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Recently I've been trying to analyze where cyberpunk as a genre is heading. A lot of the times, I feel like stories are just following the same paths that were laid out by Necromancer, even though most of it's original themes (a world interconnected by "cyberspace") aren't as mind blowing anymore. I know that post-cyberpunk also exists, but I have some slimier feelings there as well. I feel like the genre might have to -- or already is -- reinvent some aspects of itself to be more than just collections of worn out tropes. Overall, this thread boils down to two questions: 1. how does ( or already has) cyberpunk evolve. 2. Do you have any recommendations for modern cyberpunk that breaks the mold?

It's dead.

Post-cyberpunk usually strays into transhumanist or posthuman lit, like Dirty Pair "Run From The Future", Orion's Arm, or the Eclipse Phase RPG. William Gibson's Blue Ant and Bridge trilogies are post-cyberpunk stories in pre-cyberpunk settings.

honestly cyberpunk as a genre is gone. We're living in the dystopia it predicted. Post-cyberpunk took up the mantle, and little bits & pieces got smattered into the rest of sci-fi. If you don't like plain ol' formulaic cyberpunk you need to look into sci-fi that doesn't label itself as cyberpunk. It can take some digging, and I don't know anything about your tastes so you'll need to do it for yourself.

I disagree with those saying that cyberpunk is dead. Sure, the 80s wave of american cyberpunk is gone, the era of Neuromancer and Snowcrash has ended. But what has ended there was the vision of our days that was formulated before the formal establishment of our computer and smartphone based societies. But there are plenty of other authors, in other countries, where the wave came later, which caused them to write at a time where we actually had computers & stuff. It made their books more precise, they tackled other issues, their scope is often at a shorter term (because, as it has been said, the present is cyberpunk), but they're as much cyb as what came before. The cyberpunk of our societies is not a On/Off state of things. It expands, it gets deeper. So even if we are already living the dystopia, there is still room for much more of it, and thus room for more cyberpunk works. My 2 cents anyway.

The Windup Girl by Paulo Baccigalupi is my favourite example of fresh, modern cyberpunk. The high tech is biotech, and genetic IP is the oil of the day. The low lives are the residents of the slums of Bangkok as they try to eke out a living despite poverty, prejudice and oppression.

>>1743 uh, i was reading it, pretty cool book. But i think cyberpunk it's only when there are computers in it, the windup girl is biopunk. Maybe the revolutionary is that, like cyberpunk did in the '80s, our times biopunk is representing the future that expects us.

>>1739 This is what's so great is that it actually came to pass. Read Bruce Sterling's "State of the Year 2018" on The WELL and you'll see what I mean: https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/503/State-of-the-World-2018-Bruce-St-page01.html

>>1732 The basic premise of cyberpunk isn't dead in any way--it's just phased out from scifi to regular literature. The problem is that the people reading "literature" (i.e. the kind of person who gets an MFA and would subscribe to the Paris Review) doesn't think about literature in temporal terms like cyberpunk and SF do. "High tech, low life" is a motto that describes pretty much every society on Earth right now. On a societal scale and in each of our individual lives, we're watching the degradation of social structures, the onset of ecological catastrophe, and the exponential intensification of every conceivable technology. I admit that it has mostly left the original scene of written fiction (novels, short stories, etc.) but it lives on elsewhere, especially in videogames, and especially in the nascent subcultures (now normalized, not what we'd recognize as cyberpunk) that are reacting to these paradigm shifts.

>>1742 >authors, in other countries Like for example ...?

>>1803 In France you have Jean-Marc Ligny & Alain Damasio, or Lauren Beukes in South Africa, for example

The present and future of massive /cyb/ is tecnokrat/hplus predictive programming. If you want good /cyb/ media, you have to make it yourselves. We're already living in the dystopia it predicted some decades ago, but the further dystopia it's predicting now ain't here yet. If it doesn't tell you how to avoid cyberpunk in the future, then it's pred prog.

>>1804 thnx