applied.

Excellent metaphor TM, and I think it sums it up pretty perfectly, even down to the haircuts.

The advantage of labels is that usually you can try to make them stick to anything.

What TM calls Cyberpunk 2.0, for me would be just Cybergeek, that variant of geek fiction that deals with the near future. As mentioned, it overlaps partly with the Mundane movement, though the Mundane, in my opinion, worry too much about "literary" content rather than spinning a moving yarn (which is also a problem with WG, and the reason why Stephenson will outsell him).

Cyberpunk was one of the influences of both the geek writers and readers, in most cases through secondary sources rather than primary ones, movies and games instead of Schismatrix or even Neuromancer, though some hardy souls still search for the roots.

They also grew up with Tolkien and Tolkien's rip offs, so the strong New Weird and New Fantasy fields. Charles Stross and China Mieville share many readers, after all. Or Gibson and Gaiman.

I think the real change for many writers and readers, including stunts like Mundanes, is both to refuse to be labeled, and writing books for different labels. Why build a book using only tools from a box, when you can use different boxes? That is what those originally labeled as Cyberpunk, in my opinion, brought to the table, and what makes it so hard to pin, the fact that besides the SF canon you could use Chandler, Burroughs and Pynchon as models, while also influenced by Bester or Dick. Or Doctor Seuss, and Robert Sheckley if your name is Rucker.

And then, most self-proclaimed Cyberpunk writers limited themselves to a narrow subset, so the subgenre withered and the good writers just moved on to keep exploring what they wanted to tell, and how.

Most good writers using science fiction tropes do not restrict themselves to the sf box. The cyberpunk setting and pop culture is just another box, another set of tools.

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Most good writers using science fiction tropes do not restrict themselves to the sf box. The cyberpunk setting and pop culture is just another box, another set of tools.

You touched upon another defining aspect of that which we call or once called cyberpunk:

Gibson achieved what 60s New Wave SF writers were striving for: SF that read like a good book, period. Oh, to be sure, to read Neuromancer, at least to read it with full, easily turned-page effect, one needed to have read a bit of sci-fi beforehand so one would be used to regular naming of and reference to objects that currently don't exist.

That aside, Neuro was a book that pleased sci-fans, literati, and mainstream page-turners alike.

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Originally posted by The Psychophant:



They also grew up with Tolkien and Tolkien's rip offs, so the strong New Weird and New Fantasy fields. Charles Stross and China Mieville share many readers, after all. Or Gibson and Gaiman.

I think the real change for many writers and readers, including stunts like Mundanes, is both to refuse to be labeled, and writing books for different labels. Why build a book using only tools from a box, when you can use different boxes? That is what those originally labeled as Cyberpunk, in my opinion, brought to the table, and what makes it so hard to pin, the fact that besides the SF canon you could use Chandler, Burroughs and Pynchon as models, while also influenced by Bester or Dick. Or Doctor Seuss, and Robert Sheckley if your name is Rucker.

The crux, for me, is that Gibson was influenced by Pynchon and Burroughs whereas I always felt the rest of cyberpunk, such as it is/was, was influenced by science fiction more than Beats and Surrealists.

That and Gibson is simply a better writer than the rest of them.

As for Neal Stephenson, he was outselling Gibson, I don't know how long he'll hold that up though. Also, I think his readers are more along the lines of those who get the Star Wars pastiches and The Wheel of Time books on the NYT Bestseller list whereas Gibson is currently breaking genre. Ultimately, crossing genres will usually win out.

I just can't see anyone who reads Neal Stephenson reading, say, The Plot Against America or even The Road.

(OK, not "anyone" but for the most part. I think Stephenson's fans and Sci Fans got him into the NYT Bestseller list whereas more eclectic reader ultimately got Gibson in.)

Not that we will ever know as the industry keeps all their demographics quite secretive. It's very hard to determine what a book even sold. It is possible Gibson has already outsold Stephenson despite Stephenson likely being on the lists longer.

They NYT and many other list groups won't even disclose how their lists are compiled, so saying Stephenson outsold Gibson, while likely accurate, isn't likely provable to anyone without a multi thousand dollar subscription to Booksense.

And Booksense is the devil anyhow.

Ok, which one of us is Bruce Sterling? I'm pretty certain it's not me or Psychophant.

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I just can't see anyone who reads Neal Stephenson reading, say, The Plot Against America or even The Road.

Ahem. That would be me. To be honest, I actually think Stephenson wore his Pynchon on his sleeve in Cryptonomicon (I remember a perceptive review in the Washington Post when it came out that drew parallels with Gravity's Rainbow and an obscure genre of Japanese fiction that has to do with the rises and falls of businesses, which the Waterhouse sections seemed to emulate). I also was gradually more and more impressed with the Baroque Cycle after getting through the slog of the first half of Quicksilver. Flashback retellings of Daniel Waterhouse's Oxford days with Newton were rough going compared with Jack Shaftoe's swashbuckling. I enjoy Stephenson most when he's doing those sort of riffs: he lets the comic book in his mind have free reign, which makes sense if we read how Snow Crash originally came about as a graphic novel project for which Stephenson was trying to write custom Photoshop plugins.

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I much enjoyed Snow Crash and never bothered to ponder whether it was pure or post cyber-whatever. I saw that it used similar riffs, and that Stephenson had a gift for language and a talent for large, layered, onion-skinned plots. It even enshrined neon in
its prefab world-building.

It was most entertaining, but by the end he'd lost his way a bit in the interstices, a natural thing when such complexity is involved, and the novel's denouement was less an origamic infolding than a collapsing house of cards. The effect of this wasn't unpleasant; the rush of falling papier-mache plaster and Lincoln Logs (or should I say Legos?) was ridiculous good fun.

But when I learned that subsequent novels were even more complex and unabashedly indulgent in that regard, I declined pursuit. My experience is that authors who launch careers with pyrotechnic page-turners do not transform well into literati producers of extricately complex massive tomes.

I have more confidence in literati producers of extricately complex massive tomes transforming into pyrotechnic page-turners. I'd venture more hope in Salman Rushdie writing a condense polished work of pith than Gibson following in Pynchon's excessive footsteps.

Gabriel Marcia Marquez' latest work, a slim novella, was not exactly a page turner but elegantly rewarding without requiring readers make footnotes. McCarthy's The Road is so compact its prose is asymptotic, as if he were attempting with mere 2-d prose to rival 3-d printing.

Fans of Tolkien mostly agree that while the Ring trilogy is the greater work, The Hobbit is much the better written and easier to travel.

When my personal hero, Nabokov, decided to write a massive magnum opus, Ada or Ardor, he produced a work intractably displaying extreme reaches of genius but impossible to read only by slogging. (It's opening pages are perhaps the most impenetrable jungle of indulgence written among literature that doesn't stray outside grammatically correct grammar.) I never have and never will read it front to back, but it has never failed to delight me for diving in where I will. It is the opposite of a page-turner and closer to a book of sand. It is a compendium whose table of contents are disguised as a novel's narrative.

Subsequent to that, everything he wrote was delightfully compact and brief; before that, he'd written numerous novels that onion-skinned indeed but kept their hyper-volumes compact enough to fit between the turn of two pages.

I try to imagine Grisham producing a dense, multi-layered novel in which protagonists' fate exfoliated legal history's long arc in turn exfoliating philosophy's interactive dance with superstition and religion, the whole recursively bringing these themes to bear in complex impingements on protagonists and side-characters. I dislike what my mind conceives.

Yet I think Grisham is brilliant in his way. And I doubt he's particularly less intelligent than Pynchon.

I would equally view with apprehension if the author of the Travis Magee series, by no means crude or unsophisticated, attempted a baroque matrushka novel, even one in the sparse manner of Paul Auster.

I would even be wary if the venerable Alfred Bester had tried to get his Joycian Ulysses on, and Bester was a protean talent whose work nestled peripheral observations and inklings of tangential considerations.

But, counter to all I've just claimed, I doubt Pynchon could write a can't put it down, read in one day and half the next after staying up reading until 3 AM and eyes fail page-turner even if retention of his collection of animatronic Simpson's characters depended on it.

"I doubt Pynchon could write a can't put it down, read in one day and half the next after staying up reading until 3 AM and eyes fail page-turner..."
That so?

Hasn't managed to keep me up ...

Read it almost overnight.

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Originally posted by RUR:
"I doubt Pynchon could write a can't put it down, read in one day and half the next after staying up reading until 3 AM and eyes fail page-turner..."


That so?

Of course not. It's merely opined.

Lord that cover takes me back when...

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Originally posted by Kradlum:
Ok, which one of us is Bruce Sterling? I'm pretty certain it's not me or Psychophant.

Yeah, fess up. It's not me either.

I definitely have to re-read all of this stuff, I only briefly skimmed through but a lot of what TM said was very awesome I was not expecting such an essay .

It should also be noted that the modern equivalent to Punk is watered down bullshit. Blink182 is just an over glorified boy band :P Mainly why Cyberpunk is considered dead is because Punk died about around the same time. Both are causalities of the Contemporary HyperCapitalism Reality in which we live in today. (Both are victims of the MTV generation )Blame that on Optimism, suddenly it was un-cool to look negatively on the US because everyone was making shit loads of $$$ and since everyone now had a HD 50" TV they didn't really have to care about Russia about to pwn everyone with Nuclear weapons. (though when that does happen, get me a fucking Cyberdeck I'm jacking into Cyberspace and running away from this crap!)

If a young William Gibson had written Neuromancer in 1990 instead of 1980 it would have been a very ugly thing let me tell you. (this could be blamed for the Post-Cyberpunk movement)

Snow Crash is easily Post-Cyberpunk. On an interesting off topic, I bought a Pizza the other day and it had a heat sensor on it telling me how old the Pizza was.. then I went "OMFG! JUST LIKE IN SNOWCRASH!" . I was rather fascinated by that.
Granted it wasn't digital, rather Thermal but it was still pretty freaky.

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Originally posted by colin:

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Originally posted by Kradlum:
Ok, which one of us is Bruce Sterling? I'm pretty certain it's not me or Psychophant.

Yeah, fess up. It's not me either.

I got blogged by The Bruce Sterling!

If that is not the absolute, bar-coded steganograph of authentic cyberpunkness, I don't know what is.

Actually, I was just talking to my dad this morning about Sterling's spimes, speculation on cyberwar and What's To Come after watching some of his speeches on Youtube.

I'm really amazed he found my blog post, though. I was under the impression I had a readership of about three friends and maybe a few occasional netstrollers. I guess he's lurking around here or Bill handed it off to him or some such.

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You heard it here, TM is apparently an authority of Cyberpunk. lol.

"I'm really amazed he found my blog post, though. I was under the impression I had a readership of about three friends and maybe a few occasional netstrollers. I guess he's lurking around here or Bill handed it off to him or some such."

Or he was just googling.

Either way, you're two for three. Once Stephenson cites you, we're gonna have to crucify you on a T-span so you can ascend to Heaven as decreed.

Bruce, cyberpunk is dead and you know it! Hell, you intimate as much in Future: Now.