Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Noism and his damn interesting thoughts on cyberpunk, a more than 4096 reply

Noisms'speaking of cyberpunk brought this particular raving

It's not the punk that went missing, it's the cyber.   Much of the vision found in Gibson is still valid.  Finding myself with a shut down government in the middle of what he always called the Sprawl, the 70s vision of a future of a balkanized America seems as threatening as ever.  Then again, this half of cyberpunk existed before Gibson and existed after Gibson.  All that is really missing is the menacing world brought on by the baby boom's glut of young men.  The inner city that Burgess wrote of in Clockwork Orange or Norman Spinrad wrote of in Little Heroes has largely been Disneyfied.  There simply aren't as many angry young men about anymore in the developed world.  Most of America's would-be revolutionaries seem to be FYAM, formerly young angry men, than the AYMs of yesterday.

The vision of a chaotic future of change, a world where half the population is discarded as victims of future shock is still a valid one.  As valid as it was when science fiction was founded in the 19th century, when Wells wrote of Morlocks and Verne wrote of technological doomsday devices. Automation or modern times, the inequalities brought on by change,  and the attempts to stave it off by the followers of King Ludd are just as valid as they were when Kurt Vonnegut wrote Player Piano.  For that matter, it's just as valid as when Dickens used it as a setting in his works.  ( Before  you say  luddite?)

All that has really changed is the industry which is undergoing change.  The Information Revolution has put as many people on the road as the Industrial or the Agricultural.  It's made as many robber barons and the edge is always just as near.  The last time this happened it was the shift to modern agriculture, the tractor which displaced the Joad's mule, a shift which is still going on in the undeveloped parts of the world. (There have been a number of pundits drawing parallels to the Gilded Age lately, either in horror or to point out America's New Deal came out of these inequalities.)

 Much of their technological vision hasn't paid off yet.  Which doesn't make it anymore invalid than say the O'Neil habitats were invalid in the 1980s.  In fact, Gibson reused many tropes of 50s science fiction.  We've yet to perfect virtual reality.  We've yet to invent an interface between your brain and a computer.   We've yet to invent a real artificial intelligence. We have no real nanobots.  Our Feed is the rather sad "3d printer" which turns out plastic crap on demand.  The hopes and fears of this tech are still there, waiting for us in the near future.  They can be used today, just as easily as two decades ago.

Recently I've reread what I consider to be the cream of cyberpunk, of course they missed any number of things.  Of course it didn't all come true.  As I read Gibson's Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, Spinrad's Little Heroes, and Stephenson's Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was struck by the fact that much of the science is still valid in theory.  All that has really changed is the idea of cyberspace, which has panned out more into a digital library and the prevalence of cellular communications.

What is needed in a reboot isn't a radical change, but an update to the technology. To stop relying on the rather narrow number of inventions.  The general shell of a chaotic near future is still a good adventuring environment.  Just as the tentacled mutant post apocalypse future of Gamma World or the Morrow Project  is still valid every time someone makes a zombie movie or whatever that cheesy "no electricity" show is on NBC.

I'd envision such a reboot as simply being a near future scifi game, rather than one true to just cyberpunk. One which would refurnish that same noir/punk future with new scif ideas.  That would borrow the biopunk of Paolo Bacigalupi .  That would acknowledge the last thirty years of changes and ideas.

The biggest problem is that such near future scifi hasn't been in vogue lately.  Most of the big name authors of cyberpunk no longer write as much scifi.   Most of the current Hugo awards seem to go for fantasy, steampunk, or slipstream. The ones which are scifi seem to be distant futures, alternate realities, or space opera.  I tried to come up with something newer than windup girl and failed.

For near future scifi RPGs to become re-energized we need a rebirth in scifi, to something which isn't just a super hero comic book, start trek utopia, or space opera. Something which isn't just third string authors borrowing a first rate author's visions.

7 comments:

  1. Bladerunner. You need to watch the director's cut as well as Videodrome. You'll get in the mood to write it yourself.

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    1. Yeah that would explain those examples of bad fiction I keep finding on my computer hard drive.

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  2. Try some Ken MacLeod for some near future sci-fi. A lot of his stuff deals with recent imaginations of the near future.

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    1. I enjoy MaCleod, but like Charles Stross, I find most of his work just a bit to far ahead of the curve. It's Schismatrix when I want Islands in the Net.

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  3. There's also Ian McDonald, who has written near-future SF novels set in India, Brazil and Turkey. He does exactly what you crave, I think, although personally I don't like his writing style all that much.

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    1. I'll have to try him out. Is there any modern British scifi writer that doesn't seem to be named for a footballer?

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    2. Yes, China Mieville.

      (Although I suppose he's not a scifi writer technically...)

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