This weeks topic is Cyberpunk.
What is Cyberpunk?
It is a gritty aesthetic: shadows, decay, lust (for technology), capital (cash).
OR
Some high technology: human fused to machine (You are what you consume).
OR
A questionable morality: opportunism, theft, murder (You cannot trust anyone)
It is a hybrid genre:
- hard-boiled detective fiction (anti-hero, crime, portrayal)
- Film noir (lust, money, power, seduction, murder, existential malaise)
- Science Fiction/SF (world saturated by technology, post apocalyptic or apocalypse never came, giant anonymous multinational corporations)
- Literary post modernism (fragments, quick descriptions)
We also discussed books written by William Gibson about cyberpunk such as Neuromancer which was written in 1984 entirely on a typewriter. It is a coloured geometrical representations of data. Another Book written by William Gibson is 'Burning Chrome' Its genre is hybrid, draws from film noir and science fiction. The style of the prose is written in fragments that skip around narrative time.Key Issues: theft, seduction, voodoo/luck, contingent alliances, addiction, fusion of human and machine, tragic desire, the eerie sense of everyday living.
Cyberpuck as a lingua franca of digital culture.
- Huge Impact on imagining human and machine interconnections and fusions
- Ubiquitious access to information and its lack of security, endless crisis, and ad hoc solutions.
- Largely pessimistic views of human and machines but not large apocalyptic scenarios of other SF.
- CP gave a language to the way the markets of capitalism have material impacts.
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