Dork hit the schoolyards and hallways in my junior high (68-70).

Geek, back then, was a horrible epithet at first, still about circus freaks. I was way out of touch when it morphed underground and became 'semi-cool technosavvy'.

Nerd seems to mean the same thing, roughly, as trainspotter.

I barely think in sociocultural categories. Most of what they're based on is so flimsy that I find them pointless even as sticky labels.

It seems to me that along with brand-naming everything, with synechdoches running rampant, with pop music critics providing more labels to describe the various emo-core-power-punk-pop-whatever crypto genres (that I'm convinced only they can see) than there are distinguishable music styles to describe, a similar thing is happening with sociocultural labels.

Defining oneself as a goth or whatever strikes me as pointless. Or the fact that when people ask you what kind of music you like, they mean 99% of the time 'what type of music using guitars and drums and synths in stylers derived from R&R and country or maybe a touch of jazz'?

They want a label. What your music says about you. Sometimes I answer seriously and instead of saying jazz & classical (end conversation right there, eh?), I'll say High Renaissance, early Modern, Beethoven-through Brahms Romantics, early Kansas City, Miles modal, small group cool bop, freebop, fusion by Weather Report but hardly anyone else, Medieval, northern Hindustani Indian classical...

Does that make me an (*ahem*) music nerd? Or just someone who knows what they like?

And I could listen to Jeff Beck play guitar all day.

I think Bruce is ribbing us now.

I'm still unclear on how exactly steampunk is either. I can understand the reference to steam, particularly as an allusion to the pre- part of the genre.

But -punk?

From the Sterling link: ""To some, "steampunk" is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. "To me, it's essentially the intersection of technology and romance," said Jake von Slatt,"

Technology and Romance = "steampunk" that's about as untechno and unsexy as it gets. It doesn't sound like the kind of genre that buys you flowers you know? Nor a genre that would know how to fix your iPod.

Furthermore, on the matter at hand, isn't the death of a genre\type a good thing? Once C-punk is dead then people can go to write new things, no longer hemmed in to the cyberpunk intellectual ghetto right?

The King is dead, long live The King.

I'd thought that was part of the need for the term cyberpunk initially, it wasn't "sci-fi", just like "punk" wasn't "rock and roll". Once the need for separate terms goes away by the tumor being consumed by the host then the term can die too. Just an archaic name for a now useless organ.

Steampunk is probably a classic example of laziness-in-labeling because I've only seen it applied to fiction after Sterling and Gibson's "The Difference Engine" was published. It's "Steampunk" because Gibson and Sterling were, at the time, the biggest cyberpunk authors. The Victorian era having been known for using steam to move things (locomotives, etc.), cyberpunk dabbling in historical speculative fiction became "steampunk."

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
Steampunk is probably a classic example of laziness-in-labeling because I've only seen it applied to fiction after Sterling and Gibson's "The Difference Engine" was published. It's "Steampunk" because Gibson and Sterling were, at the time, the biggest cyberpunk authors. The Victorian era having been known for using steam to move things (locomotives, etc.), cyberpunk dabbling in historical speculative fiction became "steampunk."

Funny because Gaiman's milieu actually seems more "steampunk", or at least more suited to that kind of "adult fairy tale" type of stuff.

At the time? Are they not still?

"At the time" is not exclusive of "Are still." I just wanted to make the historical context clear: late '80s/early 90s.

quote:

Although many works now considered seminal to the genre were published in the 1960s and 1970s, the term steampunk originated in the late 1980s as a tongue in cheek variant of cyberpunk. It seems to have been coined by the science fiction author K. W. Jeter, who was trying to find a general term for works by Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, 1983), James Blaylock (Homunculus, 1986) and himself (Morlock Night, 1979 and Infernal Devices, 1987) which took place in a Victorian setting and imitated conventions of actual Victorian speculative fiction such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. In a letter to the science fiction magazine Locus, printed in the April 1987 issue, Jeter wrote:

Dear Locus,
Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel Morlock Night; I'd appreciate your being so good as to route it Faren Miller, as it's a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in "the Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate" was writing in the "gonzo-historical manner" first. Though of course, I did find her review in the March Locus to be quite flattering.
Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps ... -- K.W. Jeter.[1]

Danke, KL.

Whatever cyberpunk was in toto, and how much of it remains ensemble to decide whether 'cyberpunk' is alive or dead, the following shows that its memes as fiction are still useful in exploring the world in which we live and where it seems to be going:

Sleep Dealers

...and it might be a good show, too.

I think this is my most successful thread.

w00t?

my opinion is
Cyberpunk is dead as a genre.
But it will survive as a set of powerful (and mandatory) metaphors for science-fiction.

I see the concept of human wired to machines as a hyperbolic metaphor for Technology. The capacity of human beings to transcend themselves by using tools.
It could even make it to the common language. "How can he be so great at the guitar. Is he wired to it ?"

About Cyberspace. I think Bruce Sterling wrote that it's the space where a phone call takes place.
The home space of information (l'espace naturel de l'information ?).
I think it's a metaphor for the human being power of traveling into abstraction.

Mandatory ?
I don't read much science fiction these days but, tell me, do you think SciFi writer can still write about technology and information without using these metaphors ?
It would be like making an episode of 24H without using cellphones.


You will never believe

Cheesy B FLick?

Strikes me as 'transhumanist' fare old as Frankenstein and new as Jerry Springer.

it goes on and on and on and on...

Yo. It still lives.

quote:

Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:
Cheesy B FLick?

Strikes me as 'transhumanist' fare old as Frankenstein and new as Jerry Springer.

Heh. Looks like they took a bit out of the last hundred or so pages of "Gravity's Rainbow" as inspiration.

Yes, cyberpunk is still over.

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
Yes, cyberpunk is still over.

I'll agree to that, Cyberpunk has become an artifact just as post-modernism was an artifact to it. What interests me more is Post-Humanism since theoretically it can surpass Cyberpunk because its not so damn restrictive, it can comprise of many elements that can include cyberpunk. I do honestly think this is where Science Fiction is heading, where its a big bag of different styles- of course the last time someone tried it Gibson threw a hissy fit (Shadowrun) but I'd argue that was more related to the fact that they didn't even bother to cite him that he was more pissed about.. that and the idea of molly millions as an elf .

I seriously doubt that the post human is where sci-fi is headed. The very notion of post-humanity is that you don't have humans, you get somehting other, something we cannot relate to..If someone figured out how to tell a story that had no recognizable human emotions, that had creatures but not characters, then maybe they'd be on to something.

My current project includes a post human segment but I've gotten around the no people factor.

Without people (that is characters, anthropomorphic or not) you don't really have fiction.

And a post-human future where people still are recognizably human in their behavior isn't anything new.

I'm not convinced that it can be successfully done and I am certainly dissuaded from believing it can ever be any sort of real movement. All this bullshit they pile onto sci-fi and fantasy, like new weird and other dork-tropes, it's really pathetic, the gasps of people's manufactured need to market their reading material to themselves.

It was bad enough when they did it to Gibson and his like but now it's become so obviously desperate as to be laughable. At least to me.

If anything becomes popular I think it will be retro sci-fi. The future is too occluded, there isn't any agreeable zeitgeist there.

But it should be noted that while William Gibson is my favorite author and perhaps the best living prose stylist, I do not regard science fiction authors in general as very good writers nor particularly imaginative.

Genre fiction rarely is.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure we have the same need to dream about the technological future as we used to. Sci-fi, as we have known it, may in fact become a historical artifact.

Like The Mystery Play, or the Old West dime novel.

There was a time, i think, when a place for all the half-realized dreams of man to go in regards to his quickly advancing technology. It was a kind of buffer, a hedge against that very future written about, a decontamination zone between us and it. But now it's not really needed, kids are very comfortable in their implacable now and have less need to talk to themselves about their tomorrows. the anxiety is missing, the new future smell has been eroded.

In this manner I think traditional sci-fi, which I think of as being about the future of technology, will engender its own obsolescence.

Take my future?

From my cold, pre-prefrontal hands!