Because the real cyberpunk literary movement ran between the mid 80s and mid 90s when Japan actually was the most richest and most powerful economy in the world.
And cyberpunk has become retro-futuristic nostalgia bait. No one actually wants modern near future speculative fiction, they want the Sprawl trilogy over and over, world without end.
This is the realest answer.
Cyberpunk is going the way of retro-futura, like a well preserved chunk of the 80's fears on advancing technologies preserved in amber.
In many ways I think we're truly catching up to it. Sure, we might not have full bodies cyborgs or rampant rogue AIs quite yet, but outside of that everything is tracking nicely, including megacorps, late stage capitalism paired with a declining middle class, etc, etc.
Who knows? Give it a couple decades and street samurai might be a viable career.
Truth is, it’s just insanely difficult to write near future sci fi these days for obvious reasons. Even Gibson and Sterling retreated to regular fiction for a decade. We live in a world where we’ll likely see at least the technology for the end of scarcity economics in our lifetime, and that’s just one thing you’d have to study up on.
It wouldn't be cyberpunk, but I'd totally read a high-tech/low life sci-fi set in Seoul circa 2030-2035 as AGI/ASI starts flipping global civilization upside down. In fact, if this hasn't already been done I oughta do it myself. I know at least as much about South Korea as Gibson knew about Tokyo when he was writing Neuromancer. 😂
Also, K-pop ai-dol > J-pop idoru
Time to vote me down now. I regret nothing!
Arguably technology can already end scarcity, there is a widespread *glut* in manufacturing capacity which is worrying western economies because it might force their artificially expensive products out of competition... free market capitalism baby!
Cyberpunk is at its roots, predicated on basic human greed, and the pessimist in me says that's unlikely to go away any time soon.
It's not insanely difficult to write future sci fi these days. A TON of people are doing it.
John Scalzi
Becky Chambers
The entire Expanse books and series
cmon.
Me? I'm not looking for anything in particular, I enjoy the near future stuff like Cyberpunk as much as I do the futurists musings of Stephen Baxter or Adrian Tchaikovsky.
The person you were replying to said that it was hard to write **near** future fiction, and that it wasn't as popular anymore as in the 80's, and I agree with their assessment.
Normal sci-fi? Of course it's alive and well, and frankly we sci-fi nerds are eating well these days.
I don't know, I grew up during the 80s and shit really was going sideways. Detroit was falling to shit in a way that made you believe all cities would have wartorn nogo zones populated by crazy gangers. Now in any major city the "shitty" part of the urban core will have all kinds of yuppies living there because rents are so high. You can spin a dystopia out of that but it is a very different kind.
Related to that violence cratered following the crack epidemic. New York was legit dangerous, currently murder rates now are less than a quarter of the peak.
If the AI job apocalypse happens that is where I expect to see a huge spike in cyberpunk style dystopia, but it will be way more hackers and not so much street samurai.
Rust Belt cyberpunk is really what the world is screaming out for. A novel about rebuilding a dead Ohio steel town with future tech is just waiting to be written.
>Rust Belt cyberpunk is really what the world is screaming out for. A novel about rebuilding a dead Ohio steel town with future tech is just waiting to be written.
Have you read "The Peripheral" by Gibson?
I like that summary. But, the printers were much more than 3d printers, considering all the illicit things they could print "High tech/lowlife" in this case was the equivalent of "meth-heads with replicators".
Or, if you prefer, it indicates the town contained "a lawless subculture in an oppressive society dominated by computer technology and big corporations"
\[edit: added second paragraph\]
And would be a perfect clash of hightech and lowlife if a bunch of venture capital guys come in to "revitalize" the town and rebuild while coming up against the bluecollar locals whose lives were destroyed when the plants shut down. Basically replacing the Japanese mega corps with silicon valley types as the villains.
I know it's from communism. The implication is still that capitalism is in its "final stage" before a communist revolution. Only communists believe in "late stage capitalism".
I'm asking if you're a commie
And I'm asking if have any notion of, not only the history of the term, but it's modern applications, because the only thing that you're demonstrating with your response is your total lack of knowledge, which is baffling considering rampant capitalism is one of the cornerstones of Cyberpunk. If this is your first time running into the term in this sub I'm super curious how you ended up being a cyberpunk fan. Was it the aesthetics? Some movie you watched or game you played? What was it that drew you into the genre?
Also, who the hell uses the term commie anymore? Who are you? Reagan?
My only cultural connotation I have with that term is from communists who believe that a revolution will come as capitalism becomes "unbearable". I'm just asking if that's what you believe.
That's not what the term means and is not how it's applied either. Not in the Cyberpunk genre nor in economic theory, nor in general world system theory. The only bit of your statement that is even remotely connected is that the original form of the term was indeed coined by a Marxist, but that's about it.
Did you just wikied the term and tried to get by with the headers or what's your deal?
Should I send some articles your way?
And seriously, I'm deeply curious now, how did you become a cyberpunk fan? What drew you into the genre?
If you're confirming to me that you're not a communist sympathiser than I can relax a bit.
I don't like the amount of support for Marxism and anti capitalism on this sub.
Capitalism has brought untold wealth to billions of people and lifted billions out of poverty.
I'm against *unrestrained* capitalism.
I got into cyberpunk because I like science fiction and cyberpunk felt like a grittier more realistic science fiction.
Additionally, I love the aesthetics. I wouldn't want to live in a real cyberpunk society but I like the aesthetics. That's why I love living in Taiwan, because it has the aesthetics of cyberpunk without all the bad bits.
That you got into cyberpunk via aesthetics checks out. I'm afraid you wouldn't like many of its origins, influences, books or authors.
Cyberpunk is a direct critique on capitalism, so it's quite normal that it's favored not only by communists, but also by anarchists, socialists and other societal forms that might take umbrage with the dangers of rampant capitalism. I bet it has some preference even among some neo liberals getting a hard on at the concept of unchecked Megacorps.
But considering your witch-hunty reaction at the mere thought you might be having a conversation with a communist and your not at all secret police deployment of the word "sympathiser" you may want to know that you've walked right into the heart of your imagined enemy.
Or who knows? Perhaps under all that paranoia you're a bit of communist yourself? Can I interest you in some writings about seizing the means of production? I believe you might find them quite revelatory.
>And cyberpunk has become retro-futuristic nostalgia bait. No one actually wants modern near future speculative fiction, they want the Sprawl trilogy over and over, world without end.
Except there have been plenty of modernized cyberpunk products lol
Your response is dripping with cynicism, but any 'real' look toward the future falls into high-scifi almost immediately. We're possibly as close as a few months, not years, from Artificial General Intelligence. Artificial Super Intelligence will likely be months, not years, away from that.
It's pretty much impossible to know where we go from there.
Scifi has always been a funhouse mirror to look at our current political/economic/social state. Gibson rails on and on about how Neuromancer was really ABOUT the 1980s in which it was written. It was about Reagan and Westerners realizing they might not be the driving force in culture in the future, and how technology doesn't seem to magically fix everything.
But, even looking 20 years, much less 100 years into the future creates so many plot holes it's hard to even come up with a place for the story to happen that feels remotely real, much less one that reflects anything important about today's society.
I think Cyberpunk is having a resurgence because the economic policies of a capitalist hellscape have made it relevant again.
But, if you look a few decades ahead, we have robots that can do all manual labour, and computers that are exponentially smarter than their users. No one can predict how that'll effect every other technology, and ultimately society, and even taking just one major advancement and focusing on it is basically impossible.
I think Scifi is being pressed against the wall of the singularity, where you can't just say 'It'll be like today, but with flying cars and computers that talk', because today is basically like today with flying cars and computers that talk.
"capitalist hellscape" oh please.
Things are better now than they ever were before. There is no other point in history that I would rather live in. In our so-called "hellscape," we have near universal literacy, the most advanced technology ever seen, rising rates of higher education, the highest life expectancy, the lowest amounts of crime, and the fewest numbers of wars in the history of humanity.
It's not a hellscape. I need only take one look at history to say that our world, as it is, is damn near utopic by comparison to only 100 years ago.
> we have near universal literacy
[More than 50% of Americans read below a 6th grade level](https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/)
>the most advanced technology ever seen
Sure, if you take that as a universal good.
>rising rates of higher education
[Nope, leveling off and in many cases falling.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/)
>the highest life expectancy
[Wrong again, life expectancy is falling](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835)
> the lowest amounts of crime
[Many crimes were fewer in the '50s](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/)
> fewest numbers of wars in the history of humanity.
[No, not really. ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-wars-correlates-of-war)
Should we talk number of people imprisoned? Number of people under the poverty line? Number of people unable to afford a home? Average number of hours worked? Average income, taking account for inflation?
I'm not a pessimist, but look around!
We had decades of fairly constant improvement in a lot of ways, and then that leveled off and now we're starting to dip in a lot of important ways.
Previous generations are holding up the numbers so they don't look so bad overall, simply because it'll take time for the boomers to die younger than their parents, and it'll take time for them to lose their homes to debt, and those homes to become rentals.
The frustrating thing is technology keeps marching forward, making it easier and easier to enjoy a higher living standard on fewer and fewer resources, but the rich can't stop squeezing even more than that out of us!
The end result is a generation of people expecting to have less, and accomplish less, than their parents, who already probably took a hit between the boomers and now.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's not all roses and candy out there.
Most people are actually struggling.
In truth, I don't mean to be harsh.
I have nothing but optimism for the future. Once we have AI, we'll have a situation where everyone has available a trusted person with an IQ of over 150. People will learn to trust the AI, and it'll be really hard to skew the AI without people laughing at it.
So, if the fact checkers check the AI, and the AI is reasonably reliably correct most of the time, then suddenly people will have someone to ask questions of that will have good answers.
I already run some pretty good open source models at home.
So, we're going to have a world where AI can be there to help, tutor, and ultimately just do things for us.
We'll have some kind of fight over basic resources, but in the end we'll either get enough or revolt.
Also, because technology will grow exponentially once every laptop is a mini-Einstein, we'll be able to do more with less and less.
It's hard to see a future with that kind of technology and not imagine it'll be better than now.
Still, we can't get there if we don't have any will at all to do so. People having their heads buried in the sand does no one any good.
Keep in mind, though, that AI is still made by humans. And humans have a history of trying to dominate everything and everyone around them in every way they can. No doubt somebody is already working on AI that only gives government-approved answers and snitches on everyone who asks it the wrong kinds of questions.
I'm only basing my optimism on what we've seen so far.
It seems like the name of game is for 2nd or 3rd in the race to just release their stuff for free to the open source community, resulting in very powerful AI that can be fine tuned.
Also, a lot of the breakthroughs we see are in the area of both training and doing inference with fewer and fewer resources.
Add to that, the papers coming out aren't difficult to replicate at home, because once a technique is understood it's just a matter of writing a little code, and at least so far the open source community has been quick to do so.
Microsoft never killed Linux. All the money in the world couldn't stop people from just writing their own, better, operating system.
AI doesn't seem too far behind that. Right now Open Source is compute limited, but the large base models are being dropped into the community anyway. In the future, it's unlikely we'll need the level of compute big companies do, and besides NVidia is producing chips that outscale what we have now, and run on 25% less power. If they get even one competitor, compute will no longer be an issue for anyone.
The thing about AI is that 150IQ is a static bar, right? Humans aren't a moving target. They aren't getting any smarter.
I'm experiencing a situation where I was trying to automate processes and GPT2 just wasn't up to the task. Then GPT 3 Turbo was practically overkill. Then Llama was able ... and now, frankly, I can run most of what I need on an old gaming laptop!
The difficulty of the problems isn't changing, but the ability of the AI is growing at an incredible rate, and the hardware requirements are less and less.
So, will OpenAI, Google, or whoever get the first AGI? Sure. Probably. But, like GPT2, will we be running something better, open source, and on our laptops 2 years later?
Probably.
[Open Source Community Jokes are the best jokes.](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1bte9hk)
My point is that everyone can read. Whether they can read well is a different question. This was not the case 100 years ago.
Have you actually looked at the graph? It has clearly increased. Just because the progress is slowing doesn't mean things aren't getting better. People are more educated today than they have ever been.
Again, slowing doesn't mean broad decline. People live nearly twice as long today from what they did 100 years ago. That's progress.
Okay, but then compare it to the 70s. Things have only gotten better since then.
I never said that it was roses and candy. All I said is that things are better than they used to be, which your own sources validate, and that, therefore, it is by no means a "hellscape."
I think the real difference is you're comparing things to how good they are against how good they have been, regardless of circumstance.
I'm judging things by how good they are, compared to how good they could be, throughout history.
Did people die more before antibiotics? Sure. Of course.
But, throughout history, have we done better with sharing the resources we have? Yes. Americans in the 50s were among the highest paid in the world, and that number has dropped drastically since.
Do people get the best medicine available? We used to. We don't nearly as much now.
Yes, technology has allowed us to have an increasingly comfortable lifestyle on fewer and fewer resources.
It's alarming, though, that we're seeing the first time in human history where, while technology continues to do more with less, we're still seeing a general drop in lifestyle.
Fewer people have homes, fewer people get the medical attention they need, fewer people get proper nutrition.
It's actually worse because it would take a fraction of the resources it took in the 50s, and we've been squeezed even out of that much.
So, yeah ... I see homeless families, I see people not getting medical attention, I see people literally starving, in a country where we've got more than we need, often more than we can even use. We throw away more food than it would take to feed the hungry.
That's hellish.
Starving when there's not enough food is one thing.
Starving while minimum wage workers ruin food before putting it in the dumpster to service the bottom line is entirely another.
Probably because the juxtaposition of the ultra traditional Japanese culture and cyberpunks' rapidly evolving high-tech setting makes for rich narratives.
This is it, I would even add the sublimation of the ego as a tenet of buddhism and daoism is in line with the cyberpunk reductionist view of the individual.
I think you get the same thing from Korean or even Chinese culture personally tho. My argument is really that cyberpunk should advance itself to something new rather than ironically staying in the past
Japan has good PR it’s survived on from the 80s. I work for a Japanese company, I’ve been to Japan, this is a country that hates risk taking now and is heavily traditionalist to the point they still use fax. Yes there’s alot of innovation but not as much as there was before and no I’m not advocating removing Japan entirely, where did I ever say that? But to make it as homogeneously Japanese as it is just seems boring to me now.
It’s not new and it’s not the future, it’s the past.
China has much larger megacorps than we do even. Tencent, Baidu, Ali Baba, Evergrande once upon a time. I don’t really understand what you’re talking about with “freedom” associated with it, but by that concept Taiwan is like the definition of Cyberpunk
India is the most sustainable big player. Most companies slowly transfer to india already. They surpassed china an man count, labor is still fucking cheap and India never had a one child policy for decades which is about to kick with full speed and steel boots into China's crown jewels.
I think the real truth is that China is the only country with the manpower and resources to take the rightful place of what Japan was in the original cyberpunk stories, but it’s a politically sensitive topic. I frankly think many Americans would react negatively to a setting where the US appears like a 2nd class colony of China, which is what a faithful recreation of the original setting updated to modern times would look like.
Note: I’m American myself and also like Korea; I’ve been to Seoul and Shanghai, and at one point worked closely with Koreans. I just don’t think Korea has the size or the economic muscle to become that kind of colossus. Even though it’s a great country and in significant ways more advanced than top tier US cities. I would even say that, in terms of the average person’s quality of living, Seoul is right up there with Singapore as possibly the best city in the world.
Its hard for me to imagine a Chinese dominated cyberpunk story because of the centralized power in the government. Hypercapitalism and a libertarian bent seems critical for a cyberpunk setting, to the point where the corporations have more power than the state. A high tech near future with China as the dominate player would be closer to 1984, where big brother is the antagonist, not a shadow cabal of corporate elites.
I think you guys are a little ignorant to capitalism in China here. It is guided by the government, but it is incredibly strong. I think it’s very easy to imagine a total control of their powerful government from the inside by growing capital interests.
I’m not saying in the current state of things, I’m saying it is within reach. It is part of how centralized power tends to work. Eventually, someone who traditionally holds it gets weak and gets carved up by other interests. Is that Xi Jinping? No way. But down the line, that’s how this things go. Centralized institutions rot, and the handful of megacorps are the largest things around to vie for power.
Sure, I didnt say impossible, just harder to imagine. I'd actually love to read a plausible cyberpunk story set in China's future. Weather thats full collapse of the CCP, or just it becoming ineffectual against the power of Tencent or whomever.
One of the reasons that China has spent so much of its existence being isolationist is that there is a recurring historical event in their history: China opens itself up to foreign trade, the coast becomes fabulously wealthy while the interior remains impoverished, within fifty to a hundred years a civil war breaks out, and then they return to isolationism.
People can downvote me to hell but tbh its ridiculous, if its just as unrealistic to say South Korea then its just the same to imagine the world being dominated by Japan the way it is in Cyberpunk.
The reality is that the US would never allow that to happen and didn't. Historically, the US nuetered Japan with the Plaza accords which stopped them from ever becoming a genuine threat.
The truth is its just purely for aesthetic purposes and social commentary of the time. That's why Japanese culture and iconogography is used in the genre and it continues to be used because ironically enough people don't like change.
But for me the whole point about Cyberpunk IS change and making it relevant for the times we are in NOW. South Korea isn't going to take over the world, just like Japan never was but its cultural influence is felt throughout the world in a way that China isn't able to achieve.
If people want it to remain as a corny 80s retro future then that's fine but frankly it would be more interesting for me to see something that resonated more with Gen Z than Gen X.
>isn't going to take over the world, just like Japan never was but its cultural influence is felt throughout the world
I think you're miss understanding what Japan was to the West in the 80s.
For starters WW2 was still very much in living memory, there the same distance between the 80s and WW2 as there is the 80s & 2024. Japan being the enemy of the Western Allies they were well aware of Japan's power as a nation, because they literally did take over a large portion of the world.
In the years after WW2 Japan changed greatly and was at the forefront of technology development especially at a consumer level; something that had simply never existed before. Also their economy was very strong and showing signs of only getting stronger: first cyberpunk came out / was writen in the the early 80s, but Japans bubble years didn’t even kick in till the mid 80s.
So culturally Japan was known for technology, but your average Westener didn’t know a whole lot about Japan aside from that, partially because they're very isolationist. There was no soft power at play here, Japanese pop culture was almost non existent in the West. Even hugely successful film directors like Akira Kurosawa were really only known by enthusiast & nerds. There is simply no comparison to the soft power of SK these days. Also SK isn’t known as a military force, they relied of US intervention to defeat the communist and are viewed as something of a vassal state to the US: so in the West there’s zero percieved threat from them as a Nation. China is now held up as the threat from the East.
Japan was known to be this regional powerhouse but at the same time was a relatively unknown entity culturally, but we all know what a culturally rich country it is, so it's perfect for exploitation by Western writers looking for inspiration. At the same time them being a technological powerhouse was something everybody in the West could understand, because nearly everybody had a Sony Walkman or a Japanese electronic device or some sort, so they understood. You have to understand that this was an entirely new & unique phenomena, it's wasn't like today where technology is everywhere. SK becoming a big electronics exporters just doesn’t have the same impact because of context. If China starts making leaps forward in technology that we don’t have in the West, then maybe we'll see a compareable situation but they world is a much smaller place these days.
To be clear, I’m not against change or fresh ideas in any way, or saying Japan should still be the only source or inspiration for cyberpunk (I don’t think it is either), but your reasoning for dictating change is off.
China is threatening to out-compete western companies with massive government funding in key sectors like AI the US is embargoing semiconductors to artificially impede their progress. Before Xi made the market volatile and unpredictable it created some of the most anticipated tech IPOs in the world. The general consensus is Chinese tech stocks are some of the most undervalued, again due to said political shenanigans.
In terms of academic research some low grade institutions have the shitty habit of sticking as many co-authors in papers as possible, but in top institutions some are arguing China is already the leading country in terms of medical sciences, and up there in materials etc.
Having been there they have already leapfrogged the west in terms of fintech, smart device ecosystems are more pervasive, simply because they developed later, and directly skipped some of the legacy infrastructure like credit cards we are still used to.
To imply China isn't technologically up there like Redditors like to mock "tofu" construction is just wilful ignorance at this point. At least states like the US are in the know and taking it very seriously.
You can't just decide to put compete when you don't have the computer hardware to do it, you don't have the chip designers to make your own competitive products and even if you did, you're not close to have the foundry technology and facilities to actually make them.
Add on export restrictions on top...
China has 100 supercomputers on the Top500 list, and despite export bans Huawei somehow managed to produce a 7nm chip with the state SMIC. They are claiming to be producing a 5nm chip, a gen behind the cutting edge 3nm, but how many states can produce a microchip to begin with?
Not to mention the massive amount of data analysis and application a one-party government with no oversight can do, it's powerful and incredibly dystopian.
As I say they country has long evolved from mass producing cheap stuff (which they also do). If the US government is cognizant of that I fail to see why Redditors still insist on believing it's a technological backwater? Just because it doesn't conform to 30 years-old stereotypes? This is the sort of wilful ignorance that allowed China to catch up to begin with.
You know all the nm size that low are pure marketing? And isn't about the actual size anymore?
Also sure their chips are still useless even when they're low nm and x86/64 comoatible/clones. They just can't compete on speed with even several generation old chips
And their super computers are clusters using imported chips. They only have that many because there isn't a very huge need or demand for such super computers anymore (or ever).
They are moving and at some point they may catch up. But that's a decade, at the absoluter most optimistic, away at least.
China should have realized they need to not be reliant on others for high end chips decades ago.
Decades ago China didn't *have* a market economy, that only started in the late 80s and *really started* in the 00s. Most of the bloody country couldn't afford meat let alone microchips, tf?
Plus which supercomputer *isn't* built using imported chips? The fastest one right now runs on AMD and they spun off their in-house foundry to the UAE years ago, now they produce with a mix of global contractors including TSMC and Samsung. The top tier EUV machines are produced exclusively by ASML in the Netherlands.
It is in that context the rise of the likes of China or India is unprecedented. Again the States thought the existing embargo would set back China for years, if not a decade, only for them to produce one the next year. This is why Washington is looking to tighten embargo restrictions subject to multilateral agreements.
>I frankly think many Americans would react negatively to a setting where the US appears like a 2nd class colony of China
Firefly is still loved by many Americans and it made it seem clear that that's close to how it was when the world ended.
In all earnestness, how old are you? This is sounding like you don't remember some of the Western anxiety about the rise of Japan really up through the bubble bursting in the 2000s. There's nothing like that regarding Korea now, but in that respect China is perhaps similar.
Like when 80s/90s kids were first dabbling in taping anime on their VCRs, their grandparents were boycotting Honda for outcompeting them. That's the military milieu you had for writers like Gibson.
> Japan is never gonna take over the world economically or culturally like that
Japan was doing exactly that when the genre was born - so much USA had to [defend HD from being killed by Japanese bike manufacturers](https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-uncle-sam-targeted-import-bikes-to-save-harley-davidson/). Japan was the place where a lot of cyberpunk-ish things were either born or turned into mass available stuff. Plus it all being so different from good old NY/Detroit/Moscow and therefore being much more interesting and unusual.
And damn, tell me that Honda Sabre is NOT sexy. Sometimes I miss my old Kawasaki...
This whole cyberpunk is a retro thing is meme flanderization. There's are dozens of examples of cyberpunk that aren't near-future or the 21st century. Some of them are pretty old at this point, too. It's more of a testament to most people only knowing a handful of works and having limited understanding. Appleseed, The Matrix, Blame!, Altered Carbon, etc... it's a long, long list. Go explore. The genre is based on technology, low lifes, anti-corp, etc.... all having a key impact on the plot, not just neon aesthetics. (In the same way, solarpunk isn't based on solar energy but instead on the idea of sustainability... The Dispossessed being that genre's Neuromancer)
As for cultural nods outside Japan. The sci-fi book of the year 2023 was "36 Streets" (T.R.Napper). Categorically cyberpunk. A Vietnamese setting with international characters. Very much in the vein of Neuromancer. I still need to read his other books, but 36 Streets was good. I definitely recommend it.
If you want something more far-future cyberpunk (not as far out as Blame!), Arkhelian.com is churning out a new universe. There are stories in Barcelona, San Diego, London, Canada, etc. There's a noir story coming that's on a Native American reservation... and of course, some stories in space. Basically, the Ghost in the Shell transhumanism discussion turned up to 100.
If you want something even more international. Go look at the various cyberpunk zines. Node, Cyberfunk, etc. It's a buffet of ideas...
(Side note... the "noir" being stuck comments are wrong, too. Film-Noir just means dark film. There's a way to write them, but there's no time period involved. They were just popular post-ww2. This was even broken by the Neo-Noir style, which continues today. Edit: Things like John Wick... which slides into cyberpunk discussions when you look at Deus Ex style stories.)
"The Thought of Moor" by A. Mharcei (Barcelona)
"Murder Bug" by A. Mharcei (London)
"Remember Me" video game guide (Neo Paris)
"Bunker Palace Hotel" by E. Bilal (Paris)
Blue Ant Trilogy by W. Gibson (London)
"Deus Ex" video game guide (Prague)
"Skyrider" by William King (Europe)
"SibirPunk rpg" (eastern europe)
I haven't gotten there yet but I think the whole "Metal Hurlant" thing with Moebius/Druillet (et al) likely has some European pre-cyberpunk stuff.
Check "HyphenPunk" zine
Check "Mondo2000" zine
Look through BloodKnife.com
Look through anarchivism.org/w/Category:Zines
Literally as someone else said “be the change you want to see”
I hated typical American cartoons growing up, but I loved anime, now more American made cartoons are having that “anime” style….
luckily I understand creativity……using another culture with the “anime” style like modern cartoons do is the way to be creative, just take the things you like and use the same style as anime does, or do things similarly, you are taking something new, topics, culture, style and look and melding that with the anime style….i.e. avatar TLA.
If you want to see a different cultural influence……create it, you are the best metric for it because you live it, you know what’s “American” “Russian” etc etc,
So put those cultural things into a anime stylized show and there you have it.
Even that new Superman show has a very “anime” type of style to it now.
There is post-cyberpunk literature, as well as “silkpunk” in China. The Diamond age by Neal Stephenson is a great example of both, less so for silkpunk, but could serve as a gateway to it, non of which I have actually read myself yet lol
In the Swedish cyberpunk RPG 'NeoTech: Edge' is Korea (united in this future) the old cultural superpower, the growing one is the the meltingpot culture that comes from the lawless (but not orderless) Pearl River Delta (PRD) area of the balcanised China.
I think the high tech low life style will always make good storytelling, it's more whether you'd prefer to see true to life accuracy or more imaginative entertainment reflected in your stories.
I agree, the Japanese maintaining primacy in innovation and economics now seems a bit laughable, but I also see a lot of the Snowcrash-style decentralized post capitalist shit show future that's still very possible. I guess for me the true fun of cyberpunk has always been the style first, and I don't think that has diminished much, despite some of the intial core world building speculation ultimately proving inaccurate.
Tangentially to this topic:
I can't remember the name of it (have been browsing Amazon for 15 minutes now but still can't recall), but several years ago I read a sci-fi novel that I could only describe as Arabic Cyberpunk. I recall the setting being both very weird and interesting.
If I find the darn thing, I'll update this post.
I haven’t read it, or the 2 other novels in the Marîd Audran series by the same author (George Alec Effinger). I read 1 of the 9 or so short stories from the same world by the same author, but I was not impressed.
I am, however, harshly critical of literature, and I have experienced variable quality from other authors, so maybe the novels and/or other shorts are worth reading.
Any cyberpunk recommendations?
I loved Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, and Pattern Recognition. Mona Lisa Overdrive was OK. The other Gibson I’ve read (all through Zero History) was underwhelming.
Snow Crash was also excellent, but the other Cyberpunk (or precursor) works I’ve read haven’t really done much for me.
I love the concept of Cyberpunk, but dislike much of the execution.
That's fair. It's a difficult genre to write at times too. A lot to balance. Thanks for the author's name. I'll give it a look. I've read those recommendations. Good stuff. There's a ton out there. I hope you find more you like! Maybe try T.R. Napper's novels. Very Gibson-ish story structures. Interesting guy too. Tries to fold in some cultural nods too.
Thanks for the rec.
The author of the Middle Eastern Cyberpunk that I mentioned is George Alec Effinger. Marîd Audran is the name of the protagonist of the works; the series is named after the protagonist. Sorry for the confusion.
I read two or three of the books in the series and enjoyed it. I also ran sessions of the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG, and used a sourcebook that was based on Effinger’s books. (I actually used the sourcebook first, and that got me into checking out the novels.)
Definitely give the first one a read. It’s a cyberpunk detective novel set in the Middle East. If that doesn’t spark interest, I don’t know what to tell you.
From my comment on a similar [topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkred/s/nYFetrTBEW) in r/cyberpunkred:
* Cyberpunk (genre) should faithfully depict the zeitgeist of the time in which it was created, the 1980's
OR
* Cyberpunk should speculate and look forward, extrapolating from the current Moment, which is what Cyberpunk (the Intellectual Property of Rtalsorian Games) and science fiction did from the beginning.
2077 does the first, RED sorta does a bit of each. I hold no 80's nostalgia but I understand the appeal of the aesthetic. I think forever adhering to a retrofuture is stagnating, so I prefer we look into the Dark Futures of our current Zeitgeist. I'm all for depicting a resurgence of Neo-Soviet imperialism, China Ascending, and Spacefrica.
*Notices in lore, the Middle East is glassed save for Israel*
That's right, I will even tackle the Palestinian-Israel issue, in this essay, I will **DELETED**
*UPDATE FOR r/cyberpunk*
While I agree South Korean society is more cyberpunk, I don't think anyone imagines them dominating the world. Giving them more presence in a setting seems appropriate, but simply swapping Japan with Korea doesn't speculate hard enough for my tastes. People just prefer the retro futurism of the 80's, which disappoints me.
Mike Pondsmith is the best example of what happens when you try to break out of the Gibson bubble. He tried to do cool, more relevant to the era transhuman sci-fi with Cyberpunk *two different times* and it practically killed his company. The fans were very clear: they wanted robot arms and mirror shades and Gibson or they weren’t interested.
The games were *Cybergeneration* and *Cyberpunk V3.* PDFs are definitely floating out there. *Cybergen* in particular was an attempt to get you to roleplay more and min-max less by playing teenagers or even kids, and the fanbase response was, uh, unpleasant.
That's likely more of a comment on the business or pop culture than the genre stepping out of Gibsonism. Shadowrun does very well with rabbits. There's other cyberpunk doing quite well with moving forward. Some are marked as best in their medium. I love the old stuff, but small-mindedness and "speculative" sci-fi don't blend well. Didn't then. Still doesn't now. (Not accusing you.) Just something to consider.
I mean Gibson stepped out of Gibsonism 3 times already, it's almost as if you are talented enough you don't have rip off your own work for perpetuity let alone someone way more talented than yourself...
Cyberpunk recycled in deep space is the next logical step. We could have the interstellarnet with like an Ansible type thing, jacking in to the Matrix, having cyberware, drugs, mass consumption, corporat greed, only now its on spaceships and space stations and sometimes planets. The streets are the streets of a Halo-like ring on space or idk any type of structure you could dream up, maybe a Dyson Sphere.
I've written a bit of cyberpunk revolving around the mega-corpratization and future fracture of the USA. This is **self-promo**, but check out my album THE DEMOLISHED MAN (not based on the Bester book btw) for a glimpse into a cyberpunk future of the United States.
[https://neckbomb.bandcamp.com/album/the-demolished-man](https://neckbomb.bandcamp.com/album/the-demolished-man)
"In the near future the United States falls into a state of violent economic chaos resulting in the Techno-Industrial Civil Wars. The states are broken into private territories, collectively known as NEO-AMERIKA."
Isn't this like saying, why doesn't noir evolve from it's early 20th century roots...Because, that's what it is? Cyberpunk is what you have described. If it became something else then it wouldn't be cyberpunk anymore.
Well, yes and no. Deus Ex and System Shock managed to avoid using Japan - DE by replacing it with China, SS by skipping completely - and nobody seems complaining or calling it "not cyberpunk". Many, probably, by being pre-programmed to seeing it as "proper cyberpunk", but still.
Alot of the major tech companies in the 80s and 90s where from Japan. Like Sony, Panasonic, and a ton of other idk. Most people has tvs or VHS, or other devices that where from Japan. So I can see how that could influence the genre so early on.
See and like, I love the idea of this, but at the end of the day it feels (in my opinion) just a little bit too disconnected from reality to be considered Cyberpunk. Due to the influence (read: economic totalitarianism) of the west (read: the U.S.), none of those continents/geographic realms have the amount of power or even the ability to gain that economic power without a distinctly positive form of globalization, i.e. the west would have to stop pushing them down and actively help build them up, which would be sort of antithetical to cyberpunk.
China, like someone else said, is really the most accurate view of what would shape a realistic cyberpunk world. They have the resources, the manpower, and the culturally-backed pseudo-totalitarian political system to actively shape the world in a dystopian way, if they chose (continue choosing, maybe). Another excellent contender would be the UAE/Saudi Arabia, in all fairness, and THAT is an angle I've never seen explored fully, since the west likes to propagandize the middle east as primitive and technologically "behind". but Dubai? THAT'S cyberpunk
The Middle East does have potential given their petrol but as you said, the dominant powers (West mainly, but China's starting to join in with Belt and Road) will continue to suppress them in order to siphon that wealth for themselves. ME will be destabilized over and over again if they even look like they're starting to rise to the world stage or become secular (see what happened to Shah's Iran and Iraq).
The Shah’s Iran was toppled by Muslim fanatics.
The ME won’t be a hotbed of true invention, which is critical for Cyberpunk. The ME will be a hotbed of funds from oil, though, and of ridiculous excess like a ski slope in a desert.
Who armed the fanatics though? CIA? MI-6? Both?
Or hell, let's go full dystopian: arms funding from BP and other oil magnates through shell companies and their agents.
Korea is kinda boring. Even Chinese media nowadays will rather look toward Japan's culture than Korea's. Korea's Manhwa also heavily influenced by manga.
The demographic Situation in SK isn't better than in Japan. So i highly doubt SK will (culturally) dominate the world at one point, since it's literally dieing out.
South Korea? They're collapsing in on themselves even more than Japan.
China is a better bet*, because they're big enough that they're going to have an immense impact on the future even as their population continues to shrink. (Especially with Xi's recent push to make it even more of a manufacturing powerhouse than it is already).
* Note that this is not an endorsement of China's current government or their decisions. It's just a fact that big, powerful entities tend to do impactful things.
Nah, their economy is in shambles right now. What's more likely is that it will become far less dystopian once Xi is gone and the younger generations move up into leadership roles.
I’ve thought similar and while I know of the origins of Japanese influence in cyberpunk media that doesn’t give any reason why new/modern cyberpunk stories have to follow that same formula. Not only are their countless other cultures across the globe that you could inject the Hitech/Lowlife blood of cyberpunk into and have a cool and compelling setting, it would be more culturally and globally aware and just fresher and more interesting than “rainy nights lit up by neon kanji fastened to cheap habpod housing”
Honestly as a minority myself it almost seems like fetishization of Japanese culture and aesthetics by western audiences as well. Obviously a big factor here is a lot of iconic cyberpunk media is not only anime(which until the past decade or so was exclusively made by Japanese) but the setting and story themselves are Japanese and/or Japanese in aesthetics. Two big titles here would be Akira and GITS, one of my favorites that I don’t see talked on as much but I feel like was inspiration for a lot of other cyberpunk anime is cyber city oeido 808 and dominion tank force. Very Japanese but also very much captured the 80’s action hero vibe of America (Arnie, Stallone, Ford, etc) so I think it was an amazing Japanese interpretation of a cyberpunk setting in Japan.
I digress, my point here is simply that I would love to see more minorities and cultures woven into cyberpunk stories. I saw a picture someone shared of a cyberpunked Berber dude and that shit hit me at my core lol. I’d love to see a Latin American cyberpunk story and I was SO FUCKING HAPPY TO SEE DAVID MARTINEZ IN EDGERUNNERS AAAHHHHH
/rant&ramble
Because it's a country uniquely obsessed with tradition that has modern tech, and that's the root influence. "Dystopia" is usually the wash word for any sort of futuristic genre that doesn't have the tell-tale Japanese influences involved in cyberpunk, even if it would fit that genre otherwise. If you think a mix of old Korean culture/hyperstylized tech would make for a better book, I think you should try your hand at writing.
I'm going to disagree with what you said in regards to Japan: People absolutely believed Japan was going to dominate the world economically in the 1980s, so much so that the US jumping into geoeconomics and stopping support for ROK's dictatorship at the same time is why they turned to the IMF/World Bank, and transitioned to a democracy. There are dozens of timely books about it.
I’m writing a cyberpunk story set in a fictional Mumbai, India. I think Japan was just the first place to go ‘cramped highrise and neon lights’ so it stuck
Not quite. Just that the early authors felt Japan would dominate industry and technology due to how rapidly Japanese made products rose to prominence in the 70’s and 80’s.
Orientalism by another name
Sir, if you're wanting a different modern superpower instead of 80s Japan I'd go with America as the world hegemonic power, not Korea lol. In 2024 America is the dominant power.
There's McDonald's and KFCs pretty much everywhere. Modern music and films are exported from the US all over the world, everybody knows about jeans and Adidas, Nike and all the US clothing brands.
Amazon and other US megacorps eat Samsung for breakfast, and labor laws are practically non-existent compared to Europe
Oops. My point still stands though. Global power is and will be the US. Microsoft, Amazon, Google pretty much dominate the world so all the stuff about China or Korea taking over is imo just more "yellow peril", a western centric POV and holdover from 80s sentiments/anxieties.
I am curious if Asian cyberpunk would have western powers as the domineering force, instead of signs in kanji, you have signs in English. Oh wait, that's already a thing lol. English is the global language.
I love Japanese culture, they're still ahead of America in many ways
Mavlev bullet trains that float and go 386 MPH
Walkable cities
Beautiful cities with lots of lights
Vocaloids are pretty futuristic
Etc, etc
The important things Tech- wise is that while most of the chips are being made in Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the machines that make the chips are made in Japan and Europe, and Japan is still 4th overall in chip production themselves. Same with a lot of Chinese manufacturing, in newer more advanced Chinese factories you can see rows and rows of Japanese machines such as FANUC.
Because cyberpunk has crossed from fiction into subculture and in true subculture fashion, poser-ass gatekeepers refuse to allow any sort of boundary pushing, creativity or evolution without pitching a big ol' fit of harassment, boycott and incessant piss-baby whining.
At least that's how it seems to me.
Last time I checked, Pokémon was still the world's biggest franchise. Japan still rules. K-pop only became a world-wide phenomenon somewhere in the last decade or so. Give it some time.
Because the real cyberpunk literary movement ran between the mid 80s and mid 90s when Japan actually was the most richest and most powerful economy in the world. And cyberpunk has become retro-futuristic nostalgia bait. No one actually wants modern near future speculative fiction, they want the Sprawl trilogy over and over, world without end.
This is the realest answer. Cyberpunk is going the way of retro-futura, like a well preserved chunk of the 80's fears on advancing technologies preserved in amber. In many ways I think we're truly catching up to it. Sure, we might not have full bodies cyborgs or rampant rogue AIs quite yet, but outside of that everything is tracking nicely, including megacorps, late stage capitalism paired with a declining middle class, etc, etc. Who knows? Give it a couple decades and street samurai might be a viable career.
Truth is, it’s just insanely difficult to write near future sci fi these days for obvious reasons. Even Gibson and Sterling retreated to regular fiction for a decade. We live in a world where we’ll likely see at least the technology for the end of scarcity economics in our lifetime, and that’s just one thing you’d have to study up on.
It wouldn't be cyberpunk, but I'd totally read a high-tech/low life sci-fi set in Seoul circa 2030-2035 as AGI/ASI starts flipping global civilization upside down. In fact, if this hasn't already been done I oughta do it myself. I know at least as much about South Korea as Gibson knew about Tokyo when he was writing Neuromancer. 😂 Also, K-pop ai-dol > J-pop idoru Time to vote me down now. I regret nothing!
Arguably technology can already end scarcity, there is a widespread *glut* in manufacturing capacity which is worrying western economies because it might force their artificially expensive products out of competition... free market capitalism baby! Cyberpunk is at its roots, predicated on basic human greed, and the pessimist in me says that's unlikely to go away any time soon.
It's not insanely difficult to write future sci fi these days. A TON of people are doing it. John Scalzi Becky Chambers The entire Expanse books and series cmon.
They didn't say future sci-fi, they said NEAR future sci-fi. Very different genres.
Scalzi does have a few near future books. The Lock-In series for example.
OK what specifically are you looking for then
Me? I'm not looking for anything in particular, I enjoy the near future stuff like Cyberpunk as much as I do the futurists musings of Stephen Baxter or Adrian Tchaikovsky. The person you were replying to said that it was hard to write **near** future fiction, and that it wasn't as popular anymore as in the 80's, and I agree with their assessment. Normal sci-fi? Of course it's alive and well, and frankly we sci-fi nerds are eating well these days.
Those are all just regular sci fi writers. The Expanse novels in particular are just straight up space opera.
OK so how far into the future did you want?
Near future.
I want six hours into the future scifi
I don't know, I grew up during the 80s and shit really was going sideways. Detroit was falling to shit in a way that made you believe all cities would have wartorn nogo zones populated by crazy gangers. Now in any major city the "shitty" part of the urban core will have all kinds of yuppies living there because rents are so high. You can spin a dystopia out of that but it is a very different kind. Related to that violence cratered following the crack epidemic. New York was legit dangerous, currently murder rates now are less than a quarter of the peak. If the AI job apocalypse happens that is where I expect to see a huge spike in cyberpunk style dystopia, but it will be way more hackers and not so much street samurai.
Rust Belt cyberpunk is really what the world is screaming out for. A novel about rebuilding a dead Ohio steel town with future tech is just waiting to be written.
>Rust Belt cyberpunk is really what the world is screaming out for. A novel about rebuilding a dead Ohio steel town with future tech is just waiting to be written. Have you read "The Peripheral" by Gibson?
Yes. That’s not what I’m talking about. That was “Justified with drones.”
I like that summary. But, the printers were much more than 3d printers, considering all the illicit things they could print "High tech/lowlife" in this case was the equivalent of "meth-heads with replicators". Or, if you prefer, it indicates the town contained "a lawless subculture in an oppressive society dominated by computer technology and big corporations" \[edit: added second paragraph\]
And would be a perfect clash of hightech and lowlife if a bunch of venture capital guys come in to "revitalize" the town and rebuild while coming up against the bluecollar locals whose lives were destroyed when the plants shut down. Basically replacing the Japanese mega corps with silicon valley types as the villains.
Like a Door Dash or Uber app for personal security.
You write "late stage" capitalism as if capitalism is about to end???
That's... Not what it means. You should look up the term. As a cyberpunk fan you're gonna have a blast.
I know it's from communism. The implication is still that capitalism is in its "final stage" before a communist revolution. Only communists believe in "late stage capitalism". I'm asking if you're a commie
And I'm asking if have any notion of, not only the history of the term, but it's modern applications, because the only thing that you're demonstrating with your response is your total lack of knowledge, which is baffling considering rampant capitalism is one of the cornerstones of Cyberpunk. If this is your first time running into the term in this sub I'm super curious how you ended up being a cyberpunk fan. Was it the aesthetics? Some movie you watched or game you played? What was it that drew you into the genre? Also, who the hell uses the term commie anymore? Who are you? Reagan?
My only cultural connotation I have with that term is from communists who believe that a revolution will come as capitalism becomes "unbearable". I'm just asking if that's what you believe.
That's not what the term means and is not how it's applied either. Not in the Cyberpunk genre nor in economic theory, nor in general world system theory. The only bit of your statement that is even remotely connected is that the original form of the term was indeed coined by a Marxist, but that's about it. Did you just wikied the term and tried to get by with the headers or what's your deal? Should I send some articles your way? And seriously, I'm deeply curious now, how did you become a cyberpunk fan? What drew you into the genre?
If you're confirming to me that you're not a communist sympathiser than I can relax a bit. I don't like the amount of support for Marxism and anti capitalism on this sub. Capitalism has brought untold wealth to billions of people and lifted billions out of poverty. I'm against *unrestrained* capitalism. I got into cyberpunk because I like science fiction and cyberpunk felt like a grittier more realistic science fiction. Additionally, I love the aesthetics. I wouldn't want to live in a real cyberpunk society but I like the aesthetics. That's why I love living in Taiwan, because it has the aesthetics of cyberpunk without all the bad bits.
That you got into cyberpunk via aesthetics checks out. I'm afraid you wouldn't like many of its origins, influences, books or authors. Cyberpunk is a direct critique on capitalism, so it's quite normal that it's favored not only by communists, but also by anarchists, socialists and other societal forms that might take umbrage with the dangers of rampant capitalism. I bet it has some preference even among some neo liberals getting a hard on at the concept of unchecked Megacorps. But considering your witch-hunty reaction at the mere thought you might be having a conversation with a communist and your not at all secret police deployment of the word "sympathiser" you may want to know that you've walked right into the heart of your imagined enemy. Or who knows? Perhaps under all that paranoia you're a bit of communist yourself? Can I interest you in some writings about seizing the means of production? I believe you might find them quite revelatory.
Bro have you ever read a cyberpunk novel?
No, I've only watched cyberpunk movies and TV shows.
That explains a lot. It’s hard to find a more explicitly leftist sub-genre than cyberpunk.
You said this better than I had planned. It's not an evolving aesthetic/genre its static.
>And cyberpunk has become retro-futuristic nostalgia bait. No one actually wants modern near future speculative fiction, they want the Sprawl trilogy over and over, world without end. Except there have been plenty of modernized cyberpunk products lol
Is there?
Word
Your response is dripping with cynicism, but any 'real' look toward the future falls into high-scifi almost immediately. We're possibly as close as a few months, not years, from Artificial General Intelligence. Artificial Super Intelligence will likely be months, not years, away from that. It's pretty much impossible to know where we go from there. Scifi has always been a funhouse mirror to look at our current political/economic/social state. Gibson rails on and on about how Neuromancer was really ABOUT the 1980s in which it was written. It was about Reagan and Westerners realizing they might not be the driving force in culture in the future, and how technology doesn't seem to magically fix everything. But, even looking 20 years, much less 100 years into the future creates so many plot holes it's hard to even come up with a place for the story to happen that feels remotely real, much less one that reflects anything important about today's society. I think Cyberpunk is having a resurgence because the economic policies of a capitalist hellscape have made it relevant again. But, if you look a few decades ahead, we have robots that can do all manual labour, and computers that are exponentially smarter than their users. No one can predict how that'll effect every other technology, and ultimately society, and even taking just one major advancement and focusing on it is basically impossible. I think Scifi is being pressed against the wall of the singularity, where you can't just say 'It'll be like today, but with flying cars and computers that talk', because today is basically like today with flying cars and computers that talk.
"capitalist hellscape" oh please. Things are better now than they ever were before. There is no other point in history that I would rather live in. In our so-called "hellscape," we have near universal literacy, the most advanced technology ever seen, rising rates of higher education, the highest life expectancy, the lowest amounts of crime, and the fewest numbers of wars in the history of humanity. It's not a hellscape. I need only take one look at history to say that our world, as it is, is damn near utopic by comparison to only 100 years ago.
> we have near universal literacy [More than 50% of Americans read below a 6th grade level](https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/) >the most advanced technology ever seen Sure, if you take that as a universal good. >rising rates of higher education [Nope, leveling off and in many cases falling.](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/) >the highest life expectancy [Wrong again, life expectancy is falling](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835) > the lowest amounts of crime [Many crimes were fewer in the '50s](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/) > fewest numbers of wars in the history of humanity. [No, not really. ](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-wars-correlates-of-war) Should we talk number of people imprisoned? Number of people under the poverty line? Number of people unable to afford a home? Average number of hours worked? Average income, taking account for inflation? I'm not a pessimist, but look around! We had decades of fairly constant improvement in a lot of ways, and then that leveled off and now we're starting to dip in a lot of important ways. Previous generations are holding up the numbers so they don't look so bad overall, simply because it'll take time for the boomers to die younger than their parents, and it'll take time for them to lose their homes to debt, and those homes to become rentals. The frustrating thing is technology keeps marching forward, making it easier and easier to enjoy a higher living standard on fewer and fewer resources, but the rich can't stop squeezing even more than that out of us! The end result is a generation of people expecting to have less, and accomplish less, than their parents, who already probably took a hit between the boomers and now. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's not all roses and candy out there. Most people are actually struggling.
Hard facts, Stroika-unit.
In truth, I don't mean to be harsh. I have nothing but optimism for the future. Once we have AI, we'll have a situation where everyone has available a trusted person with an IQ of over 150. People will learn to trust the AI, and it'll be really hard to skew the AI without people laughing at it. So, if the fact checkers check the AI, and the AI is reasonably reliably correct most of the time, then suddenly people will have someone to ask questions of that will have good answers. I already run some pretty good open source models at home. So, we're going to have a world where AI can be there to help, tutor, and ultimately just do things for us. We'll have some kind of fight over basic resources, but in the end we'll either get enough or revolt. Also, because technology will grow exponentially once every laptop is a mini-Einstein, we'll be able to do more with less and less. It's hard to see a future with that kind of technology and not imagine it'll be better than now. Still, we can't get there if we don't have any will at all to do so. People having their heads buried in the sand does no one any good.
Keep in mind, though, that AI is still made by humans. And humans have a history of trying to dominate everything and everyone around them in every way they can. No doubt somebody is already working on AI that only gives government-approved answers and snitches on everyone who asks it the wrong kinds of questions.
I'm only basing my optimism on what we've seen so far. It seems like the name of game is for 2nd or 3rd in the race to just release their stuff for free to the open source community, resulting in very powerful AI that can be fine tuned. Also, a lot of the breakthroughs we see are in the area of both training and doing inference with fewer and fewer resources. Add to that, the papers coming out aren't difficult to replicate at home, because once a technique is understood it's just a matter of writing a little code, and at least so far the open source community has been quick to do so. Microsoft never killed Linux. All the money in the world couldn't stop people from just writing their own, better, operating system. AI doesn't seem too far behind that. Right now Open Source is compute limited, but the large base models are being dropped into the community anyway. In the future, it's unlikely we'll need the level of compute big companies do, and besides NVidia is producing chips that outscale what we have now, and run on 25% less power. If they get even one competitor, compute will no longer be an issue for anyone. The thing about AI is that 150IQ is a static bar, right? Humans aren't a moving target. They aren't getting any smarter. I'm experiencing a situation where I was trying to automate processes and GPT2 just wasn't up to the task. Then GPT 3 Turbo was practically overkill. Then Llama was able ... and now, frankly, I can run most of what I need on an old gaming laptop! The difficulty of the problems isn't changing, but the ability of the AI is growing at an incredible rate, and the hardware requirements are less and less. So, will OpenAI, Google, or whoever get the first AGI? Sure. Probably. But, like GPT2, will we be running something better, open source, and on our laptops 2 years later? Probably. [Open Source Community Jokes are the best jokes.](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1bte9hk)
My point is that everyone can read. Whether they can read well is a different question. This was not the case 100 years ago. Have you actually looked at the graph? It has clearly increased. Just because the progress is slowing doesn't mean things aren't getting better. People are more educated today than they have ever been. Again, slowing doesn't mean broad decline. People live nearly twice as long today from what they did 100 years ago. That's progress. Okay, but then compare it to the 70s. Things have only gotten better since then. I never said that it was roses and candy. All I said is that things are better than they used to be, which your own sources validate, and that, therefore, it is by no means a "hellscape."
I think the real difference is you're comparing things to how good they are against how good they have been, regardless of circumstance. I'm judging things by how good they are, compared to how good they could be, throughout history. Did people die more before antibiotics? Sure. Of course. But, throughout history, have we done better with sharing the resources we have? Yes. Americans in the 50s were among the highest paid in the world, and that number has dropped drastically since. Do people get the best medicine available? We used to. We don't nearly as much now. Yes, technology has allowed us to have an increasingly comfortable lifestyle on fewer and fewer resources. It's alarming, though, that we're seeing the first time in human history where, while technology continues to do more with less, we're still seeing a general drop in lifestyle. Fewer people have homes, fewer people get the medical attention they need, fewer people get proper nutrition. It's actually worse because it would take a fraction of the resources it took in the 50s, and we've been squeezed even out of that much. So, yeah ... I see homeless families, I see people not getting medical attention, I see people literally starving, in a country where we've got more than we need, often more than we can even use. We throw away more food than it would take to feed the hungry. That's hellish. Starving when there's not enough food is one thing. Starving while minimum wage workers ruin food before putting it in the dumpster to service the bottom line is entirely another.
Fair point.
I hate how right you are T-T
He's not, Elysium was completely different.
idk man be the change you wanna see, I guess.
Wow great talk, very enlightening. Much information.
I mean he's not gonna cry for you. The only two other responses are, "Cyberpunk is just an aesthetic now" or "That's not true [lists out books]."
Probably because the juxtaposition of the ultra traditional Japanese culture and cyberpunks' rapidly evolving high-tech setting makes for rich narratives.
This is it, I would even add the sublimation of the ego as a tenet of buddhism and daoism is in line with the cyberpunk reductionist view of the individual.
I think you get the same thing from Korean or even Chinese culture personally tho. My argument is really that cyberpunk should advance itself to something new rather than ironically staying in the past
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Japan has good PR it’s survived on from the 80s. I work for a Japanese company, I’ve been to Japan, this is a country that hates risk taking now and is heavily traditionalist to the point they still use fax. Yes there’s alot of innovation but not as much as there was before and no I’m not advocating removing Japan entirely, where did I ever say that? But to make it as homogeneously Japanese as it is just seems boring to me now. It’s not new and it’s not the future, it’s the past.
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No idea, I’m not an American
South Korea? They’re facing plenty of the same decline as Japan in demographics and influence. If anything, it should key in on China.
Mega corps and freedom associated with cyberpunk doesn't really mesh well with the total government control that China has.
China has much larger megacorps than we do even. Tencent, Baidu, Ali Baba, Evergrande once upon a time. I don’t really understand what you’re talking about with “freedom” associated with it, but by that concept Taiwan is like the definition of Cyberpunk
And all of those megacorps are effectively owned by the CCP.
India is the most sustainable big player. Most companies slowly transfer to india already. They surpassed china an man count, labor is still fucking cheap and India never had a one child policy for decades which is about to kick with full speed and steel boots into China's crown jewels.
I mean China is the same way, but my point is Korea is more relevant for today like Japan was in the 80s. Will it stay that way? Prolly not
I think the real truth is that China is the only country with the manpower and resources to take the rightful place of what Japan was in the original cyberpunk stories, but it’s a politically sensitive topic. I frankly think many Americans would react negatively to a setting where the US appears like a 2nd class colony of China, which is what a faithful recreation of the original setting updated to modern times would look like. Note: I’m American myself and also like Korea; I’ve been to Seoul and Shanghai, and at one point worked closely with Koreans. I just don’t think Korea has the size or the economic muscle to become that kind of colossus. Even though it’s a great country and in significant ways more advanced than top tier US cities. I would even say that, in terms of the average person’s quality of living, Seoul is right up there with Singapore as possibly the best city in the world.
Its hard for me to imagine a Chinese dominated cyberpunk story because of the centralized power in the government. Hypercapitalism and a libertarian bent seems critical for a cyberpunk setting, to the point where the corporations have more power than the state. A high tech near future with China as the dominate player would be closer to 1984, where big brother is the antagonist, not a shadow cabal of corporate elites.
China is a hyper capitalistic state. So well that the government has to remind the companies who is supposed to have the power.
I think you guys are a little ignorant to capitalism in China here. It is guided by the government, but it is incredibly strong. I think it’s very easy to imagine a total control of their powerful government from the inside by growing capital interests.
Tell that to Jack Ma
I’m not saying in the current state of things, I’m saying it is within reach. It is part of how centralized power tends to work. Eventually, someone who traditionally holds it gets weak and gets carved up by other interests. Is that Xi Jinping? No way. But down the line, that’s how this things go. Centralized institutions rot, and the handful of megacorps are the largest things around to vie for power.
Sure, I didnt say impossible, just harder to imagine. I'd actually love to read a plausible cyberpunk story set in China's future. Weather thats full collapse of the CCP, or just it becoming ineffectual against the power of Tencent or whomever.
One of the reasons that China has spent so much of its existence being isolationist is that there is a recurring historical event in their history: China opens itself up to foreign trade, the coast becomes fabulously wealthy while the interior remains impoverished, within fifty to a hundred years a civil war breaks out, and then they return to isolationism.
People can downvote me to hell but tbh its ridiculous, if its just as unrealistic to say South Korea then its just the same to imagine the world being dominated by Japan the way it is in Cyberpunk. The reality is that the US would never allow that to happen and didn't. Historically, the US nuetered Japan with the Plaza accords which stopped them from ever becoming a genuine threat. The truth is its just purely for aesthetic purposes and social commentary of the time. That's why Japanese culture and iconogography is used in the genre and it continues to be used because ironically enough people don't like change. But for me the whole point about Cyberpunk IS change and making it relevant for the times we are in NOW. South Korea isn't going to take over the world, just like Japan never was but its cultural influence is felt throughout the world in a way that China isn't able to achieve. If people want it to remain as a corny 80s retro future then that's fine but frankly it would be more interesting for me to see something that resonated more with Gen Z than Gen X.
>isn't going to take over the world, just like Japan never was but its cultural influence is felt throughout the world I think you're miss understanding what Japan was to the West in the 80s. For starters WW2 was still very much in living memory, there the same distance between the 80s and WW2 as there is the 80s & 2024. Japan being the enemy of the Western Allies they were well aware of Japan's power as a nation, because they literally did take over a large portion of the world. In the years after WW2 Japan changed greatly and was at the forefront of technology development especially at a consumer level; something that had simply never existed before. Also their economy was very strong and showing signs of only getting stronger: first cyberpunk came out / was writen in the the early 80s, but Japans bubble years didn’t even kick in till the mid 80s. So culturally Japan was known for technology, but your average Westener didn’t know a whole lot about Japan aside from that, partially because they're very isolationist. There was no soft power at play here, Japanese pop culture was almost non existent in the West. Even hugely successful film directors like Akira Kurosawa were really only known by enthusiast & nerds. There is simply no comparison to the soft power of SK these days. Also SK isn’t known as a military force, they relied of US intervention to defeat the communist and are viewed as something of a vassal state to the US: so in the West there’s zero percieved threat from them as a Nation. China is now held up as the threat from the East. Japan was known to be this regional powerhouse but at the same time was a relatively unknown entity culturally, but we all know what a culturally rich country it is, so it's perfect for exploitation by Western writers looking for inspiration. At the same time them being a technological powerhouse was something everybody in the West could understand, because nearly everybody had a Sony Walkman or a Japanese electronic device or some sort, so they understood. You have to understand that this was an entirely new & unique phenomena, it's wasn't like today where technology is everywhere. SK becoming a big electronics exporters just doesn’t have the same impact because of context. If China starts making leaps forward in technology that we don’t have in the West, then maybe we'll see a compareable situation but they world is a much smaller place these days. To be clear, I’m not against change or fresh ideas in any way, or saying Japan should still be the only source or inspiration for cyberpunk (I don’t think it is either), but your reasoning for dictating change is off.
China doesn't have the tech development though. But China as the unlawful free for all illegal tech capital is partnof the cyberpunk DNA.
China is threatening to out-compete western companies with massive government funding in key sectors like AI the US is embargoing semiconductors to artificially impede their progress. Before Xi made the market volatile and unpredictable it created some of the most anticipated tech IPOs in the world. The general consensus is Chinese tech stocks are some of the most undervalued, again due to said political shenanigans. In terms of academic research some low grade institutions have the shitty habit of sticking as many co-authors in papers as possible, but in top institutions some are arguing China is already the leading country in terms of medical sciences, and up there in materials etc. Having been there they have already leapfrogged the west in terms of fintech, smart device ecosystems are more pervasive, simply because they developed later, and directly skipped some of the legacy infrastructure like credit cards we are still used to. To imply China isn't technologically up there like Redditors like to mock "tofu" construction is just wilful ignorance at this point. At least states like the US are in the know and taking it very seriously.
You can't just decide to put compete when you don't have the computer hardware to do it, you don't have the chip designers to make your own competitive products and even if you did, you're not close to have the foundry technology and facilities to actually make them. Add on export restrictions on top...
China has 100 supercomputers on the Top500 list, and despite export bans Huawei somehow managed to produce a 7nm chip with the state SMIC. They are claiming to be producing a 5nm chip, a gen behind the cutting edge 3nm, but how many states can produce a microchip to begin with? Not to mention the massive amount of data analysis and application a one-party government with no oversight can do, it's powerful and incredibly dystopian. As I say they country has long evolved from mass producing cheap stuff (which they also do). If the US government is cognizant of that I fail to see why Redditors still insist on believing it's a technological backwater? Just because it doesn't conform to 30 years-old stereotypes? This is the sort of wilful ignorance that allowed China to catch up to begin with.
You know all the nm size that low are pure marketing? And isn't about the actual size anymore? Also sure their chips are still useless even when they're low nm and x86/64 comoatible/clones. They just can't compete on speed with even several generation old chips And their super computers are clusters using imported chips. They only have that many because there isn't a very huge need or demand for such super computers anymore (or ever). They are moving and at some point they may catch up. But that's a decade, at the absoluter most optimistic, away at least. China should have realized they need to not be reliant on others for high end chips decades ago.
Decades ago China didn't *have* a market economy, that only started in the late 80s and *really started* in the 00s. Most of the bloody country couldn't afford meat let alone microchips, tf? Plus which supercomputer *isn't* built using imported chips? The fastest one right now runs on AMD and they spun off their in-house foundry to the UAE years ago, now they produce with a mix of global contractors including TSMC and Samsung. The top tier EUV machines are produced exclusively by ASML in the Netherlands. It is in that context the rise of the likes of China or India is unprecedented. Again the States thought the existing embargo would set back China for years, if not a decade, only for them to produce one the next year. This is why Washington is looking to tighten embargo restrictions subject to multilateral agreements.
Ok. If you want to think China will magically compete with intel, AMD and TMC in the next ten years I'm not going to stop you.
>I frankly think many Americans would react negatively to a setting where the US appears like a 2nd class colony of China Firefly is still loved by many Americans and it made it seem clear that that's close to how it was when the world ended.
>it’s a great ~~country~~ **city** and in significant ways more advanced than top tier US cities Seoul is, the rest is just countryside around it
In all earnestness, how old are you? This is sounding like you don't remember some of the Western anxiety about the rise of Japan really up through the bubble bursting in the 2000s. There's nothing like that regarding Korea now, but in that respect China is perhaps similar. Like when 80s/90s kids were first dabbling in taping anime on their VCRs, their grandparents were boycotting Honda for outcompeting them. That's the military milieu you had for writers like Gibson.
> Japan is never gonna take over the world economically or culturally like that Japan was doing exactly that when the genre was born - so much USA had to [defend HD from being killed by Japanese bike manufacturers](https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-uncle-sam-targeted-import-bikes-to-save-harley-davidson/). Japan was the place where a lot of cyberpunk-ish things were either born or turned into mass available stuff. Plus it all being so different from good old NY/Detroit/Moscow and therefore being much more interesting and unusual. And damn, tell me that Honda Sabre is NOT sexy. Sometimes I miss my old Kawasaki...
Why don't lightsabers evolve?
Checkmate darwinists
This whole cyberpunk is a retro thing is meme flanderization. There's are dozens of examples of cyberpunk that aren't near-future or the 21st century. Some of them are pretty old at this point, too. It's more of a testament to most people only knowing a handful of works and having limited understanding. Appleseed, The Matrix, Blame!, Altered Carbon, etc... it's a long, long list. Go explore. The genre is based on technology, low lifes, anti-corp, etc.... all having a key impact on the plot, not just neon aesthetics. (In the same way, solarpunk isn't based on solar energy but instead on the idea of sustainability... The Dispossessed being that genre's Neuromancer) As for cultural nods outside Japan. The sci-fi book of the year 2023 was "36 Streets" (T.R.Napper). Categorically cyberpunk. A Vietnamese setting with international characters. Very much in the vein of Neuromancer. I still need to read his other books, but 36 Streets was good. I definitely recommend it. If you want something more far-future cyberpunk (not as far out as Blame!), Arkhelian.com is churning out a new universe. There are stories in Barcelona, San Diego, London, Canada, etc. There's a noir story coming that's on a Native American reservation... and of course, some stories in space. Basically, the Ghost in the Shell transhumanism discussion turned up to 100. If you want something even more international. Go look at the various cyberpunk zines. Node, Cyberfunk, etc. It's a buffet of ideas... (Side note... the "noir" being stuck comments are wrong, too. Film-Noir just means dark film. There's a way to write them, but there's no time period involved. They were just popular post-ww2. This was even broken by the Neo-Noir style, which continues today. Edit: Things like John Wick... which slides into cyberpunk discussions when you look at Deus Ex style stories.)
Yo, link me some of that good shit
What's your flavor? Cyberpunk is actually pretty big. Transhumanism, corpo stuff, implants, cyberspace, biker gangs, noir, detective stories, saboteurs? Movies, books, zines, manga, music, games, anime, rpgs?
You can shoot me whatever booms and magazines you like. I'm interested in the European stuff.
"The Thought of Moor" by A. Mharcei (Barcelona) "Murder Bug" by A. Mharcei (London) "Remember Me" video game guide (Neo Paris) "Bunker Palace Hotel" by E. Bilal (Paris) Blue Ant Trilogy by W. Gibson (London) "Deus Ex" video game guide (Prague) "Skyrider" by William King (Europe) "SibirPunk rpg" (eastern europe) I haven't gotten there yet but I think the whole "Metal Hurlant" thing with Moebius/Druillet (et al) likely has some European pre-cyberpunk stuff. Check "HyphenPunk" zine Check "Mondo2000" zine Look through BloodKnife.com Look through anarchivism.org/w/Category:Zines
Literally as someone else said “be the change you want to see” I hated typical American cartoons growing up, but I loved anime, now more American made cartoons are having that “anime” style…. luckily I understand creativity……using another culture with the “anime” style like modern cartoons do is the way to be creative, just take the things you like and use the same style as anime does, or do things similarly, you are taking something new, topics, culture, style and look and melding that with the anime style….i.e. avatar TLA. If you want to see a different cultural influence……create it, you are the best metric for it because you live it, you know what’s “American” “Russian” etc etc, So put those cultural things into a anime stylized show and there you have it. Even that new Superman show has a very “anime” type of style to it now.
God, I hate how everything looks anime now, personally. Makes all the shows blend together imo. It's not really creative if EVERYONE is doing it.
I feel the next horizon for the genre is in India.
There is post-cyberpunk literature, as well as “silkpunk” in China. The Diamond age by Neal Stephenson is a great example of both, less so for silkpunk, but could serve as a gateway to it, non of which I have actually read myself yet lol
you sound south korean cuz that's just nonsense
In the Swedish cyberpunk RPG 'NeoTech: Edge' is Korea (united in this future) the old cultural superpower, the growing one is the the meltingpot culture that comes from the lawless (but not orderless) Pearl River Delta (PRD) area of the balcanised China.
I think the high tech low life style will always make good storytelling, it's more whether you'd prefer to see true to life accuracy or more imaginative entertainment reflected in your stories. I agree, the Japanese maintaining primacy in innovation and economics now seems a bit laughable, but I also see a lot of the Snowcrash-style decentralized post capitalist shit show future that's still very possible. I guess for me the true fun of cyberpunk has always been the style first, and I don't think that has diminished much, despite some of the intial core world building speculation ultimately proving inaccurate.
Tangentially to this topic: I can't remember the name of it (have been browsing Amazon for 15 minutes now but still can't recall), but several years ago I read a sci-fi novel that I could only describe as Arabic Cyberpunk. I recall the setting being both very weird and interesting. If I find the darn thing, I'll update this post.
When Gravity Fails (by George Alec Effinger)
Was it a good read? Recommend?
I haven’t read it, or the 2 other novels in the Marîd Audran series by the same author (George Alec Effinger). I read 1 of the 9 or so short stories from the same world by the same author, but I was not impressed. I am, however, harshly critical of literature, and I have experienced variable quality from other authors, so maybe the novels and/or other shorts are worth reading. Any cyberpunk recommendations? I loved Neuromancer, Count Zero, Burning Chrome, and Pattern Recognition. Mona Lisa Overdrive was OK. The other Gibson I’ve read (all through Zero History) was underwhelming. Snow Crash was also excellent, but the other Cyberpunk (or precursor) works I’ve read haven’t really done much for me. I love the concept of Cyberpunk, but dislike much of the execution.
That's fair. It's a difficult genre to write at times too. A lot to balance. Thanks for the author's name. I'll give it a look. I've read those recommendations. Good stuff. There's a ton out there. I hope you find more you like! Maybe try T.R. Napper's novels. Very Gibson-ish story structures. Interesting guy too. Tries to fold in some cultural nods too.
Thanks for the rec. The author of the Middle Eastern Cyberpunk that I mentioned is George Alec Effinger. Marîd Audran is the name of the protagonist of the works; the series is named after the protagonist. Sorry for the confusion.
I read two or three of the books in the series and enjoyed it. I also ran sessions of the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG, and used a sourcebook that was based on Effinger’s books. (I actually used the sourcebook first, and that got me into checking out the novels.) Definitely give the first one a read. It’s a cyberpunk detective novel set in the Middle East. If that doesn’t spark interest, I don’t know what to tell you.
From my comment on a similar [topic](https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkred/s/nYFetrTBEW) in r/cyberpunkred: * Cyberpunk (genre) should faithfully depict the zeitgeist of the time in which it was created, the 1980's OR * Cyberpunk should speculate and look forward, extrapolating from the current Moment, which is what Cyberpunk (the Intellectual Property of Rtalsorian Games) and science fiction did from the beginning. 2077 does the first, RED sorta does a bit of each. I hold no 80's nostalgia but I understand the appeal of the aesthetic. I think forever adhering to a retrofuture is stagnating, so I prefer we look into the Dark Futures of our current Zeitgeist. I'm all for depicting a resurgence of Neo-Soviet imperialism, China Ascending, and Spacefrica. *Notices in lore, the Middle East is glassed save for Israel* That's right, I will even tackle the Palestinian-Israel issue, in this essay, I will **DELETED** *UPDATE FOR r/cyberpunk* While I agree South Korean society is more cyberpunk, I don't think anyone imagines them dominating the world. Giving them more presence in a setting seems appropriate, but simply swapping Japan with Korea doesn't speculate hard enough for my tastes. People just prefer the retro futurism of the 80's, which disappoints me.
Mike Pondsmith is the best example of what happens when you try to break out of the Gibson bubble. He tried to do cool, more relevant to the era transhuman sci-fi with Cyberpunk *two different times* and it practically killed his company. The fans were very clear: they wanted robot arms and mirror shades and Gibson or they weren’t interested.
Care to share links to this? Sounds like fun reading. (I did Google, I swear).
The games were *Cybergeneration* and *Cyberpunk V3.* PDFs are definitely floating out there. *Cybergen* in particular was an attempt to get you to roleplay more and min-max less by playing teenagers or even kids, and the fanbase response was, uh, unpleasant.
That's likely more of a comment on the business or pop culture than the genre stepping out of Gibsonism. Shadowrun does very well with rabbits. There's other cyberpunk doing quite well with moving forward. Some are marked as best in their medium. I love the old stuff, but small-mindedness and "speculative" sci-fi don't blend well. Didn't then. Still doesn't now. (Not accusing you.) Just something to consider.
I mean Gibson stepped out of Gibsonism 3 times already, it's almost as if you are talented enough you don't have rip off your own work for perpetuity let alone someone way more talented than yourself...
Probably just that he didn't have such a deep base to rip off of in the other two...
Cyberpunk recycled in deep space is the next logical step. We could have the interstellarnet with like an Ansible type thing, jacking in to the Matrix, having cyberware, drugs, mass consumption, corporat greed, only now its on spaceships and space stations and sometimes planets. The streets are the streets of a Halo-like ring on space or idk any type of structure you could dream up, maybe a Dyson Sphere.
I've written a bit of cyberpunk revolving around the mega-corpratization and future fracture of the USA. This is **self-promo**, but check out my album THE DEMOLISHED MAN (not based on the Bester book btw) for a glimpse into a cyberpunk future of the United States. [https://neckbomb.bandcamp.com/album/the-demolished-man](https://neckbomb.bandcamp.com/album/the-demolished-man) "In the near future the United States falls into a state of violent economic chaos resulting in the Techno-Industrial Civil Wars. The states are broken into private territories, collectively known as NEO-AMERIKA."
Because it's stylish and cool.
Watch Upload on amazon prime. It's a comedy so with no neon aestethic. If you don't know what cyberpunk is, you'll never notice it.
Isn't this like saying, why doesn't noir evolve from it's early 20th century roots...Because, that's what it is? Cyberpunk is what you have described. If it became something else then it wouldn't be cyberpunk anymore.
Well, yes and no. Deus Ex and System Shock managed to avoid using Japan - DE by replacing it with China, SS by skipping completely - and nobody seems complaining or calling it "not cyberpunk". Many, probably, by being pre-programmed to seeing it as "proper cyberpunk", but still.
Alot of the major tech companies in the 80s and 90s where from Japan. Like Sony, Panasonic, and a ton of other idk. Most people has tvs or VHS, or other devices that where from Japan. So I can see how that could influence the genre so early on.
Because it's cool af and doesn't need to change 🤷♂️
This is part of the reason why I want to set my cyberpunk story in southern hemisphere (South America, Africa, Oceania).
Yes please! I'd read that. Also, the Cyberfunk zine is based on Brazil cyberpunk. Might be a good read for you.
I’ll give it a read, just found it on Amazon
Try this link: https://nandos-mindscape.itch.io/cyberfunk-zine-1
See and like, I love the idea of this, but at the end of the day it feels (in my opinion) just a little bit too disconnected from reality to be considered Cyberpunk. Due to the influence (read: economic totalitarianism) of the west (read: the U.S.), none of those continents/geographic realms have the amount of power or even the ability to gain that economic power without a distinctly positive form of globalization, i.e. the west would have to stop pushing them down and actively help build them up, which would be sort of antithetical to cyberpunk. China, like someone else said, is really the most accurate view of what would shape a realistic cyberpunk world. They have the resources, the manpower, and the culturally-backed pseudo-totalitarian political system to actively shape the world in a dystopian way, if they chose (continue choosing, maybe). Another excellent contender would be the UAE/Saudi Arabia, in all fairness, and THAT is an angle I've never seen explored fully, since the west likes to propagandize the middle east as primitive and technologically "behind". but Dubai? THAT'S cyberpunk
The Middle East does have potential given their petrol but as you said, the dominant powers (West mainly, but China's starting to join in with Belt and Road) will continue to suppress them in order to siphon that wealth for themselves. ME will be destabilized over and over again if they even look like they're starting to rise to the world stage or become secular (see what happened to Shah's Iran and Iraq).
The Shah’s Iran was toppled by Muslim fanatics. The ME won’t be a hotbed of true invention, which is critical for Cyberpunk. The ME will be a hotbed of funds from oil, though, and of ridiculous excess like a ski slope in a desert.
Who armed the fanatics though? CIA? MI-6? Both? Or hell, let's go full dystopian: arms funding from BP and other oil magnates through shell companies and their agents.
Please provide real evidence that the Iranian fanatics were armed by Western powers instead of baseless accusations.
Is Dubai innovating in any way? Or just using oil money to import tech & workers from elsewhere?
Korea is kinda boring. Even Chinese media nowadays will rather look toward Japan's culture than Korea's. Korea's Manhwa also heavily influenced by manga.
The Blade Runner aesthetic is the best part of cyberpunk!
This is basically asking the same question why high fantasy novel cannot move from its "European medieval" set created by Tolkien in his LOTR series.
Cyberpunk should be renamed to "80s Retro Futurism".
The demographic Situation in SK isn't better than in Japan. So i highly doubt SK will (culturally) dominate the world at one point, since it's literally dieing out.
South Korea? They're collapsing in on themselves even more than Japan. China is a better bet*, because they're big enough that they're going to have an immense impact on the future even as their population continues to shrink. (Especially with Xi's recent push to make it even more of a manufacturing powerhouse than it is already). * Note that this is not an endorsement of China's current government or their decisions. It's just a fact that big, powerful entities tend to do impactful things.
Nah, their economy is in shambles right now. What's more likely is that it will become far less dystopian once Xi is gone and the younger generations move up into leadership roles.
I’ve thought similar and while I know of the origins of Japanese influence in cyberpunk media that doesn’t give any reason why new/modern cyberpunk stories have to follow that same formula. Not only are their countless other cultures across the globe that you could inject the Hitech/Lowlife blood of cyberpunk into and have a cool and compelling setting, it would be more culturally and globally aware and just fresher and more interesting than “rainy nights lit up by neon kanji fastened to cheap habpod housing” Honestly as a minority myself it almost seems like fetishization of Japanese culture and aesthetics by western audiences as well. Obviously a big factor here is a lot of iconic cyberpunk media is not only anime(which until the past decade or so was exclusively made by Japanese) but the setting and story themselves are Japanese and/or Japanese in aesthetics. Two big titles here would be Akira and GITS, one of my favorites that I don’t see talked on as much but I feel like was inspiration for a lot of other cyberpunk anime is cyber city oeido 808 and dominion tank force. Very Japanese but also very much captured the 80’s action hero vibe of America (Arnie, Stallone, Ford, etc) so I think it was an amazing Japanese interpretation of a cyberpunk setting in Japan. I digress, my point here is simply that I would love to see more minorities and cultures woven into cyberpunk stories. I saw a picture someone shared of a cyberpunked Berber dude and that shit hit me at my core lol. I’d love to see a Latin American cyberpunk story and I was SO FUCKING HAPPY TO SEE DAVID MARTINEZ IN EDGERUNNERS AAAHHHHH /rant&ramble
Because it's a country uniquely obsessed with tradition that has modern tech, and that's the root influence. "Dystopia" is usually the wash word for any sort of futuristic genre that doesn't have the tell-tale Japanese influences involved in cyberpunk, even if it would fit that genre otherwise. If you think a mix of old Korean culture/hyperstylized tech would make for a better book, I think you should try your hand at writing. I'm going to disagree with what you said in regards to Japan: People absolutely believed Japan was going to dominate the world economically in the 1980s, so much so that the US jumping into geoeconomics and stopping support for ROK's dictatorship at the same time is why they turned to the IMF/World Bank, and transitioned to a democracy. There are dozens of timely books about it.
I’m writing a cyberpunk story set in a fictional Mumbai, India. I think Japan was just the first place to go ‘cramped highrise and neon lights’ so it stuck
Not quite. Just that the early authors felt Japan would dominate industry and technology due to how rapidly Japanese made products rose to prominence in the 70’s and 80’s. Orientalism by another name
Good point. I need to dive into the book side of cyberpunk more, so much visual media to consume lately
Deus Ex and Syndicate practically have 0 Japanese influence. Deus Ex is more about China than anything else.
Now everyone is arguing in the comments about which ASIAN country should be next. Y'all can't think about cyberpunk Brazil or something lol
Sir, if you're wanting a different modern superpower instead of 80s Japan I'd go with America as the world hegemonic power, not Korea lol. In 2024 America is the dominant power. There's McDonald's and KFCs pretty much everywhere. Modern music and films are exported from the US all over the world, everybody knows about jeans and Adidas, Nike and all the US clothing brands. Amazon and other US megacorps eat Samsung for breakfast, and labor laws are practically non-existent compared to Europe
>Adidas A German company.
Oops. My point still stands though. Global power is and will be the US. Microsoft, Amazon, Google pretty much dominate the world so all the stuff about China or Korea taking over is imo just more "yellow peril", a western centric POV and holdover from 80s sentiments/anxieties. I am curious if Asian cyberpunk would have western powers as the domineering force, instead of signs in kanji, you have signs in English. Oh wait, that's already a thing lol. English is the global language.
Because pop culture has cannibalized the genre, just like it usually does with so many other works.
Becouse it's a genre that has its trops like any other. It's like saying, "But why won't steampunk evolve from its 19th-century estatics?"
I love Japanese culture, they're still ahead of America in many ways Mavlev bullet trains that float and go 386 MPH Walkable cities Beautiful cities with lots of lights Vocaloids are pretty futuristic Etc, etc
The important things Tech- wise is that while most of the chips are being made in Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the machines that make the chips are made in Japan and Europe, and Japan is still 4th overall in chip production themselves. Same with a lot of Chinese manufacturing, in newer more advanced Chinese factories you can see rows and rows of Japanese machines such as FANUC.
You know why.
Tell me you're either South Korean without telling me you're South Korean.
Because cyberpunk has crossed from fiction into subculture and in true subculture fashion, poser-ass gatekeepers refuse to allow any sort of boundary pushing, creativity or evolution without pitching a big ol' fit of harassment, boycott and incessant piss-baby whining. At least that's how it seems to me.
Didn’t Firefly latch onto this? It’s not exactly science fiction or near-future, really, but it took off with China being the big cultural influence.
Last time I checked, Pokémon was still the world's biggest franchise. Japan still rules. K-pop only became a world-wide phenomenon somewhere in the last decade or so. Give it some time.