[wjrb]

Long, but a good read, though I started skimming around the (broken?) [IMG] tags. Great history and clarification of the source of what "we" imagine as cyberpunk and what that means.

Reading this in the context of recent discussions about 'Reading Neuromancer for the First Time in 2025'[0] and The Paris Review interview with William Gibson[1]. I recommend the discussion of [0] and reading all of [1] if you're into this.

The article defines cyberpunk as 'science fiction that imagines “late capitalism”'. In Gibson's Paris Review, he says (to paraphrase) that the past as it was cannot be imagined; we can only imagine the future. There's no "speculative" that's purely the future, because it all must build on the present.

I found the post illuminating and a great disambiguation of the term "cyberpunk" and the (messy) history of the term. There's no mention of the term "solarpunk", which some regard as a sort of modern-successor-thing to cyberpunk. I haven't read any yet. I sometimes imagine Doctorow's work as post-cyberpunk, somehow more painful because it's often realistic but also more positive. Like the article says, it's hard to classify things.

I'm a huge Neuromancer and Gibson fan, and love the cyberpunk aesthetic as well as the "Neuromantic" genre. I haven't read much Bruce Sterling, so glad to get to read 'Mozart in Mirrorshades'.

The article does touch on Japanese cyberpunk, to say that it's outside the context of the post --- which I appreciate! The discussion from 3 days ago [0] has some great comments making those distinctions, though I'm only familiar with a small part of the media.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548353 [1]: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi...

[fasbiner]

I think it's more precise to paraphrase that he, William Gibson cannot imagine the past as it was. He is interested in fashion, surfaces, narrative, velocity, and futurism as such. But there's a reason he emerged in California with its active obliteration of history and not say, Switzerland.

The Swiss would find it absurd to imagine that their past is inaccessible when they have all the written records, the buildings, the family letters and a rich progressive regional literature that would be of little interest to the outside world.

They would've found it hard to imagine the impersonal (and predictive) dystopian cyberpunk since they have a degree of effective devolutionary democracy unimaginable to most americans. But as it turns out, California and east asia seem to be more representative of the future.

[wjrb]

I think I'm misunderstanding you; Gibson doesn't live in California.

I took the quote as Gibson believing that nobody at all can imagine the past as it was, objectively, but only their own personal past, colored as it is by all of the moments that they have lived since that (past) moment.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Solarpunk seems far less dystopian, so while it is one successor, it's by no means the preordained one.

Gibson has a post-capitalistic Jackpot trilogy, but that seems to have disappeared into the "post-apocalyptic" box.

Amazon have adapted the first book. It's by far the best adaptation of any Gibson book, according to this commenter

[wjrb]

Off-topic-ish, do you have any solarpunk media (books, movie, whatever) you can recommend?

I won't even take a crack at trying to understand all of the time/reality things happening in the Jackpot trilogy.