Is cyberpunk a dead genre?

[Khampelf]

@Case Sensitive

As for William Gibson, maybe he just likes The Velvet Underground: there’s no other reason for Bobby, a barely literate wannabe with no obvious interest in the past to be quoting “First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait” in Count Zero. After all, Gibson did call a novel All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Bobby doesn’t say that. Lucas the oungan does, right before they meet the Finn.

“I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know?”

But Bobby did have an obvious interest in the past, hence his handle, taken from ‘old programmer talk’. Count Zero Interrupt.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Jenny Haniver

This sentence also makes a great epitaph for cyberpunk as a discrete genre. It’s a great opening, and in 1984, a great image as well.

…But when was the last time you saw a television that would actually show you “snow” when you tuned it to a dead channel? Now all you’re likely to see is a bright, summery blue blankness, totally in opposition to the image the sentence is intended to summon.

Neil Gaiman used that observation for a joke in Neverwhere.

Scroll down to Dec 13 for a bit of a comment on it.

[Scissorjack]

@The Sonoran Lizard King

Bobby doesn’t say that. Lucas the oungan does, right before they meet the Finn.

“I got a pair of shoes older than you are, so what the fuck should I expect you to know?”

But Bobby did have an obvious interest in the past, hence his handle, taken from ‘old programmer talk’. Count Zero Interrupt.

Just checked, and you’re right. Mind you, Bobby’s POV does say earlier that “Sometimes you just had to wait”, which is enough of a paraphrase to both make me misremember it, and to think that Gibson had it running through his head.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Tengu

Neil Gaiman used that observation for a joke in Neverwhere.

Scroll down to Dec 13 for a bit of a comment on it.

Well, yeah. It’s obvious to anyone who goes from over-the-air tv to cable. I know that it’s been used as an example of time superseding sf description since the 1980s.

But it’s also one of those things that each new generation has to pick up on for itself. Like thinking it invented sex.

[Trunk]

I read a fiction review in the NYT yesterday about a new book by a guy named Richard Morgan. It wasn’t cyberpunk exactly, but in it, they mentioned an old book by him that is cyber punkish.

Free registration required (but, why aren’t you registered at NYT by now anyway?)

Here’s a link to yesterday’s article, which sounds like a pretty cool book.

Here’s the link to the cyberpunk novel.

Here’s a quote from that review.

If you’ve ever wondered what kind of science fiction Raymond Chandler might have written for a futuristic Philip Marlowe, check out ALTERED CARBON, by Richard K. Morgan (Del Rey/Ballantine, paper, $13.95). In this rousing first novel, Morgan has reimagined ‘‘The Big Sleep’’ as 25th-century noir.

Takeshi Lev Kovacs, the Marlowesque protagonist, dies in a shootout before the end of the prologue. But not to worry. Thanks to ‘‘the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval,’’ all the particulars of a human personality can now be digitized and stored on a handy stack of disks. Unless the stack in your spine and all backup copies are blown to atom-size bits, you can be ‘‘resleeved’’ in a new body with only a slight loss of recent memories. Of course, this takes money, which leaves Kovacs wondering why Laurens J. Bancroft, a 357-year-old Bay City mogul, has gone to the trouble of resurrecting him.

[Chairman_Pow]

@Case Sensitive

As for William Gibson, maybe he just likes The Velvet Underground: there’s no other reason for Bobby, a barely literate wannabe with no obvious interest in the past to be quoting “First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait” in Count Zero. After all, Gibson did call a novel All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Hopefully this isn’t ressurecting a zombie thread, but I just realized that, IIRC, that line (“First thing…”) is from a W. S. Burroughs novel and Gibson is a big Burroughs fan - big enough that he recognized the source material for some of the cutup stuff Burroughs did (that being scifi stuff from the '50s).

[Taber]

Robert A. Metzger’s Cusp is kind of cyberpunkish, but then again he seems to try to cram every science fiction idea ever had into it

[Chairman_Pow]

Just finished Pattern Recognition and I think it’s a much better example of cyberpunk than most other novels (with he and Stephenson writing stuff set in the present day, I’m much more inclined to like those than the futuristic ones - the present day works seem to capture the zeitgeist much better than the goofy prognostication that is outdated a few years later, even if the goofy world of forums described in PR are old hat even three years later).