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Except for Ian M. Banks, which is about spaceships :)
Most of the culture novels are around a Special Circumstances situation. The minds and other science fiction elements are largely (albeit quite richly detailed) backdrop to a human protagonist’s actions. Despite the utopian culture, there are still very messy and complicated situations.
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Gibson is such a unique sci-fi author because his fundamental interest is fashion (he’s said this himself) - his worlds are beautiful, but completely skin deep, and he’s a master of using one word or phrase to evoke an entire world or backstory, but you scratch at what he’s written and it’s all vibes. Bruce Sterling is similar, although maybe less of a fashion native - they’re both looking at people and at trends and…
A more charitable description highlights that Gibson is more literary than the authors you're comparing to. He has an artistic flourish to his wording, and he's very good at it. This isn't to detract from your main point. It's interesting to think about that in Stephenson novels (I don't wish to draw too deep a comparison, but many make it between Snow Crash and Neuromancer), it is interesting to note how deep Stephe…
By contrast I think Stephenson's popularity is largely just a condemnation of modern sci-fi, to say nothing of cyberpunk. It's certainly not bad, but it's equally certainly not particularly exceptional either, except for the fact that his peers are mostly even less remarkable.
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For a long time I thought I really loved the cyberpunk genre. But I kept reading story after story by different cyberpunk authors and found them mediocre and cliche at best. The closest and best I could find was J. G. Ballard, who doesn’t really qualify as cyberpunk in a strict sense. It was at that point that I realized: I’m mostly just interested in Gibson, not in whatever self-labels as in the genre.
I always wondered if Ballard is the British Philip K. Dick / Dick is the American Ballard.
PKD on the other hand has much more experimentation and crazy hallucinogenic stuff going on.
Both are great and worth reading though, for sure.
I'm not seeing anyone mention of Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis, released a decade after Neuromancer and Akira. It's a significant contribution to the cyberpunk canon told from the perspective of an investigative gonzo journalist exploring all the oddities of his world. Goodreads lists it as the 2nd best cyberpunk manga after Akira.
It's a masterpiece. Surprised it hasn't been adapted as a film or series.
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Rewrite the sentence "William Gibson never met and adjective he didn't like" in the style of William Gibson: "It was as if adjectives flocked to him—neon, recursive, glinting things—clinging like wet chrome to every noun he touched."
It's funny, I think the second one is easier to parse. I loved Neuromancer when it got shoved in my face in 1992. I don't understand how people can find Gibson hard to read. I somehow lump him together with Hemingway. He may use more punctuation, but his phrases are bite size and flowing. I see the influence of beat poets. His prose isn't a paragraph long sentence to parse into some giant syntax tree. It's a stream o…
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When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away. I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content. I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of bo…
When's the last time you were bored? When's the last time you did something interesting?
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When's the last time you were bored? It's been ages for me. Too much going on all the time. Most people have an endless scroll one phone tap away. I was bored all the time in the 90s and early 2000s. I actively am trying to cut off the overstimulation though. I never used those types of phone apps but youtube and the net have endless content. I think if you searched you'd find other articles mentioning the lack of bo…
Not being bored doesn’t mean you’re leading an interesting life.
I meant that boredom I experienced earlier in life was arguably a good thing.
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Gibson was obviously very inspired by Japan. The Matrix was also in part directly inspired by Ghost in the Shell, even creating The Animatrix at the same time. But Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner was told from the inside. It is about the authorities chasing down rouge elements. Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders. Like someone else said in the comments here, cyberpunk is countercul…
> Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders. The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious... It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory…
This was all dropped at some point - the only surviving relic being the name of the character.
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> Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system. Counter-culture still…
Sadly, the minorities (in the Anglosphere at least) don't deliver at either "think" or "independently". Their counterculture is as countercultural as joining a church. Just another way to fit in. Be be slightly different and they'll chastise you - a high-profile example of this mechanism has just happened again https://archive.is/qeDfU . Unless that's what it's always been. Hooligan-like countercultures are also excl…
This is my understanding. Was it really different in the 60s/70s?
Being unique, by definition, means you don’t fit in with a “culture”. There’s something inherent in human nature that causes people to form tribes (and copy others leading to cargo-culting, groupthink etc.); those who are too different to want to join the mainstream group still want to join some other group, they want to be accepted, which means they still have pressure to conform.
The main thing I see today is that most liberal “countercultures” don’t tolerate political differences. But they seem to tolerate other differences (at worst if nobody else has your difference it’ll be ignored which has always been the case), and perhaps 60s/70s counter-culture tolerated political differences more but had some other taboo.