Cyberpunk discussion
Cyberpunk Itself
>
Noir
date
newest »
newest »
I feel like it is a dead genre. As much as I love it there is so little of it written today.
Its hard enough to tell what punk means anymore. Hence my own migration toward "grassroots espionage." But I didnt know it didn't know this either at first.It seems post cyberpunk is used to describe stories that aren't dark and gritty. I don't particularly like the term myself, as what if I still have a dark and gritty story, but corporations just aren't all powerful?
Cyberpunk doesn't have to be noir-ish, though classsic, old school cyberpunk usually is. A lot of the transhumanist/posthumanist stuff eschews the noir origins of the genre for loftier abstractions. I also don't think cyberpunk HAS to have all-powerful corporations either - again, that's a trope of classic cyberpunk but not a required one. I think one of the main requirements is a sense of an uneasy truce between man and the technology that threatens to overrun man's life.
That definition actually makes sense. Although I might add just being gorier doesn't make it darker either.Isnt it also required to be street level or "grassroots" level tech?
I don't think it has to be street level tech. It could be the contrast between the street level and the shinier tech. A pretty common theme is control, or the struggle for control. Corporations trying to control individuals, individuals struggling to maintain control over their bodies with technology. How many times have we seen a character implanted with some device meant to either directly control or exert some form of control over the individual's actions in order to force them to do a job they might not want to do?
Ah ok, I see what you mean.It makes me unsure of my own writing though, as my own governing entity is where the corp is just about to gain power but does not yet have the resources to be more overt. Sort of an odd pre-cyberpunk sort of world. Hence my unsure thing about the corp.
I'll be interested to see where cyberpunk goes in the future.
Rudy Rucker has written many cyberpunk novels that feel very "bright". If you read Rucker you should know what I mean. He writes some goofy, crazy things. Jeff Noon was another one.
Do you think that in order to be truly Cyberpunk, a book has to be dark and feel noir? I think Cyberpunk has evolved from them, it's branched off into many other things. Chalres Stross has Cyberpunk elements in some of his stuff, for example, and it different. Cyberpunk is not dead, it's just been incorporated into other genres.