Week 8 Cyberpunk special 2/2

I love cyberpunk, it's by far one of my favourite genres in every kind of media form. Sci fi as a genre really suffered from over-romanticized ideals, it always seemed as this unbelievable distant thing that nobody could relate to. The genre was hit very hard by this because who cares about characters who you, the reader, can't even relate too? I know I sure don't.

That's where Cyberpunk came in. It was dark, gritty, rude and to some degree, believable. That's the main difference of the Sci-fi genre and the Fantasy genre, one is meant to seem fake and make believe, a different place and time. While sci-fi's strong point has always been "hey I can see that happening!" "well that makes sense!" hell a lot of ideas for new technologies or weapons come from science fiction.

There's something about the downtrodden that just makes damn interesting stories. Philosophy is something that's constantly brought up in the cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner made us ask ourselves what it meant to be human? How to define humanity and what makes something *not* human. It does this in a thrilling neo-noir style that's left it as one of the best examples of great cyberpunk.

But why does cyberpunk bring these ideas to our head? The genre itself doesn't even seem at a glance for something pompous and intellectual. Hell, the name itself 'Cyberpunk' makes it sound more like stories of the down trodden fighting an overwhelming force(which it usually is) yet it consistently brings up deep topics that leave us speechless. I usually joke that if we ever worked out the meaning of life we'd probably find it in the cyberpunk genre, it just brings up far too many ideas that are so close to our definition of being that you can't help but question your own reality and question your own self of being.



While I haven't read I have No Mouth, and I must Scream, it's a very good example of how mature the genre really is. Actually, a better description would be how messed up it is. The short story is about a self aware computer basically tormenting 5 people for the rest of their lives. It's quite messed up so I won't go into much detail, hey that's what wikipedia is for!

Anyway, back to cyberpunk as an ideology instead of a genre. Cyberpunk exists in a dystopian world, it's the only way it can exist. A cynic could draw parallels of cyberpunk universes to reality with the deckers of the cyberpunk world diving into the mega corporations databases for whatever reason. Generally they'd be doing the same exact thing that hackers in the real world do when they break into corporate records.

A lot of authors asked, why does this new form of information culture have to be such a bleak future for humanity? Hence post-cyberpunk was born. Instead of technology being used to control humanity, it's used to benefit it. Usually in some sort of Utopia. Generally you have to steer away from Western sources for Post-Cyberpunk, Ghost in the Shell and Ergo Proxy
come to mind.

Because I felt like mentioning it, I find it funny that cyberpunk has the same critics of Punk music when it comes to claiming that it's 'dead'.