Cyberpunk

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What is Cyberpunk?

Cyberpunk is a science-fiction sub-genre dealing with the integration of society and technology in dystopian settings. Often referred to as “low-life and high tech,” Cyberpunk stories deal with outsiders (punks) who fight against the oppressors in society (usually mega corporations that control everything) via technological means (cyber). If the punks aren’t actively fighting against a megacorp, they’re still dealing with living in a world completely dependent on high technology.

Cyberpunk characteristics include:

Dystopian city setting where mega-corporations rule
Full integration of technology into society, featuring cybernetic implants
Outsider protagonists (punks) who often are very familiar with the technology around them
Hard boiled detective and film noir vibes and influence
Themes dabbling in trans-humanism, existentialism, and what it means to be human.

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Where would you draw the line between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk? (Do you think post-cyberpunk exists?) (lemmy.zip)

submitted 3 months ago by Hammerjack@lemmy.zip to c/cyberpunk@lemmy.zip

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I have trouble understanding when a genre becomes "post-" so I'm curious what people here might think.

What cyberpunk work do you think moved us into post-cyberpunk? Is there one? Or is this "post-cyberpunk" stuff nonsense and it's all just cyberpunk?

I've heard an argument that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is post-cyberpunk because it's a satire of the cyberpunk genre, but I've heard the same thing said about Bruce Bethke's Headcrash (1995). And is satire of the original genre a requirement to move post- a genre?

I could see an argument that post-cyberpunk takes place in worlds that know what the modern-day internet looks like (with social media and disinformation) but I'm not sure if there's a cyberpunk work that really carries that flag. That is, I could see an argument for post-cyberpunk being a "refresh" of the 1980s cultural fears to fit our modern times, but I'm not sure if there's a work that ushered in this new genre. I've made the argument that Elysium updates cyberpunk with modern cultural fears, but I don't think it led to a wave of updated cyberpunk works (it was an outlier, not the progenitor of a new genre).

So what do you think? What requirements would you have for the cyberpunk genre to become post-cyberpunk? And does that cyberpunk work already exist?

(Note: for the picture in this post, I was trying to show the juxtaposition of "classic cyberpunk" vs "modern cyberpunk". I'm not arguing that Deus Ex is post-cyberpunk.)

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[–] Sergio@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

fwiw I have a cyberpunk-related dissertation laying around that I keep meaning to read, and somewhere towards the intro it says:

In Rewired: The Post-cyberpunk Anthology (2007), James Patrick Kelly and
John Kessel propose a new consideration of what they see as later evolutions of
cyberpunk works and categorise these texts as “post-cyberpunk”.

...

Kelly and Kessel’s argument centres around the loss of cyberpunk’s ‘revolution’.
That once ‘popular culture hacked into it and turned cyberpunk to its own purposes’ 28 it
became ‘tamer’ and ‘fuzzier’ in definition. They see this progression as what allowed
cyberpunk to be contained into a single moment that has long passed, ‘consigned to the
dustbin of literary history.’ 29 Cyberpunk’s initial authors fought for it to be established as
a rebellion against other, as they might have seen them, stagnant or limited SciFi
genres. Yet once it moved away from this cult of personality, it seemed to lose its
power. Kelly and Kessel reinvigorate it through their conception of post-cyberpunk,
describing fresh stories ‘long after classic cyberpunk’ that foster its same ‘obsessions’.
Their work here is fuelled by a positive intent: to acknowledge that cyberpunk concerns
have been maintained in fiction through to the contemporary texts they have chosen for
their connection.

https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/14422/ (pg 7,9)

edit: I mean this as a contribution to your statement "I’m not sure if there’s a work that ushered in this new genre". Clearly Kelly and Kessel's proposal isn't the last word, and the dissertation writer himself has disagreements with it. However, Kelly and Kessel are/were major SF writers so I'm guessing they were an important part of the definition.