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The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

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Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#231

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

yike321123 wrote: post #63
ipnon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his defense, there are few things more punk than disdain for derivatives and veneration for originality and progenitors. Punks are a conservative bunch. They're still playing the same records from 50 years ago like they came out today.

Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it. I guess to say it more plainly it's what you see the rock or rap genres of today as. While very few people "innovate" just like the music industry the writing industry is a monopoly full of those whose only interest is in revenue generation and shiny lights rather…

>> Honestly, the majority of derivatives of the cyberpunk genre I've seen have all usually been cheap cash grabs with less than any real messaging behind it.

Yes, well, like punk-punk. See Jello Biaffra and The Melvins, "Those dumb punk kids will buy anything":

Hey, we're back Show us how much you care

The merch booth's right over there

And if our scam works What a bandwagon it will be

https://genius.com/Jello-biafra-those-dumb-punk-kids-will-bu...

And music:

https://youtu.be/reUcpCVMUag

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#232

Post by sho_hn »

Krasnol wrote: post #196
sho_hn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking in a pop culture context here, where even just in 2020-2022 Korea and Korean culture/heritage has had significant soft power success in a number of markets/media: - Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, so a bit murky on what product is flowing there) - Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot rooted in Kore…

Germany here. Besides Squid Game and Parasite, I've not heard of most of them and in the case of PUBG, I wasn't aware it was from SK or in any way special in this seemingly endless pool of "the same game with another skin"-genre.

Sure, but is there a Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian film or TV show you think just as many people around you know from the same time frame? And I mean, that's still anecdotal - what isn't anecdotal is that the upscale KaDeWe department store I live nearby in Berlin had a Korea week a while ago, and so on. And whose pop music export has flash mobs and dance troupes dancing to it in the streets of every major city for years now?

As for gaming, I think another good example is the celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure you there's plenty of young kids who can name them.

In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the time Neuromancer was written.

I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. Depends on the metric.

Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but that's more related to economics and politics - although Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and very topical example to the contrary! (There's other interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai for example, but so far it's not really converted over to the mainstream for Chinese film.)

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#233

Post by leach »

I just got into the sprawl series over the past couple of months. Finished Neuromancer and count zero, now blazing through Mona Lisa overdrive.

It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world and think about it for a while.

I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy right now. After I'm done ill probably read Gibsons other stuff because he is really good.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#234

Post by telchior »

EricE wrote: post #222
telchior wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right on in your first sentence. Aesthetics trump message when art reaches wide popularity. ... I swear that I used the word "trump" above unintentionally, but my example for this is Trump rallies using music from bands like Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young and R.E.M. The music contains messages that explicitly speak against the type of political power being wielded, and! the artists themselves speak up ab…

lol - if you think Trump was part of the political establishment you clearly weren't paying attention!

He wasn't when he ran; he is now; neither fact matters at all for the point, which is that the message of the art (the songs being used in campaign events) was being misused / destroyed, by direct testimony of the artists. Same as Gibson saying he doesn't approve of how his cyberpunk message is being used.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#235

Post by themadturk »

pmoriarty wrote: post #43
jmyeet wrote: post #29

I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. Maybe because so many people raved about it or that I read it many years after it was written. I honestly don't know. It was... OK. But amazing? I don't see it. I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, philosophies and politics of that time. Li…

Neuromancer was groundbreaking in its time. I read it when it came out in 1984 and it blew me away. These days so much other media has been influenced by it that it doesn't look nearly as original. But just imagine reading it when there were no books or movies about: - cyberspace inhabited by AIs - neural interfaces - corporate armies - insanely rich people living in Earth orbit - genetically engineered assassins wit…

My favorites are the Bigend trilogy, especially the first, Pattern Recognition. It's like he decided the real word (in 2001) was science fictional enough.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#236

Post by wiredfool »

paparush wrote: post #181
mmaunder wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a 38 year old metaphor. Neil Stephenson's Smartwheels don't exist either, and we still don't have "professional road surfers", but that doesn't make Snow Crash any less relevant: "Smartwheels use sonar, laser range finding and millimeter wave radar to identify mufflers and other debris. Each one consists of a hub with many tiny spokes. Each spoke telescopes into five sections. On the end is a squat foot, rubb…

You wanna talk about contact patches?

I am sooooo glad I read Snowcrash _after_ I stopped driving pizzas.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#237

Post by notahacker »

the_af wrote: post #229
notahacker wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't said anything about Blade Runner. I reference Gibson claiming inspiration from the line "you flew the Gullwing over Leningrad, didn't you?" in Escape from New York because he loved how 'a casual reference could imply a lot', which is all about his admiration for the style of SF (and trope-heavy style at that). > What are modern cyberpunk derivatives fighting against? Cyberpunk today is codified as a consume…

Well, the comment you were replying to with a "this" did mention Blade Runner. > "[Gibson] just wrote about punks and hacking in a neo-noir dystopia because Gibson thought that was a much less boring setting for a story than conservative utopias." You are not wrong, but I'd argue that it had a meaningful message beyond plain aesthetics when placed in the right context, i.e. when Neuromancer and cyberpunk were born. N…

It certainly had more novelty when it was new! But the tropes being familiar and so outdated that using some of them in future settings is positively anachronistic is part of the appeal, just like it is for most of the earlier scifi canon, and Gibson seems to have enjoyed consuming trope-heavy genre fiction far too much to be precious about people doing the same with themes he invented or popularised. Not everything he's written mashed up ideas with such originality either.

Or in his own words: https://twitter.com/greatdismal/status/1164240403270270976?l...

(and the Matrix was both an iconic film and something which borrowed more directly, liberally and naively from Neuromancer than most of the low effort stuff)

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#238

Post by ad-hominem »

leach wrote: post #233

I just got into the sprawl series over the past couple of months. Finished Neuromancer and count zero, now blazing through Mona Lisa overdrive. It's such an amazing series, it so good I find myself trying to pace myself while reading it so I can gestate more of the world and think about it for a while. I rarely find a book or series that captivates me to this level so I'm basically in love with the sprawl trilogy rig…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#239

Post by themadturk »

omarhaneef wrote: post #41
jmyeet wrote: post #29

I was honestly underwhelmed by Neuromancer. Maybe because so many people raved about it or that I read it many years after it was written. I honestly don't know. It was... OK. But amazing? I don't see it. I love science fiction. One thing you have to realize about science ficiton is that it is a product of the time it was written. It may share many of the aesthetics, themes, philosophies and politics of that time. Li…

Also true of Lord of the Rings, or watching Star Wars etc if you didn't read/watch it early on (either when it first came out to the world, or early on in your life when you were new to the genre). I won't speculate on why this is the case, but some people claim its because the innovations are copied so quickly the original becomes just another copy of itself.

To my youngest son (born in 1994), The Phantom Menace was his favorite Star Wars movie for years. Many of our feelings about "the best" of something depends on how it coincides with our formative years. For me the original Star Wars was highly influential(I saw it on its first run, between junior and senior year in college), but the most formative science fiction movie for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen on first run in a Cinerama theater).

(My son has evolved somewhat in his view of Star Wars films. I'm just glad his older brother didn't regard The Barney Movie t00 highly.)

Re: The Influence of Neuromancer on Cyberpunk

#240

Post by ethbr0 »

rektide wrote: post #178
pmoriarty wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd imagine looking back, a lot of Neuromancer and pre-ubiquitous web Cyberpunk reads weirdly because it was written in an information-scarce world." There's just as much scarcity of valuable information today... it's just that now it's buried under a mountain of garbage which is more accessible than ever before.

That information glut, if it does so exist, leads more towards dis-belief imo & skepticism, especially in the main. Yeah there's a lot of meme-viruses, num shrubs, other ways to go wrong or really wrong. Radicalization happens. Before we didnt used to be connected enough to see this shit, and the asymetric nature of the loud & shitty versus the peaceful/coherent/quiet/skeptical mainstream means the delusional & extre…

I'd never thought about info virality (aka memeticness) that way, but it's a good perspective about the phase change that seemed to happen between past and present.

I.e. That info memes have some inherent max to their virality, which has stayed constant throughout time.

But the cost of transporting information from one person to another has plummeted (measured by time, money, and pretty much every conceivable metric).

Consequently, things that would not have spread virally in previous eras are now easily able to do so, and do.

It's really the ease of transport that's enabled this, not any fundamental shift in the info memes themselves.

But I'm sure the same thought occurred to everyone when newspapers and radio were popularized as well.

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