Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development (
More info?)
Risto Saarelma <rsaarelm@gmail.com>
wrote on Wed, 18 May 2005 09:05:41 +0000 (UTC):
> On 2005-05-18, Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>> Greg Egan's pretty much the perfect "hard SF AKA cyberpunk" writer.
>> Alastair Reynolds is a good modern hard SF writer whose novels would
>> have been called cyberpunk 10 years ago (compare them to Bruce
>> Sterling's <Involution Ocean>, <The Artificial Kid>, or <Schismatrix>
>> and tell me there's any difference). In the soft SF but still cyberpunk
> So you're saying cyberpunk means pretty much the exploration of
> (possibly unexpected) uses and consequences of modern and future
> technologies? This seems to include a pretty wide chunk of all science
> fiction literature.
Almost. It's about the ways that people really use technology, rather
than the ways they're expected to. And while that's a lot of modern
hard SF, that's really bizarre and unusual in classic SF.
Traditionally, only the elite got to use the cool tech, often invented
it, they rarely share it with the public, and they all used it how the
manual says. Classic SF is rarely about rebels, it's told from the
point of view of the power structure, who are pretty hard for most of us
to sympathize with.
That's why I say that the cyberpunks won. It's hard to even conceive
of how bad SF used to be in the old days; there's a reason why SF nearly
died in the '70s.
> I've associated cyberpunk with settings that are not that distant from
> the present time, very often deal with technological dehumanization with
> evil corporate entities being a common example, features some sort of
> street culture, like you said, and tends to be some kind of noir
> detective story. The last point is probably the issue I have with the
> idea that most modern SF is cyberpunk. The "hard boiled" stories are a
> subset which I associate with core cyberpunk works.
The "evil corporation" meme is VERY rare in cyberpunk, maybe
nonexistent. I can't think of any truly evil corps in cyberpunk novels.
Please, name some if you've got a real suggestion. I think it's a myth.
The New Wave writers are all hardline Communists, and *they* had a lot
of evil corps, but the cyberpunks were all aware of the neutral to
positive-from-their-POV behavior of real corporations. Corporations
aren't good or evil, they're just the gigantic, lumbering part of the
ecology you live in. If you're a small, fast mammal, you can get a lot
done before the corporations notice.
Hard boiled detectives pretty much only appear in <Blade Runner> and
Effinger's books, which started as a parody of Blade Runner (since a
hard-boiled detective in Muslim culture is not real functional). All
the others just have street people and rebels as the protagonists.
The rest is just surface material. It's what the story's about that
makes it cyberpunk.
> A hard SF author who I don't think is doing anything like cyberpunk is
> Stephen Baxter.
Baxter is not hard SF, given the liberties he takes with physics and
the ridiculous power level he works with, but that's unsurprising: he's
very intentionally writing in the style of E.E. "Doc" Smith. It's
cheesy pulp space opera.
> One reason I don't particularly like cyberpunk is its preoccupation with
> street thugs. Traditional SF deals with scientific understanding of the
> universe, which is among the higher aspirations humans can have. Street
> crime, on the other hand, is pretty low. Too often cyberpunk literature
> seems to be asking how low can people go, and there is already plenty of
> literature that does that. Hard SF that asks how high can people go is
> much more rare and also more challenging to write.
Stories about testosterone-poisoned heroes and perky-breasted heroines
saving the universe in a nonsensical economy are not more challenging to
write than more realistic stories. Something's wrong when I even have
to point that out. It's easy to write yet another pretentious snob
who's never left his ivory tower and upper-class lifestyle, which is
what most of those "how high can people go" stories are.
Most of the world, now and almost certainly for the next few
centuries, isn't like that. Most of the world is street culture; that
doesn't make them "thugs", it makes them normal people. Some are
criminals, some aren't. Given one of the most common setting
assumptions, that the wealth inequality between rich and poor will
continue to widen, that's going to be more and more of the population.
The poor may get objectively richer, and may have access to a standard
of living and technology that our current rich can't even imagine, but
the rich of that time will be at an even higher level, prompting
rebellion and crime to better yourself and those you care about.
And if you don't like that, don't read it. I don't generally read
space opera, because it's mostly juvenile nonsense.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. [...] The
streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a
swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle." -Neal Stephenson, /. interview
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram