Cyberpunk & The Suburbs

I know a lot of narratives within the genre focus on dense urban areas and rightfully so, but even in environments where suburbs exist they're often left out because they're not as visually entertaining. It's easy to see elements of the genre in modern cities, but most of the existing suburban construction comes from the 60s-90s, and definitely lacks this "aesthetic" although the use of such a word undermines the authenticity of the genre. Where can visual elements of the genre be found? (I also acknowledge some inherent nonvisual elements like corporate influence, class divides, etc, but I'm talking more visual aspects of the environments themselves, not the concepts those environments invoke.)

>>40085 This exact thread was posted several years ago. Suburbs have more cyber and less punk. Even more now than back then. A lot of suburbs near me have license plate scanners being managed by who knows. Doors all have amazon connected cameras. Big brother lives in your voice assistant. Cell phones track every human in the house and streets like ants to produce data points. The only difference between the suburbs is the artificiality of the community, and the lack of vertical use of space. In some ways, it actually makes me think of the highly controlled suburb testing setting in the resident evil movie where they release zombies to test how effective they are. Cyberpunk typically pertains exclusively to that characteristic urban grunge. Visual aspects are hard to characterize. Suburbs are either post apocalyptic looking run down housing, or uncanny white picket fences for miles. There are not enough shadows in the suburbs to be cyberpunk. One would have to rely on the primarily non-visual elements like botnet EVs, VR and phone obsessed families, and the cardboard cutout commercial facade that corpos have turned them into. Bonus points for those housing communities from asset management and investing conglomerates that cram hundreds of people into cookie cutter "luxury apartments and townhouses"

I just really don't think you'll find anything. Suburbs "try" to be idyllic, it's the place you would "want" to raise a family in. Because of that, most things related to cyberpunk just wouldn't fit in the suburbs. Crime being the main one. Of course, suburban crime exists, but you don't have the advantage of being just one case file in a very very long list, like in the city. The only thing I can think of relating to suburbs and cyberpunk is that part in Count Zero, where one of the characters lives in an abandoned warehouse in the suburbs, leeching off hacked connections to the Power Authority and whatnot. That's the closest you'll get I think without it becoming the slums

>>40086 >this exact thread that explains the awful sense of deja vous I got just now lol. Cyberpunk is a genre. One cannot set some age of sail adventure novel in some czech village even if its contemporaneous to many age of sail adventure novels, because that's out of the scope of the genre. Sure in a cyberpunk setting suburbs surely exist, but cyberpunk focuses on HIGH TECH, LOW LIFE, and suburbs, for the most part, are significantly the den of the middle class, and thus out of scope. >>40087 >suburbs try to be idyllic many urbs do, too.

In Snow Crash, the suburbs "Burbclaves" are very present. The concept of walled neighborhoods as a escape of a chaotic city, with a lot of copypasted houses made in masse and managed by a corporations, with all the technologies to ensure "security" is peak cyberpunk for me. I don't really know how american suburbs are really like but judging by how the gated communities that spread in my country are, it doesn't fit into my head how this is not explored more in the genre.

>>40094 >how is this not explored more I think the contrast is more often drawn between hyper rich and hyper poor, the slums vs the space villas sort of thing. Suburbs are for people who are trying to escape the city, and almost can. Neither extremely powerful nor utterly destitute, and thus less sharp of a contrast, which is what a lot of sigh brr bunk is going for. I know in the do androids dream of electric sheep book, which is maybe less /sighb/ than the moobie, decker seemed to live in a standard suburb right ? Such things even if present go imho a little unnoticed, its a subtle indicator of class and mindset, not terribly in your face but there to build the character, like how well kempt his clothes are. I don't recall how the hero of neuromancer was dressed or where he lived, but I do recall more or less my sense of him, which was I do think influenced by the former two.

I can't recall where I saw it but saw something about how kids don't go outside anymore because the design of suburban areas leaves them with nowhere to go. I also have seen something how this causes elderly people to become isolated because all these endless winding roads and it slows down emergency vehicle response times and due to close proximity of homes fires spread easily house to house so people are dying from the suburbs.

>>40094 I completely forgot about Snow Crash. That book was hilarious to me, because I live in an American suburb right next to an infamous highway which looks literally like picrel stretched for miles. The burbclaves were very interesting. The exaggeration of the American highway was not that farfetched.

>>40197 The MaddAddam trilogy turned my hatred of suburbs into cyberpunk nightmare fuel. The ideal "white picket fence" gated community turning into a post apocalyptic with every technological amenity a person could want and how that becomes cyberpunk as society slowly crashes and burns. I think Fahrenheit 451 would also delve into the cyberpunk. The MCs wife is addicted to drugs and "full wall TV" *Cough VR* and all non-sanctioned information delivered via analog text is derezzed because muh feelings n' sheit iirc The MC is an enforcer, who works for the state apparatus for the suppression of non sanctioned information who has a change of heart after witnessing someone who actually has a reason to live and die. I'm surprised that book doesn't get mentioned more here. It pretty much predicted the advent of the US drug crisis and loss of social cohesion and participation in favor of individual pursuits and pleasures after the 1980s.

>>40198 I forgot about that one too. I only read Oryx and Crake, never had enough interest in the sequels to continue. Is it really worth it? I quote "Joke! Don't kill me!" all the time but no one knows it

>>40199 Book 2 follows the hippy girl that the MC had a one night stand with in high school iirc, except their fates become more or less intertwined. The second book is actually cool, because the organization that she is part of is like an anti-technology cyberpunk mormon hippy commune of religious eco-scavengers who despise high tech technology and bioengineering, and they also have a doomsday prophesy about a second "flood" to cleanse the earth it's almost as if they knew what was coming (but IIRC the MC doesn't 100% agree with their beliefs, she just goes along with them. Forgive me but I read the book almost 10 years ago). Book 3 is a continuation story of book 1 and 2, and gives more of a back story as to the high tech- low lives that the MCs used to live before everything goes to soykaf. I liked all the books, but It's hard to discuss the author with normal people who just liked the Handmaids tale and have no idea she also wrote sci-fi (despite her not actually liking her books being called science fiction, and more science possibility). I thought the authors technological understanding was pretty funny in the way it was described, despite her essentially trying to say that the MCs spent their teenage years living in the suburbs because that's what middle class kids do, looking at gore and CP on the dark web, but fear not because they were behind 7 proxies, and their edgelord phase turned into literally ending the world. Some of the stuff she talks about was pretty wild, like the corporate suburbs that companies have. I was reminded of the book when I saw that whole thing with google/facebook trying to build their own tech villages, like the mining towns of old where everything you could need or want was available through the company. https://www.businessinsider.com/company-towns-facebook-google-tesla-elon-musk-housing-real-estate-2023-12

>>40201 >ust liked the Handmaids tale and have no idea she also wrote sci-fi forgive me, I thought HMT was scifi about some fertility plague.

>>40202 HMT is more about religious fascism and its consequences, not necessarily science (fiction). Compare it to a fictionalization of the Islamic revolution in Iran as a result of "moral corruption" being eliminated from the government by force and establishing an infallible and strict religious system of order. People are just infertile because muh environmental pollution and the water chemicals making the frogs gay.

>>40203 Religious fascism and its consequences maybe, but its presented in a context wherein there's unusually strong justification for it, which appears by all I can discern to be in the book real and true such that the fascism is perhaps justified for civilizational and racial preservation.