Cyberpunk! and the future of Sci-Fi

[Set Harth]

Your nitpicking about format rather than the substance of the argument.

You're unilaterally labeling genres as dead or films as worthless and insisting that EVERYONE agrees with you. I think that's more than a question of "format", and it doesn't really qualify as an argument.

*bang head against wall*

Yes that was my point. POOR EXECUTION

So if Lucas fails in execution, the entire genre automatically fails intellectually?

This looks like a textbook example of changing the subject.

Not at all. You misrepresented the supposed "goals" of cyberpunk by assuming that what you ( sorry, YOUNG MEN ) got out of it was somehow a definition of its goals.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

You're judging a genre based on what they got right and wrong as far as predicting the future?

Well the claim of supporters of Cyberpunk is it's connection to reality. I'm showing that it's connection was tenuous as best. I also don't think it was as influential as people claim.

Gibson's work is more observant of the way the world is today and what it's becoming than the combined output of LeGuin, Heinlein, Niven and any three others you'd care to name.

This whole argument began when EVERYBODY acknowledged that 50's space opera was intellectually dead.

True, but it's still lots of fun.
Can the same be said for cyberpunk?

Absolutely.

 

[RAMA]

Cyberpunk refreshed the world of SF in the 80s, mostly in style, while still borrowing heavily from 60s influences. It grounded SF in near future stories that didn't seem that far off from reality. Eventually, the actual events within cyberpunk, the transhumanist elements..."jacking in", as well as themes of small players able to effect a world they may barely understand and often progressed without them, and so on will be seen a small part of a larger whole within The Singularity in genre fiction, which encompasses both classical themes and more innovative ones.

Cyberpunk isn't dead, it's just been absorbed.

http://vimeo.com/39242851

RAMA

 

[Professor Zoom]

Cyberpunk isn't dead, it's just been absorbed.

That makes sense. And that's what happens to a lot of genres of art... the become a part of something else... and reinterperted.

So, hardly a failed genre. OR irrelevant.

 

[Kegg]

Gibson's work is more observant of the way the world is today and what it's becoming than the combined output of LeGuin, Heinlein, Niven and any three others you'd care to name.

Here's a little bit of meaningless observational frippery.

What word did Ursula LeGuin invent that has had a life beyond her own work?

Ansible.

A device that can send information at FTL speeds. Its use outside LeGuin is largely by other science fiction writers referring to the same kind of fictional device.

Now, what word did William Gibson invent that has had a life beyond his own work?

Cyberspace.

I don't have to explain that word, because you're on it, right now.

Related: Bacigalupi's Hugo and Nebula winning book is referred to as the biopunk genre, a descendant or offshoot of cyberpunk and interested in the same kind of direct projection of the future. For a failed genre its legacy's still plowing on.

 

[Greg Cox]

Both Verne and Wells have pretty high success rates .

Wells?

That must be why I keep bumping into invisible men, Martian invaders, surgically-modified beast-people, giant insects, anti-gravity, and time machines every time I step outside!

(Not that it matters. Wells' books are still read because they're great stories, not because of his track record at predicting the future.They're novels, not fortune cookies.)

Verne was probably the better futurist, but I've always found Wells to be a much better storyteller.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi

I wasn't really thrilled by this essay

Me neither. I think there was a note in the comments for that article that mention how some readers came across cyberpunk while reading a lot of other fiction from before and after the 80s and just saw it as another part of the whole.

That was how I came across Gibson's writing. It was intriguing, but not captivating. I saw bits of what other people had written in it, but telepathy or other unworldly powers were replaced with some more physical and "grounded".

David Brin wrote a bit more of a balanced article here.

 

[Australis]

Please read the article I linked to in my first post before commenting

Well what was Cyberpunk's goal outside of "sticking it to the man" and being full of angst about reality like every other thing with the word -punk in it.

You didn't get the sense of technology rushing at us and we're not prepared for what it will do to us? How we'll fetishise it even though we don't understand the long term effects? And where's the angst in steampunk? I must have missed that. Nostalgia, maybe, but not angst.

I liked Cyberpunk but it's a literary dead end. That's not my assessment that's the father of Cyberpunk, William Gibson's judgement.
...
Sure and Neuromancer is one of them but that's not evidence that the genre is relevant NOW.

(Why does multi-quote not work properly for me? <sigh>

Any genre can be made relevant, it just takes a lot of understanding of current scientific developments and where they are going.

Both Verne and Wells have pretty high success rates and the future isn't going to be kind to Asimov. This whole argument began when EVERYBODY acknowledged that 50's space opera was intellectually dead.

But space opera continues in Banks's Culture novels, and I'm very glad it does. And it would be interesting to see how it would be handled if the proposed Lensman movies went ahead. I imnagined they have to have some kind of retro-future style to them.

The Windup Girl is fantastic.

I heard it's pretty good. That's my next read after Cloud Atlas

not really engaging with a direct future in the way cyberpunk did.

Only as a snapshot of Reagan America and extending it in to future. That's why cyberpunk ultimately failed as a genre. What writers like Gibson didn't realize was how the internet would change and even subvert the assumptions of centralized control. Sure they foresaw the potential of networked computers but they didn't see what the social possibility was. Even Gibson himself acknowledges this in his many interviews.

You do realise that the people viewed as the architects of the internet, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, were heavily influenced by Neuromancer, don't you? Gibson saw what was the internet, gave it a spin, filtered it through noir style, because it seemed to require that feel of edgy desperation (I called it the high-tech low-life). And others picked it up and ran with it.

On a personal note, Neuromancer changed my life, when I read it back in 1986. I'd been trying to write stories that looked at SF in a difference way, but I couldn't quite get there. Then I read it, and it completely blew me away. And made me aware of this: "Damn, I have to get into computers ort I'm gonna get left behind!" (well, the book and the arrival of the first ATMs). Five years later, I went to college to learn IT.

Cyberpunk, in the most general sense, brought some observation of the world and technology as it was and as it actually was evolving back into the genre, saving it from becoming tidally locked into ritualistic storytelling about FTL spaceships and fucking elves.

I accept your point of view but it ignores the fact that Sci-fi was moving past the classical 50's space opera by the late 60's. Like I said what about Le Guin and the later works of Philip K Dick and even Robert Heinlein. Cyberpunk's obsession with technology is its downfall since technology and our relationship with it constantly changes. I mean none of the writer's in the 80's foresaw Google as both a technology and a company. Compare Cyberpunk with say Star Wars. Star Wars feels relevant today while Cyberpunk feels like a product of the 80's

None of the writers in the 60s and 70s foresaw Google either. Or the internet. And Star Wars was always a fairy tale in a high tech guise. Le Guin is a good writer, I have big problems with Heinlein's later novels which, in the light of cyberpunk, don't look terribly inventive on a technological scale. As for Dick, I don't have anything worthwhile to say about him.

The way the likes of us are clustered here, hunched over our keyboards, directed ads pouring down the side of our screens, is very, very cyberspace.

On another note, in Gibson's most recent trilogy, beginning with Pattern Recognition, he's writing SF novels about now, with now technology, now social conditions, now politics, but giving it the same feel as if it's written about future events and created worlds. Some could view it as a failure of imagination, but I take it to mean that, more than ever, the future is now.

 

[The Squire of Gothos]

You do realise that the people viewed as the architects of the internet, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, were heavily influenced by Neuromancer, don't you?

See that's what I like to read more about, is there any worthwhile place to do so?

I know my Android hand set and its top of the line model Nexus are parting references to Blade Runner. But the only lengthy discussion I've come across in reference to what influenced companies like Google was Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (which I think you should possible take with a pinch of salt).

 

[RJDiogenes]

Cyberpunk saved SF? Hardly. It was merely a sign of the times-- the computer revolution and the Reagan Era. The contemporary SF of any era is the extrapolation of that era (and what is known in that era) into the future. Gibson and Cyberpunk were both great developments in the genre, but they didn't save SF-- they were just the Ellison and Dangerous Visions of their day.

This guy just wants to pump up his own book as a game changer.

As for Space Opera being intellectually dead, Australis summed up that quite nicely. It's not only alive, but has experienced a Renaissance.

And as for poetry no longer being relevant: That will only happen when Humanity is extinct.

 

[Kegg]

David Brin wrote a bit more of a balanced article here.

That article is many things, but 'balanced' might be a little generous. A charitable and perhaps more accurate description would be that it's a summation of the argument as to why cyberpunk was not all that special.

This guy just wants to pump up his own book as a game changer.

What he says about his book is this:

To the extent that my novel The Windup Girl was a success, I think it was because I touched on issues that people are desperately interested in but that science fiction had been ignoring. If a book about agribusiness takes off, you know something’s amiss in the universe.

Perhaps you know science fiction novels about agribusinesses that puts the lie to this.

As for Space Opera being intellectually dead, Australis summed up that quite nicely.

Australis wasn't defending space opera from the 1950s, though, which was the period it was being accused of vacuous.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Oh, okay. Well, that's not true, either.

 

[Australis]

As for Space Opera being intellectually dead, Australis summed up that quite nicely.

Australis wasn't defending space opera from the 1950s, though, which was the period it was being accused of vacuous.

Hmm. Reading 1950s space opera now would be purely an exercise in nostalgia, hence my comment about the Lensman series - as a young teen in the early 70s, they fired my imagination, I'd not read anything like them before. Now, they are a lot harder to read, the clichéd romances, the diesel driven spaceships, the square jawed heroes. We've moved on a lot since then. Keep in mind, Space Opera was a reflection of its times, just as cyberpunk was, just as TOS was, and just as, uh, whatever we have now is.

(Sidenote: I started writing a novel called Cyberian Junction, about a solar system wide society that was, more or less, quite cyberpunk in outlook and lifestyle. This universe is 'invaded' by ships from an alt.universe where the Galactic Patrol of the Lensman series lived on. The collision of cultures was epic, and participants of both sides were stuck for a while in the opposite world, examining the beliefs of each side. But it was very hard to finish without making it a parody of either or both. I was going to tack a teaser on the end - the Lensman types went home, and just as thigs were settling down, another ship came through the rip/rift/whatever, with interstellar drive and a large saucer section for the bridge. )

Yminale, if you haven't read any of Banks's Culture novels you really should. I wasn't overly fussed on Matter, but really liked the rest (and just found out there'll be a new one this year, The Hydrogen Sonata. Sweeet!) A lot of people here would like to be citizens of the Federation, but I would much prefer to be a citizen of the Culture.

Hell, I'd want that just for the ship names alone: Irregular Apocalypse, No More Mr Nice Guy, Hand of God 137, Clear Air Turbulence (obviously a Gillan fan), Just Read The Instructions, Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence,Youthful Indiscretion, Gunboat Diplomat, What Are The Civilian Applications?, Congenital Optimist, Problem Child, Shoot Them Later, Use Psychology, What Is The Answer and Why?, I Blame My Mother, I Blame Your Mother, A Series Of Unlikely Explanations, Never Talk To Strangers, Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality, Poke It With A Stick, on an on and ON! That isn't yer average Space Opera ship names, and who wouldn't want to live in a civilisation where they name their ships like that? As you might be able to tell... I'm a fan.

As for cyberpunk, like punk music, it freed us up to try different things in its particular area, and we are better off for it. Still relevant? When someone comes along to tighten it up and tweak it for the 21st Century.

 

[RJDiogenes]

50s Space Opera was definitely a product of its time, as all literature is, but it shouldn't be any harder to read than any other era, from Homer to Shakespeare to Verne. I think that literature passes through phases: It's hep, it's passe, it's an embarrassment, it's classic. Mid-to-late 20th century stuff seems to be going through the embarrassment phase at the moment....

 

[Kegg]

I think that literature passes through phases: It's hep, it's passe, it's an embarrassment, it's classic.

There's a lot of old stuff that simply by virtue of bieng old hasn't automatically transmuted it to classic status. The Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, is only really known today for his notoriously purple prose.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Well, naturally, and that will always be the majority of stuff (not that bad literature, like bad movies, can't be entertaining). But what happens is that ensuing generations, in the near term, want to distinguish themselves from those who immediately preceded them, and so they pump themselves up and trivialize those who came before. But as stuff becomes older, it becomes less of a threat and you don't see so much of that behavior.

 

[Ubik]

Well, naturally, and that will always be the majority of stuff (not that bad literature, like bad movies, can't be entertaining). But what happens is that ensuing generations, in the near term, want to distinguish themselves from those who immediately preceded them, and so they pump themselves up and trivialize those who came before. But as stuff becomes older, it becomes less of a threat and you don't see so much of that behavior.

That's not the only problem. Stuff that is popular for a time, or even influential, but is not of high quality, will soon become unreadable. Doc Smith basically made the space opera genre popular, and for that he is clearly influential, but of the Lensman series, only the third one is any good. The others are very, very difficult to read today, because it has bad writing, poor pacing, awful dialogue and characterization, and blatant sexism. People read it at the time because it seemed new. Without that "newsness," really its only virtue, it has nothing left to recommend it.

Some of Gibson's early cyberpunk is still extremely readable today. Not because its relevant, which it may not be, but because Gibson is, at times, a fine writer, with a good handle on prose and pacing. That's why it has attained "classic" status, particularly Neuromancer. Because, beyond being influential and important, it's actually a fairly good work of art. Good art lasts, whether its relevant or not. Bad art fades, even if it was terribly relevant at the time.

 

[Set Harth]

And let's not forget that Count Zero eerily predicted a space shuttle disintegrating on reentry.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Gibson made a lot of valid predictions, but I wouldn't give him credit for that. Burning up in re-entry has always been a danger in spaceflight and literature is full of examples of it.

Well, naturally, and that will always be the majority of stuff (not that bad literature, like bad movies, can't be entertaining). But what happens is that ensuing generations, in the near term, want to distinguish themselves from those who immediately preceded them, and so they pump themselves up and trivialize those who came before. But as stuff becomes older, it becomes less of a threat and you don't see so much of that behavior.

That's not the only problem. Stuff that is popular for a time, or even influential, but is not of high quality, will soon become unreadable. Doc Smith basically made the space opera genre popular, and for that he is clearly influential, but of the Lensman series, only the third one is any good. The others are very, very difficult to read today, because it has bad writing, poor pacing, awful dialogue and characterization, and blatant sexism. People read it at the time because it seemed new. Without that "newsness," really its only virtue, it has nothing left to recommend it.

Some of Gibson's early cyberpunk is still extremely readable today. Not because its relevant, which it may not be, but because Gibson is, at times, a fine writer, with a good handle on prose and pacing. That's why it has attained "classic" status, particularly Neuromancer. Because, beyond being influential and important, it's actually a fairly good work of art. Good art lasts, whether its relevant or not. Bad art fades, even if it was terribly relevant at the time.

That's true to a degree, but not entirely. Sometimes a work attains classic status through inertia or because of their influential nature, rather than quality (which is often subjective). The older a work is, the more out of sync with contemporary society it becomes, since what's contemporary is always changing-- most older literature is rife with racism, sexism, classism et cetera. And Neuromancer isn't that old compared to Lensman.

Also, there is always disagreement about what is classic, and many works go in and out of fashion. The Foundation Trilogy is considered by most to be a classic, yet many people don't consider it well written. A lot of other people consider The Great Gatsby to be one of the all-time great works of literature, but I think it's shallow and trivial. Most people consider Shakespeare the greatest writer in the history of Western civilization, but only because they were taught to think that in school.

 

[JoeZhang]

Just a minor peeve of mine - I'm always suspect of people who's web communications end with their qualifications - why does David Brin need me to know he has a PhD?

Sorry.. carry on.