dichotic noise

“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)

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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.”

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