Should I read this or Neuromancer for some good old cyberpunkino?
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
Should I read this or Neuromancer for some good old cyberpunkino?
Should I read this or Neuromancer for some good old cyberpunkino?
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
Either they are both good.
Your brains have been poisoned by the films. San Francisco in Electric Dreams is decrepit and largely deserted, very dry with scant plant or animal life. It's still a pastiche of the 60s and 70s when& where PKD lived at the time of writing. There is indeed some pretty far out worldbuilding, but the immediate setting is like old San Fran but with the addition of a few (seemingly already anachronistic) sci fi devices like the flying cars with grass-covered rooftop parking lots, mystical 50s style television sets, the mood machine, but it all feels old and austere. The Earth is largely deserted. However there's no inkling in the book of the imagery in the film. It's not constantly dark and raining in the book, for example.
Ergo Electric Dreams isn't cyberpunk, is what I'm saying.
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is technically proto-cyberpunk; it single-handedly invented the genre. Neuromancer was good but it takes a few reads to understand it. Definitely read PKD's work.
>Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is technically proto-cyberpunk; it single-handedly invented the genre.
It's early cyberpunk. People who try to define cyberpunk fairly make definitions that include Android Dream. Trying to attach proto to it is incoherent.
How is the use of technology to dominate enemies and the cyberneticizing of Grievous and Anakin not major themes? They literally upturn the social order and move the plot, you idiot.
I accept your concession.
You guys make incoherent definitions of cyberpunk that contradict the actual definitions made by its old guard, and in addition, you contradict yourselves. An anon stupidly said:
23195887
>Technology and how it can affect life and make it miserable. That's cyberpunk _aesthetic_ you midwit.
Later I made this post:
>How is the use of technology to dominate enemies and the cyberneticizing of Grievous and Anakin not major themes? They literally upturn the social order and move the plot, you idiot.
Because by his own definition that lets SW meet the definition of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk isn't always literal punks, it's not always hurrdurr neon cities, and it doesn't even always involve misery. I'm noticing none of you midwits can actually beat my greentext here, and can only respond with limp memes.
Anon the plot of the book is about killing people for being malfunctioning corporate property.
The androids are literally not people. My point stands.
cyberpunk doesnt just mean "dark and rainy with neon lights", its main themes are how technology affects our idea of what a human is. electric dreams deals with artificial animals (including artificial humans) and their humanity. you could add a bunch of colored lighting and rain to star wars and it wouldnt be cyberpunk since the humans act like normal humans and lucas treated droids like equipment (except for a few quips) in the setting of a story with very different themes (the science fiction part of the story was mainly related to interstellar travel and different species).
>you could add a bunch of colored lighting and rain to star wars
coruscant was cyberpunk honestly, and matches your sociological definition of cyberpunk
cyberpunk is theme not setting, if the clones were treated any differently than normal soldiers would be, it wasnt a big enough part of the story to be noticeable
They are treated different. They don't have civil rights and can be legally killed by Kaminoans at will.
SW1-6 were overwhelmingly concerned with how technology, and technological corporations and conglomerates affect life. The main examples are:
Naboo being blockaded by an advanced technological army.
Coruscants upper and lower levels being drastically different.
Clone technology being more ethically horrific than drones yet necessary to repel droid armies.
Darth Vader, once savior of the galaxy, has his entire life overtaken by technology.
The emperor's armies develop gigantic vehicles to strike awe against his subjects.
The rebels' very existence is threatened by that advanced gigantic technology to the point they have to flee to distant corners and define their lives around the technology necessary to survive.
That said, by the definition given, how is SW not cyberpunk (in addition to space opera)? It can't not be said to be the setting, not just a theme. Do you often go out of your way to contradict yourself?
having a couple cyberpunk aspects that basically nobody notices due to them being completely overshadowed by the main themes doesnt make something cyberpunk. maybe some of the expanded universe stories are cyberpunk but not mainline starwars. is electric dreams a space opera because it takes place in a universe where massive space battles have happened and interplanetary tensions are a thing? id argue not because those arent the main themes. just like id argue that weird fiction isnt fantasy even though there are fantastical creatures because the main themes are different.
That's more than a couple and they form the structure of the plots. SW fits the cyberpunk genre as it does space opera.
>is electric dreams a space opera because it takes place in a universe where massive space battles have happened and interplanetary tensions are a thing?
False equivalence. SW has SO and CP aspects depicted directly that dominate its plot and form its main themes, but AD doesn't have notable SO aspects. If this is the best you can do that means you lost the discussion and flatly contradicted yourself.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of fantasy. Think about what fantasy means you disgusting midwit.
You don't even think. I accept your concession jeet tier smooth brain.
star wars has elements of cyberpunk but nobody cares about them because they arent the main themes of the story. anybody can tell the difference between a fantasy novel where fantastical elements are an accepted part of the world and a weird fiction story where fantastical elements creep into an otherwise normal world. you might consider genre some autistic checklist of setting/worldbuilding elements but to the vast majority of people its the feel of the story and the main themes. are you also going to argue that some of houellebecq's novels are science fiction because they include made up scientific discoveries? that any scifi with some woowoo powers is actually a subgenre of fantasy? is magical realism also fantasy?
They don't notice despite them being hugely prominent and engines that drive the story because like you they don't think and they're practically citizens of the Republic who've been stagnating for ages without any developing anything new while the world around them decays.
>anybody can tell the difference between a fantasy novel where fantastical elements are an accepted part of the world and a weird fiction story where fantastical elements creep into an otherwise normal world.
More proof you're a midwit. Fantasy existed before high fantasy like Tolkien. Stop being a jeet.
>that any scifi with some woowoo powers is actually a subgenre of fantasy? is magical realism also fantasy?
Yes you moronic homosexual. Asimov admitted the former, and Wolfe pointed out the other.
they dont notice because theyre not the major themes. they can be worth thinking about in the context of the story but if anybody saw a star wars book while searching for cyberpunk novels they would skip right over it. genre is a tool you use to categorize things so you can find other things like them, not some inherent attribute and failing to exclude things from a category makes that category meaningless.
If you want to get really insufferable about all of this, the main theme of cyberpunk is more about class inequality. It's about how the future isn't likely to be a Jetsons utopia where everyone is raised up by technology. We'll have the technology, but the rich will have the best stuff for themselves, and the poor will continue to exist and do what they do (which as depicted in cyberpunk novels is usually crime with computers).
Indian scammers operating through devices that would have been considered super computers a few decades ago, is pretty much the prediction of the cyberpunk genre come to pass.
>If you want to get really insufferable about all of this, the main theme of cyberpunk is more about class inequality.
Why are Marxists so cringe and narcissistically making everything about their silly ideology.
Bro, some of the biggest people involved in shaping the Cyberpunk genre literally were Marxists, or at least sympathetic. You can't pretend that's not a factor of the genre.
It's also an interesting and valid response to something like Star Trek, which is overly optimistic in it's vision of a future where the dregs of society basically just disappear, and people generally don't think to misuse all of that technology in some heinous manner.
If you want existential sci-fi with robots and stuff, fine. That's not the essence of what cyberpunk is though. That's more Asimov.
>You can't pretend that's not a factor of the genre.
That's completely different from saying a mutant ideology, blind to narrow material and overwrought biases, spiteful of their natural betters (though they sometimes behave badly), is the main theme of cyberpunk. So stop saying stupid things.
It literally is the main theme of cyberpunk. "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed", is a thing Gibson said at one point.
Or at least thinking about similar things. Overwhelming corporate power where states just dissolve (or corporations become states unto themselves) is another theme and companies use technology to boost their profits at the expense of people. Consumerism as a social control mechanism -- think Herbert Marcuse. The technology exists to change society in a fundamental way, but you look around the cyberpunk world and there's violence, poverty, social classes, and people pitted against each other in a dog-eat-dog competition.
>"The end of history is a code term for the across-the-board annihilation of progressive social visions."
-- Bruce Sterling
Sterling also said it's hard for many people to understand the allure of fascism, but that it makes more sense when you look at it sort of like a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster that overwhelms your brain with its dazzling special effects.
>“Now we call ourselves Russia. As if that could help us. We can’t feed ourselves. We can’t house ourselves. We can’t even exterminate a lousy bunch of fricking Chechnians. It’s just like with these fricking Finns! We owned them for eighty years. Then the Finns got smart with us. So we rolled in with tanks and the sons of b***hes ran into their forests in the dark and the snow, and they kicked our ass! Even after we finally crushed them, and stole the best part of their country, they just came right back! Now it’s fifty years later, and the Russian Federation owes Finland a billion dollars. There are only five million Finns! My country owes every single Finn two hundred dollars each!”
>“It’s that Marxist thing, ace.” They walked on in silence.
>“We’re past the Marxist thing,” said Khoklov, warming to his theme as the pill took hold. “Now it’s different. This time Russia has a kind of craziness that is truly big enough and bad enough to take over the whole world. Massive; total, institutional corruption: Top to bottom: Nothing held back. A new kind of absolute corruption that will sell anything: the flesh of our women, the future of our children. Everything inside our museums and our churches. Anything goes for money: gold, oil, arms, dope, nukes. We’ll sell the soil and the forests and the Russian sky. We’ll sell our souls.”
-- “The Littlest Jackal” by Bruce Sterling (1996)
There's conflict within classes and between individuals, you buffoon. Moreover the real theme of cyberpunk is man affected technology, usually in an inferior position. Social classes are just a secondary abstraction after that. You could have cyberpunk involving the last man on earth, or an immortal who happened to be the only technologist to have ever existe. No Marxist theory of classes necessary for those stories, dummy. Stop being brainwashed by silly Marxist ideology.
See
The entire cyber punk aesthetic of the Blade Runner movie was 100% crafted by Ridley Scott, there's almost none of that in the book. In fact much of the setting as described in the book is the complete opposite of how it appears in the movie. In Blade Runner the world is portrayed as dense, monolithic, and over populated. In the novel earth is barren, sparce and deserted. He mentions whole sections of cities that are completely empty and there will be entire apartment buildings with a single occupant in them. There's also very little exterior description of any of the buildings or environment and what we do get is incredibly basic, although to be fair all of PDK's work that I've read is like that. I think it's actually one reason why so many of his stories have been made into movies. He rarely goes into any detail about the physicality of the world of his stories so directors are free to overlay any aesthetic they want on the narrative and nothing about the story really changes.
>In the novel earth is barren, sparce and deserted. He mentions whole sections of cities that are completely empty and there will be entire apartment buildings with a single occupant in them.
Technology and how it can affect life and make it miserable. That's cyberpunk _aesthetic_ you midwit.
Give it a rest, you're the mid wit here. Cyber punk wasn't even really a thing when Androids was written and if anything it influenced people like Gibson who would go on to write cyberpunk as a full blown genre. Androids is like proto-cyber punk at best.
Cyberpunk, as an aesthetic, goes back further that. See, the artwork of Moebius.
Cyberpunk is basically about information technology and urban cultural decline. Arguably, it's not just computers, but artificial minds and intelligences. PKD incorporates this heavily into his other book, Ubik. Everyday appliances are personified as homeostatic entities. Technology is almost always proliferated in these settings, because they're about the mundane circumstances of culture as high-winded sci fi.
If you ever happen to read old pulp stories, it's clear many ideas solidified by novelists and film-makers were originated there. Even though they precede the information revolution and the birth of computers, they're quite imaginative, though not strong as literature, and maybe they prefigure a lot of modern cyberpunk, "space operas," and other fantasy works. A lot of writers got started in these evolving pulps. Arthur C Clarke, Bradbury, PKD. Unfortunately, many pulp authors will remain obscure, despite some obvious superiority in creativity.
I'd recommend reading some old pulps for that grungy low-fi science fiction feeling. Though not in the public domain, they are often in open archives.
depends on how computerized you want it to be. electric sheep feels much more like classic sci-fi in that the character interracts with physical objects, technology is more separate from humans, and the setting is easily understandable. neuromancer feels more fantastical and like you arent sure whether something is happening in the physical world or in cyberspace, and the world is less well defined. id also recommend snow crash, it has a little too much zaniness but is otherwise like a more modern and easily understood gibson book.
i liked the winter market, is neuromancer similar?
havent read winterarket, but based on how the bridge and sprawl trilogies felt, its probably lower tech, less jargony, but overall similar
Always prefer Dick. He fried his brains so you don't have to
>Always prefer Dick.
id pfer you use a different verb
Electric Sheep will be a much more comfortable and enjoyable read if you haven’t read much sci fi. Also to me a much better book than Neuromancer.
Read the whole Sprawl trilogy. If you like the cyberpunk genre, you won't regret.
why not both
what are the best cyberpunk books in general? i started to read one but it was too corny, and i can handle fun-corny pretty well
andoid sheep reminded me of Assimov's Ronot novels from the 50's
when I read PKD a month after Assimov, I felt like I'd already read it
>Every Cyberpunk snob thinks you're not a Cyberpunk fan if you haven't read this or Neuromancer
Reading Neuromancer I couldn't shake off the this-is-what-a-16-years-old-thinks-it's-cool-but-the-author-must-be-like-40 feel the book gave me. I still liked it enough to read Idoru after, but that one was so underwhelming that I lost all interest in the author.
>this-is-what-a-16-years-old-thinks-it's-cool-but-the-author-must-be-like-40 feel
Correct. You gotta embrace it tho.
>Reading Neuromancer I couldn't shake off the this-is-what-a-16-years-old-thinks-it's-cool-but-the-author-must-be-like-40 feel the book gave me.
I think it's because that style of writing was cool 40 something years ago though
Cyberpunk is a setting.