There’s the novel, there are the movies and there are the games. The novel, Neuromancer, is singular in that it’s the one that ‘started it all’. And there’s something about it, because cyberpunk isn’t exactly a place where you might want to live, but it sure is a place where you might want to spend some time. Cyberpunk is the hyper-future, hyper-technological, hyper-urban, hyper-post-global-warming, hyper-neon, hyper-metropolitan, hyper-android-plague, hyper-cybernetically-enhanced, but at the same time it’s “a genre that’s defined by struggle, not by computers”. This angle was coined as such in a gurps-manual.
That’s an interesting angle, because when we look back, let’s say a hundred years or so, then it’s obvious that life was hard and that it was a struggle. At the same time, if you look at the surface of it, life was the same as it is now, be it that we have more technology and possibly a little more leisure at our disposal.
That brings up a very interesting point: a future is always more technologically advanced, but what are you left with when you strip away all that technology?
Future minus technology is life as we know it
Which links directly towards the things that we find most important in our lives. Most of us still enjoy our leisure time more than our work time. We work for vacations, a nice house, a nice car, and ultimately to secure a good life for ourselves and our families, but there are times when it’s tough, when it is stressful and all of that. Which how life simply ‘is’ from time to time as well.
That’s also what draws the distinction between good science-fiction and bad science-fiction, because if the underlying story isn’t about people overcoming obstacles and living their lives, then it doesn’t work.
That’s much of the reason why the first ever cyberpunk-movie (Blade Runner) does work: we follow the work of a boozy detective who tries to make the world a better place by catching bad guys (replicants), while it’s palpable between the lines that he questions whether his contribution makes that much sense in the greater scheme of things.
And that draws very close to a feeling that many of us have when it comes to our day job from time to time: does it really matter? And then we carry on because we need the paycheck and at some point that job has become just what we do, it has become part of our identity, and at that point it becomes very hard to shake it all off.
And that’s one hell off a big feeling, and we all have it from time to time, whether we own up to it or not (or whether we’re aware of it or not).
Neuromancer vs. Blade Runner
This is also much of the reason why Neuromancer (the first ever cyberpunk novel) doesn’t work: strip away all the technology and all the related terminology and the story falls apart. The story is ultimately about two halves of an AI that want to join together to create a real personality, which is a crime in this story. Of course there are characters running around that we can relate to, a little bit, but it simply doesn’t have that same guttural impact, because this future is too far out, it’s too implausible to be an actual future that we might end up living in.
Most notably, the original Blade Runner is where it’s at, with not just the right atmosphere, but also that story-line that works on a very visceral level. The follow up, Blade Runner 2049, which was released just a few years ago works to a lesser extent for exactly the same reason as why Neuromancer ultimately didn’t work.
The detective is an android himself, lacking any capabilities for emotion, and it turns out that the replicants have evolved into some sort of human species where they start delivering babies and start worshipping some sort of god.
2049 is good in the sense that it’s technically good, but that’s the same kind of good as describing a story as being smart or inventive, which is just a polite way of saying that it didn’t grab you and wouldn’t let go. When someone starts calling you smart and inventive: watch out.
Good scifi versus bad
Let’s be honest here: an analysis like this isn’t hard. So why put out a story, or a movie, that isn’t all that in each possible way? This is actually one that I have been trying to wrap my head around for a good long time.
Take for example one of my favorite authors who wrote such great works as IT, The Shining and Pet Sematary. He wrote over sixty novels and many more short stories. Out of that entire body of work there’s maybe ten percent that’s so good that it really does grab you, and it doesn’t let go. The other 90 percent? Garbage.
I mean that in the most sincere, most respectful way that I can think of. In interviews King sometimes describes it as that he never knows whether a story is any good until it’s finished and until it’s out there. But I think that’s just an easy way out.
I will admit that it’s sometimes hard to see the value of something when you’re too up close, when you have just created something and when you don’t know yet what others will think of it. There are two simple tricks though: store it in a drawer for at least half a year or ask someone that you trust to give their honest opinion.
And then it becomes much simpler. Then it also makes sense why people create the kind of pulp that’s just not bad enough to stop watching: money. 2049 rode on the success of the original. Neuromancer rode on a hype that was created around it. King rode the hype that was created around him. That’s about the only way that I can manage to make sense of any of this.
What about the gurp?
Or the bigger one: what inspires loyalty to a genre-setting such as cyberpunk, beyond what I have just laid out. It’s that feeling of that kind of future with neon, hyper-technological, hyper-urban and all that, but more than that it’s also a form of nostalgia. Most likely, you must have seen cyberpunk movies or played cyberpunk games at some point in time, and you have probably returned to that later on.
It’s a well known fact that people tend to keep on listening to the music that they got hooked on between the ages of 15 and 30. It’s not a stretch that the same mechanism might work for a whole range of other things as well: movie genres, fiction genres, video-game-genres, food and drinks in all its forms, ideas of what makes a good person, ideas of what a just society looks like, and ultimately ideas of a good life.
That’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to get excited about. That’s what the gurp relates to as well, albeit sideways: it’s a technical manual with requirements for creating a cyberpunk game. Personally I only recently discovered gurp, and I spent some time going through one of their manuals.
It’s a little too exact for my taste to define life beyond the so-and-so, but at the same time: it’s an interesting endeavor and possibly one that will help you to look a system such as cyberpunk in a much more deterministic way. It doesn’t just consist of a so-and-so, but also of nuts and bolts and a whole range of other things that hold it together. It’s something else as well: loyalty, or as a play of words, the loyola.
Key points
- cyberpunk is a hyper-future that works, because when all the technological stuff is stripped away you’re left with life as we all know it.
- cyberpunk as such also marks the distinction between good and bad science-fiction, and good fiction in general.
- the motive for putting out mediocre content: money.
- loyalty to cyberpunk might work because of the same mechanism that causes us to be hooked on the music that we were exposed to between the ages of 15 and 30.
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