Me too. I desperately want to like this movie but I'm not optimistic.
and that modern takes would either ultimately be throwback fanservice, or something so wildly different that it couldn’t even be considered cyberpunk anymore
I think this is where we're at, yeah. If a novel actually fits the hard definition of "cyberpunk" then it's most likely using that cliched setting of a retro-futuristic 1980s. And yet if it includes all the aspects of our modern dystopia then it just becomes "near future" and not cyberpunk anymore.
Does Gibson’s style differ in “The Peripheral” compared to “Neuromancer” though?
Yes, absolutely. As genre-defining as it was, Neuromancer was actually Gibson's first novel. He has grown a lot as a writer since then and I think The Peripheral is much more approachable.
I had originally posted a more long-winded version of the OP in !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip but it was with my now-deleted piefed account
Did the post not go through? Did you delete it? I'm sorry you weren't able to make the post there. I'm definitely open to more book-specific discussions, but the majority of that community is just me shouting into the void and I haven't had anything to say about books recently. Feel free to post there!
Bang Bang Bodhisattva is definitely not pro-cop propaganda. It really does follow the hard-boiled detective mold where they're basically vigilantes trying to solve a crime because the police force isn't helpful.
But, if you're interested in trans characters in cyberpunk novels, I also made this post about a year ago. And while I haven't read it, I also heard about Hammajang Luck, which I guess is a queer cyberpunk novel that includes a lot of Hawaiian culture.
If you like your cyberpunk with a heavy dose of hard-boiled detectives, Bang Bang Bodhisattva is a cyberpunk novel where the main character is trans. That's something you wouldn't find in most older cyberpunk works.
There's also Titanium Noir, which I haven't read. I think that one leans more into scifi mystery than cyberpunk though, just from the description.
The Avery Cates series is fantastic! It has a really fun dark humor to it with first-person narration.
First of all, come join us at !cyberpunk@lemmy.zip !
Second, if you're really asking "how has cyberpunk been updated for the modern era" then I recommend reading William Gibson's The Peripheral. It's Gibson's return to the cyberpunk genre with some updated ideas. It was also turned into a (cancelled) Amazon Prime series.
Otherwise, I think Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan was the best "recent" cyberpunk book (2003). After that, I'd argue the most popular cyberpunk book was Ready Player One in 2012. But let's say that book is "divisive" at best. It was also turned into a movie directed by Steven Spielberg.
Not every year will receive a masterpiece of the genre. We'd be lucky to get a masterpiece in a decade now that cyberpunk is really no longer part of the zeitgeist and is an aging genre from the 1980s. To be honest, most cyberpunk these days are just pulp novels from indie artists on the Kindle store and aren't exactly deep or philosophical. I mean, these days, I'm mostly finding books like Jack: Into The Beanstalk or the Cyberpunk City series. They're fun, but not exactly "literature".
I think Pride & Prejudice & Zombies worked better. Also, from what I remember, I feel like that movie did a better job of integrating zombies into the story than this movie did with vampires. So I think this movie was also "alright", much like its source material.
I hope you're right, and I'm sure there will always be corners of the internet that will feel like a true sharing of ideas without an insidious side pushing towards enshittification.
While I don't think the walled gardens of big tech companies will ever go away, I hope we can always keep small corners of the internet (like Lemmy) for ourselves.
I was going to make a flippant post about a 12 year old Julia Stiles in the PBS show GhostWriter playing a hacker. Seriously, check it out. The clip is only 41 seconds long and it's so incredibly cringe.
But then re-watching the clip myself, it reminded me of how optimistic we were in the 90s about the future of the internet. There was a time when the internet was a new frontier. It was a way to find people with common interests, or have conversations with people on the other side of the planet. It was a way to share ideas without any boundaries. This could only be a benefit to humanity.
I remember seeing someone talking about Trouble and Her Friends and how the book was written from this optimistic perspective. It was written in 1994 (the same year as that Julia Stiles episode). The book takes this 1994 optimistic vision of the internet and extrapolates it out into a future world. And now, in hindsight, it just feels anachronistic. That future never happened. It's a world of ubiquitous internet and virtual reality, but the internet of Trouble and Her Friends has no commerce whatsoever. It was never monetized. And that just seems quaint now.
It reminds me also of the early 2000s internet where things had picked up but only young people and tech enthusiasts used it. "Old people" just didn't get it . I remember politicians trying to regulate the internet when they themselves had never used it and only had others briefly explain it to them.
There was a band at the time, Machinae Supremacy, who had a bunch of songs about internet culture and the politicians trying to stop them. Like their song Force Feedback:
This is the world you're in
And this is where ours begins
A borderless nation of thoughts to replace
Your walled-in existence in space
Sure you already know
That your age was long ago
We augment reality online
And you hail from ancient times
Again, this protection of internet culture just feels quaint today. I don't know if internet users in the 90s and early 2000s could've predicted what would happen when everyone was online or when businesses realized there was a profit to be made online. Maybe they could never envision that future; or maybe they just didn't want to.
I guess I don't really have a point here. I just wanted to watch a silly clip from a tv show but ended up feeling nostalgic about the optimism we used to have for the internet, and for what could've been.
20
Last time I went to DefCon, the SLNT Bags were petty popular. I didn't buy one myself so I can't speak to their effectiveness, but if the DefCon crowd trusts them I think they're probably at least worth looking into.
I just played the demo and I really enjoyed it. Of course, Tron 2.0 is one of my favorite games so I was always going to enjoy it to some extent. I just like the Tron world.
Anyway, Tron: Catalyst has aspects of open world exploration, a combat system that's almost like a twin-stick shooter, and an interesting time-loop concept. Basically, you obtain some information then manually restart your time-loop to change outcomes with your new-found knowledge. The game kinda forces these "time to restart" moments on you, but it makes for an interesting storyline at least. And the story seems to be the main focus here. At least in this demo, I think there's more dialog than combat.
I definitely enjoyed this game more than Tron: Identity but I'm not really a fan of visual novels so I don't know if that means much.
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I'm pretty sure this is the original version of this meme. Or at least, it's the first one I ever saw.