most of my "peers" take heavy approval of cyberpunk lit. as compared to other scifi flavors. I'm curious also, if this is some sort of generation gap? a clear demarcation between two distinct groups of fandom.
a schism?
for that matter, what does "the other group" think about cyberpunk? (i'd guess that most folks in this forum are from that population.)
I've been thinking much about it lately, too much, whether or not to use cyberpunk as my writing tool, what scares me; cyberpunk might be viewed as some bastard child of the literati......
Thus I believe a good writer can use the trappings and settings of cyberpunk (techno distopia, virtual reality, nanotech, bionic implants, direct computer/brain interface, etc.) in a quality story.
Cyberpunk only becomes cyberpuke when it's delivered via bad writing.
There are a number of other conventions that kind of loosely define the genre. The cyberpunk vision of the future is usually pretty dystopian, oppressive governments and corperations try to use artificial intelligence to impose totalitarian control, brave and superintelligent hackers use their superior human intellect to fight the power. Neurocybernetic implants are almost a given, and some people think of it as the sole qualification for entry into the genre. Sex, Drugs, and Rock'n Roll contain or at least point to the meaning of life, etc. Cyber is for the computer-brain interface, punk is for the SDRXtreme hacker cool.
Cyber-punk was a flash in the pan. The unimaginable present that Gibson (prophet of cyberpunk) speaks of has rendered it obsolete. Medical technology has barely begun to solve the issues of input and output directly too and from the human brain, and yet the cultural evolution has moved beyond that expressed in cyberpunk.
Neurocybernetic implants are now simply good SF--the idea that anything about having a computer interface implanted inside your skull would make you unusually sexy, druggy, or rockin' is no longer de rigueur. Nor is the idea that hackers are brave freedom fighters, most people now look on them as degenerate scum. Admittedly, there is a story to be written here, since governments and corperations have spent billions to create and foster just that impression in the popular mind, but the hackers have largely lived down to the insults.
Some of the cyberpunk fiction was groundbreaking, a lot of it was really good. But the present no longer extrapolates to the future that cyberpunk envisioned. Which is why pretty much everything that emulates it too directly now is trash.
What is cyberpunk? Cyberpunk is dead.
I don't think it's a generation gap thing in my case; I was still in high school when Neuromancer was published. (And it's not a technosavviness gap either -- computer programming was my hobby at the time. Let me tell you, I wrote some pretty cool stuff for the Atari 800 and the Apple II+.)
I think it's a matter of taste. I'm not fond of dystopian fiction.
I say you should feel free to take the cool cybernetic stuff from cyberpunk, but don't feel that you are forced to conform to its vision of the future. (If you want to write dystopian fiction, go ahead; I'm just saying that you shouldn't let your story be constrained by the conventions of cyberpunk.)
quote:
Medical technology has barely begun to solve the issues of input and output directly too and from the human brain, and yet the cultural evolution has moved beyond that expressed in cyberpunk.
Has it? I'm not so sure about that. I'll admit to not having read much cyberpunk, but of what I've read, I'd say there is still the possibility of that kind of problem arising in the future. Yes, a lot of people are working to ensure that governments don't gain the kind of authority depicted, but they will not necessarily win... the same goes for a lot of the other issues: drug use, street violence, and so on. These could easily become more widespread in the future.
Also, a lot of the 'bigger issues' of cyberpunk are still floating around to bother us in the future. 15 years after Neuromancer (??? was it around '88 when that was published, or is my memory misleading me?), and we're still wondering what life will be like with AI...
The problem with cyberpunk is that people got bored of the same future vision over and again. Futurism as a whole field seems to have gone out of fashion, anyway.
The fundamental problem could indeed be that people got bored of the same future vision being repeated ad nauseam...but some kinds of future visions pale faster than others. Dystopian visions haven't exactly gone out of style, they've just lost the edge that they once had. And there is the issue of our society's unwillingness to look in the face of where our choices are leading us...we no longer want to see the most plausible dystopian visions, because we the (*&%ing people would be the ones to institute such a future...we don't want to be told that we're bad.
There are also the Apocalyptic visions (hehe). I think that these stories have become less popular as we realize just how likely some kind of terrible disaster (literal or social) actual might be, especially given how little we are ready to do about it.
I think that it comes down the the fact that while cyber-punk did indeed break new ground in a number of ways, it also was a very narrow vision defined by a very small number of seminal works. As a sub-genre it just wasn't broad enough for real creativity, which may be why the most imaginative and compelling uses of the ideas cyber-punk initially pioneered are now found in other SF works.
But that probably is true of any sub-genre field of literature. Most of us even occasionally rebel against the tyranny of being pigeon-holed as SF, Fantasy, or even SF/F writers. Why would anyone volunteer for an even smaller pigeon-hole?
Also, the tools you choose to use for writing will depend on your story - you've had some good descriptions, and you obviously have read and like the sub-genre. You will write the story with the tools that work, and if it is good people will read it. People have their preferences obviously, but I don't think it has to do with a generation gap or a schism. Definitely there will be different fan groups, but I think many people read broadly within speculative fiction.
Actually, speculative fiction did not originally exist as a subgenre of fiction - our elder writers had books in the general fiction section. Some might see the whole of sf/f as being a "bastard child" and certainly not literature - are you concerned with writing great literature, great sf, or just a great story that happens to be sf/cyberpunk?
As for who we are... I'm in my late thirties (ack!), married with toddler twins, at home currently, female - what do you think I read? Yes, I love Anne McCaffrey and Andre Norton - bet that was an easy guess. However, I also really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and finished Gibson's "Neuromancer" recently and plan to read some more of their books... but I have a Robert Jordan waiting, "Dune: The Machine Crusade" is by my bed, "Ringworld" is almost finished, am buying OSC's newest "Crystal City"... well, you get the picture!
Write what is in you, in the context that fits the story. If it is good, you can make it work!
Lee
So yes, there will be a certain demographic that will read cyberpunk, but I don't think it's a generational thing. Let's take my generation (I'm 26). Within that age group there are drug users, eggheads, jocks, sluts, foul-mouthed people, and prudes. I'm pretty sure every generation has the same, and as people grow up they may change but they can still identify with the person they were. For example, I used to be painfully shy. I'm actually somewhat outgoing now, I grew out of that, but I can still readily identify with painfully shy characters.
Anyway, when writing your cyberpunk you need to continue to take care in following certain rules of writing. In particular, because this is such an easy trap to fall into when you get the "punk" mentality going, you need to keep in mind what makes a character sympathetic to readers.
[This message has been edited by BudHAHA (edited December 02, 2003).]