I’m running the next P2PU ‘Introduction in Cyberpunk’ course. One of the aspects I’ll be focusing on is the blending between near-future and present, and between fiction and reality.
I found this endorsement on twitter by Lt. Worf to be in this spirit.
The alarm clock projected its cardioid waking field over the bed. The substance of his dream started to fade away and crisp reality was pouring in…
“Damn it, not again, not when I’m dreaming of her” he shouted, kicking away the clock’s antenna towards the wall. He closed his eyes, she was still there: soft and warm, sleeping in his arms and slowly fading away.
He opened his eyes — she was gone. (more…)
I’ve just read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot.” I’m stunned. There is no way I can analyse it objectively; as it renders back to life vivid bits of memories from my childhood. Let me explain.
I was born behind the so-called “Iron Curtain,” been raised in a communist society where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideology was the purest and our technology was the best. And supposedly — in our glorious history — we invented everything and the perverted capitalists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.
“Ubik helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Your friends will say, Christ, I used to think that you weren’t fun. But now, wow! — Safe when your privacy settings match your level of comfort, do not forget to review them often. Avoid prolonged use.”
“Here be dragons” is a phrase used to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of the medieval practice of putting sea serpents and other mythological creatures in blank areas of maps. (Wikipedia, Here be dragons)
As a reaction to the Utopian science fiction (frequently set into a distant glorious future), cyberpunk projected all our fears into the uncharted territory of the very near future.
What separates us from the near dark future is a kind of unspecified, yet imminent apocalypse. Hence, most of the cyberpunk scenes are post-apocalyptic ones, where the apocalypse is a given, part of a forgotten history:
“…no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won.” — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Chapter 2)
Technically an anti-hero lacks the attributes of the hero, of the “knight in the shining armour” type. I believe that one particular aspect of not being a (classical) hero is the use deception, living double lives, etc.
In The Matrix, Neo lives a double life: he works a dull cubicle job by day, helps his landlady take out the garbage; by night he’s involved in illegal information trade. He is trapped into this double life and he looks for an exit: an answer and a saviour (Morpheus).
Science fiction — before the cyberpunk split — was more or less different retellings of the same archetypes where aliens replaced ghosts and monsters, space replaced the oceans and technology replaced magic. This provided the grounds for scientific speculations, — and for a long time that was the main theme — and that was the fuel of the (technical) imagination of the mankind. We reached the Moon in a story first in Kepler’s “Somnium,” then with Jules Verne’s “From Earth to Moon.”